Hazara Nation

Afghanistan has been called “the right war”; “a war we can win”; “the war we should have been fighting all along.” This should set off loud alarms because it suggests that military victory in Afghanistan will be nearly automatic if we just show up with enough troops. And, once again, some of our top military and political leaders are planning ahead for the last war; in this case, they’re trying to duplicate the so-called victory in Iraq.

Any notions of certainty are both frightening and naive. Frightening, because they’re founded in the belief that all we have to do is disengage our combat brigades from Iraq and redeploy them to Afghanistan to re-create the success we achieved eight years ago against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Naive, because they’re based on the recurring fantasy that 30,000 more U.S. troops will transform Afghanistan into an ersatz version of a Muslim democracy. Like Iraq.

Of course, Iraq today — despite claims from neocons and Clinton-Bush-era nation builders — is hardly stable, harmonious or peaceful, except when compared with the sectarian nightmare of Iraq from 2005 to 2007. However, even then, Iraq wasn’t Afghanistan; not even close. To begin with, Afghanistan is a honeycomb of ethnic groups and tribes. About half its people are Pashtuns, from more than 30 different tribes; an additional 25 percent are Tajiks; 18 percent, Hazaras; 6 percent, Uzbeks; 3 percent, Turkmen; 1 percent, Qizilbash; and about 7 percent are Aimaq, Arab, Kirghiz, Wakhi, Farsiwan, Nuristani, Baluch, Brahui, Qizilbash, Kabuli or Jat. The country has been described by journalist Tom Coghlan as “one of the most conservative, opaque and dizzyingly complex tribal societies on earth.”

Second, President Hamid Karzai’s “national” government has little to do with the lives of Afghanis outside Kabul and isn’t even recognized in every sector of that city. Classic counterinsurgency doctrine depends on an indigenous government we can support, but the current national government in Afghanistan doesn’t remotely qualify, unless one considers “worthy” a corrupt government bordering on a kleptocracy, with little real power over 90 percent of the country.

Third, our military presence is a double-edged sword. No country likes to be occupied, patrolled or garrisoned by a foreign military. Our own Founders didn’t take very well to it 233 years ago. The presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to suppress violence and promote peace is often the match that ignites the violence and resistance in the first place. Afghanis have always opposed the presence of large numbers of armed outsiders, and our troops, no matter how well intentioned, will be viewed the same way that Macedonian, British and Soviet troops were viewed in the past.

Before the United States commits its already stretched and weary forces, financial resources and battered reputation to another colossal geopolitical blunder, Congress and the Obama administration need to begin at the beginning and take the time to absorb a little history and contemporary culture of Afghanistan. Against a backdrop of knowledge, we need to ask and answer some very practical questions about our expectations there, including:

• What can we realistically achieve? What kind of Afghanistan do we want to leave behind?

• Must it be a working democracy with freely elected officials and a centralized government?

• Would it be sufficient to leave a region able to deny terrorists safe haven?

• What agreements with Pakistan will be necessary to curb or end the ability of Al Qaeda to commute to work from Pakistan?

• What will our relationship be with the Taliban?

• What will that require? How many troops and other military resources, at what cost and for how long?

Thoughtful and careful consideration of circumstances, goals and alternatives before committing to a course of action was supposed to be one of the hard lessons we learned in Vietnam more than 40 years ago and, again, in Iraq six years ago. Absent a clear and achievable objective and a realistic assessment of the cost to achieve the objective, the United States should not commit a single additional soldier, sailor, airman or Marine to Afghanistan.

So what is a “clear and achievable objective”? A starting point would be to simply ensure that Afghanistan is not a terrorist safe haven for groups with the ability to attack the United States. In other words, Afghanistan would become a counterterrorism, rather than counterinsurgency, operation.

Pursuit of this limited goal does not mean walking away from Afghanistan or abandoning its people. The United States could still provide substantial financial, logistic, intelligence and other support to an Afghan government and security forces. It would, however, be a critical step toward a realistic approach to American goals in Afghanistan and a step away from a fanciful and messianic vision of “fixing” a nation that is simply not fixable by outsiders.

By REP. NEIL ABERCROMBIE/ Politico
Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) is chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Air and Land Forces. Read the full story

JG At least six Indonesians charged with people smuggling are undergoing trials in Perth, Western Australia, the Indonesian Consulate in the state capital said on Thursday.

Consular official Ricky Suhendar said Abdul Hamid, 35, and Amos Ndolo, 58, are awaiting sentences after pleading guilty to people smuggling. The charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years in jail.

Abdul, of Dompu, Bima, West Nusa Tenggara Province, was arrested by Australian police near Ashmore Reef in the Indian Ocean between Indonesia and Australia, on Sept. 29, 2008. He was caught attempting to smuggle 12 asylum seekers from Iran and Afghanistan into Australia.

Amos Ndolo, a resident of Rote Island, Flores, East Nusa Tenggara Province, was arrested after he was found with 14 refugees aboard his boat on Oct. 6, 2008.

“The [sentencing] of Amos Ndolo and Abdul Hamid is expected next month,” Ricky said.

Afghanistan threatens to destroy Barack Obama's presidency. Lost in the Inauguration euphoria this week is that our celebrity-in-chief is poised to commit a massive strategic military blunder - one that will squander American blood and treasure, and perhaps mark the end of our superpower status. The United States is sleepwalking toward disaster.

Mr. Obama vows to transfer troops from Iraq into southern Afghanistan. Facing a resurgent Taliban, he wants to replicate the successful "surge" in Iraq by infusing 20,000 to 30,000 additional soldiers. In particular, Mr. Obama seeks to bolster NATO forces around Kandahar, and stem the growing tide of guerrilla attacks.

The centerpiece of his foreign policy - and that of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - is that Iraq was "the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place." He believes Afghanistan is the central front in the war on terrorism: It is in that mountainous, unruly land that America's enemies must be vanquished. Mr. Obama is convinced that, by crushing the Taliban insurgents, a decisive victory can be won against Islamist extremism. He is wrong. Sending more troops will only perpetuate mistaken Bush administration policies.

The decision to topple the Taliban regime was the right one: It provided a safe haven for al Qaeda, which enabled the terror group to launch the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The U.S. intervention dismantled its training camps. Countless terrorists were killed or captured. Al Qaeda's senior leadership was decapitated. Moreover, for years, jihadists had struck American targets with impunity - the 1979 kidnapping of U.S. diplomats held as hostages in Iran, the mass murder of 241 U.S. service personnel in Beirut, the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center, the 2000 suicide strikes on the USS Cole. By invading Afghanistan, President Bush sent a necessary message around the world: America would hit back - and hit back hard. Also, Washington dislodged a medieval theocratic state, where homosexuals were routinely executed and women enslaved, and replaced it with a pro-American democracy. Mr. Bush liberated 23 million Muslims from tyranny.

By 2005, America had achieved all its strategic objectives in Afghanistan. Yet, instead of declaring mission accomplished and slowly pulling out American forces, Mr. Bush did the very opposite. He embarked upon nation-building. Washington sought to rebuild Afghanistan's economy, resuscitate its agriculture, destroy its flourishing heroin trade, entrench women's rights and establish an independent judiciary and the rule of law.

Most foolishly, the administration helped to transform the country into a centralized unitary state, where power is consolidated in the hands of a strong president and a vigorous executive branch. The result has been a violent backlash among numerous tribal chiefs and religious leaders.

From its creation in the 18th century, Afghanistan has been an ethnic and linguistic patchwork - more of a fractious collection of bickering warlords and Muslim clerics than a coherent nation. The only form of government suitable to it is a loose federation where economic, cultural and political authority is devolved to its diverse tribal regions and provinces.

The absence of a decentralized power structure is now fueling the insurgency. The country's ethnic Pashtuns, who form more than 42 percent of the population, are seething that the Bush administration decided to prop up President Hamid Karzai's corrupt and inefficient government. Rather than fostering a power-sharing arrangement among the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara Shi'ites, the United States has put all its political eggs in one basket - Mr. Karzai. But he is not Afghanistan's George Washington. Instead, Mr. Karzai is an incompetent thug. He possesses no national constituency and has failed to impose central-government control over most of its territory. The administrative bureaucracy is a giant parasite, sucking billions in foreign aid - where large chunks are being stolen and siphoned off by greedy apparatchiks - while doing little to build modern roads, schools and hospitals. The Afghan army and police forces are corrupt and ineffective, reluctant to fight the insurgents.

The key to success is not an infusion of American troops; it is the recognition that local warlords - like in Iraq - must be co-opted and given a real stake in Afghanistan's future. The Taliban are hated by too many Afghans to return to power. In fact, a large segment of the Taliban is not even anti-American. They are Pashtun nationalists, who feel marginalized by Mr. Karzai's regime.

Nation-building is not the answer. It is the problem. America has embraced an open-ended, impossible mission. Washington's primary national interest is not to plant modern institutions on Afghanistan's stony soil, but to prevent it from becoming a haven again for Islamist training bases. For this, nimble special forces are sufficient, provided they are nearby and ready to strike.

Mr. Obama, however, promises to Americanize the war - with no end in sight. He will pour even more troops into a bloody quagmire, while the Afghan military sits on the sidelines. Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires; it humiliated the mighty Soviet Red Army and brought the British to their knees.

The establishment media have cast Mr. Obama as the 21st-century version of President John F. Kennedy - a sophisticated internationalist, whose inspirational leadership and soaring rhetoric will restore liberalism both at home and abroad. They have no idea how accurate their comparison is. Kennedy was not only inexperienced but reckless. He brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. More importantly, it was Kennedy who gave us Vietnam, a military disaster from which America has never truly recovered.

Mr. Obama is now following Kennedy's footsteps. Afghanistan will be his Vietnam. And when the body bags of dead American soldiers start coming home, Mr. Obama's liberal base will turn against the war - just as they did in the 1960s. This will split his party and break his presidency. He lacks the stomach for a protracted campaign. He will cut Afghanistan loose - just as the liberals cut Vietnam loose.

The result will be not only another major defeat. It will mean the loss of U.S. prestige and credibility on the world stage, the moment America becomes a paper tiger - a toothless great power unable and unwilling to win its wars. This is the real "change" that awaits us.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times.

Gul Agha Sherzai (whose name is completely made up to make himself sound cool), is a man with a sketchy past: he was one of the main warlords controlling Kandahar in the early 90s who did such a great job running the city that the Taliban either murdered or chased out of town all the men he was associated with to uproarious cheers. Since then, he’s moved north and east, netting himself a province with a truly remarkable agricultural sector—Nangarhar is either one of the most poppy-ridden, or most poppy-free, of Afghanistan provinces, depending on the previous wheat harvest and the performance of Sherzai’s own poppy farms in Kandahar—and become Afghanistan’s Man of the Year. According to local accounts, Sherzai is either “better then those who don’t do nothin for the people n alwayz think for their pocket,” or making himself rich by organizing some of the bribe checkpoints truck drives going through the Khyber (when it’s open) must transit.

There are other stories: he’s either great for building roads and trying to fix the police, or he’s corrupt for being too “usy with musicians, dancing boys, handsome musician are all around him, parties, bribery, collecting money.” He’s a mixed bag, in other words. So guess who Barack Obama invited to his inauguration? Certainly not Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai. No, according to Baktash Siawash he invited Sherzai.

Obama select four Afghan politicians to participate in his ceremony which Gula Agha Sherzai, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai and Dr. Ali Ahmad Jalali are the invited persons.

To build off Christian’s good rumination on Afghanistan’s forthcoming Presidential election, these men are likely to run in the election. Contrasted with Seth Jones’ rather shallow defense of US-backed puppets, these names might represent the new power elite in Afghanistan, at least as far as America is concerned. It might even be a good thing, since Karzai has not yet shown himself to be an effective enough leader to break the hold of corruption and narcotics on the country (his brother probably doesn’t help).

But my big question is: how are these other men any better? Sherzai has obvious shortcomings; Abdullah Abdullah is a Tajik and was a close advisor to Ahmed Shah Massou and this not too attractive to the Hazaras and many Pashtuns; Ashraf Ghani kinda sorta broke Afghanistan the last time he tried to assert a role in its affairs (as a participant in the Bonn process); Ahmad Jalali is a wonderful scholar (he cowrote The Other Side of the Mountain with Les Grau), but who knows what his leadership skills are, or how popular he is in Afghanistan itself as compared to the American classroom?

Indeed, and Christian said this in his post, it is a practical impossibility to find an Afghan without some kind of crazy problem that probably should preclude him from assuming office. Then again, American politicians have the same sorts of problems… just, they usually have fewer bodies in their wakes. Regardless, as Baktash notes, it is indeed remarkable that these men had the honor of attending Barack Obama’s inauguration, and not the current president (and supposed front-runner) Hamid Karzai. That in and of itself is a pretty remarkable statement of faith.

So, where does that part about strengthening the central government of Afghanistan come into play again?

ICT As we enter the deep cold of winter (especially if you live in Minnesota!), it is a good time to pause and reflect.

If the goal of life for a native person is maturity, as Vine Deloria once said, what are some of the steps we might take to help us achieve a measure of maturity before we attain elder status, assuming we make it to that exalted period in our lives?

A liberal education is often cited as a key pathway to maturity, especially if by liberal education we mean “fitness for the world,” as J. H. Newman put it. Of course, educational standards throughout Indian country – since the boarding school period forward – and in the United States more broadly, have never been much to brag about. Education today is mired in a “teaching to the test” mentality that is certainly not conducive to true maturity, where it should be focused on nurturing the unique personality of every individual student.

A person who faithfully adheres to religious/spiritual traditions is also sometimes considered a more mature individual, although this assertion is more easily challenged than the educational dimension when one witnesses how constraining, discriminatory, and downright deadly many religious fundamentalists have been throughout history and still are today (e.g., Salem Witchcraft trials and executions in the 1600s; the cultural genocide imposed by federal law and carried out by federally-funded Christian missionaries in Indian country in the 19th and early 20th centuries; or the Taliban of Afghanistan who violently abuse the rights of Afghan women and have committed genocidal acts against the Hazaras, a Shia Muslim ethnic group in the late 20th century.)

Being part of a strong family unit, preferably with an extended family network that emphasizes such values as generosity, compassion, respect, and love, is certainly a contributing factor in the development of a mature individual and a mature society, for that matter. And when such a family unit, however large or small, is wedded to a particular sacred place where one’s native language (assuming it has survived) is relied on to transmit core values, conduct ceremonies, and produce the songs that link us with the spirits and our ancestors, this, too, surely contributes to a deeper maturity – at both the individual, family, clan and national level.

Quiet pauses enable us to fuse our thoughts, however momentarily, in a way that aids in healing and deep reflection.

Language and orality are vital cogs in the development of our individual and collective identities.

RH The United States has mired itself in the Great Game of Central Asia in a way that promises no easy escape.

There was a reason we did so, going all the way back to 1979. That is when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the United States decided to help the Afghan people resist Soviet occupation. We spent billions of dollars, in league with the security forces of Pakistan, building up fundamentalist Islamic groups to fight the Soviets.

Fast forward to 2001. The fundamentalist group that took control of Afghanistan in the mid-'90s, the Taliban, had provided safe haven for a radical, largely Arab group, al-Qaida, which attacked the United States on Sept. 11. It was clear the Taliban had to go, a goal that U.S. military forces swiftly accomplished, though al-Qaida escaped to rebuild itself in the mountains of Pakistan.

The hostility of fundamentalist Afghans and Pakistanis toward the United States is an example of what is called blowback. Forces we helped unleash have turned against us, and now they are turning against the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis have used radical groups to harass their archenemy, India, by fomenting violence in the disputed region of Kashmir. But radical groups are now targeting Pakistan itself, forcing Pakistan to increase military pressure on al-Qaida, the Taliban and others in the mountainous border region near Afghanistan.

This is the mess where we find ourselves. The attack by Islamic radicals on sites in Mumbai last month is now being seen as an effort to enflame tensions between India and Pakistan in order to shift Pakistan's military attention away from the fight on the Afghan border and toward India. Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari, is said to be seeking peace with India, and the unanswered question is whether Pakistan's military or security forces helped terrorists attack Mumbai as a way of curbing Zardari's peace efforts. For decades conflict with India has been the raison d'etre for the Pakistani military.

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to increase the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan by about 30,000 in order to quell violence by the Taliban. Our main interest is in preventing Afghanistan from becoming a staging area for terrorism once again. But the violence in Afghanistan, as in Pakistan, will be hard to stop because it is rooted in a complex web of ethnic and religious conflicts. A recent article in The New Yorker magazine described how Hazara police officers are trying to fight the Taliban insurgency in the south. The Taliban is made up mainly of ethnic Pashtuns, and it is questionable whether use of Hazaras to fight Pashtuns is likely to result in a peaceful outcome, ever.

Afghanistan has never been a coherent nation. Even in the peaceful days under the former king, regional leaders had great power, and the Pashtuns exerted harsh control over Hazaras and others. The Pashtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan remain essentially uncontrollable, though in the days of Gandhi a great Pashtun leader, Khan Abdul Ghaffur Khan, was an ally of Gandhi's in nonviolence.

It is not clear whether Zardari's crackdown on terrorists in Pakistan can make rapprochement with India a reality or whether terrorism rooted in the Pashtun homeland will continue to entangle everyone. It is clear there is no easy way out of the Great Game.

TN
After September 11, the British-Pakistani author Nadeem Aslam told The Independent that he was plagued by feelings of guilt: “I asked myself whether in my personal life and as a writer I had been rigorous enough to condemn the small scale September 11s that go on every day.” Detaching September 11 from its political context, Aslam subsumed all crimes committed in the name of Islam to one category, and so saw patriarchal bullying within the family or the overbearing social pressure of a conservative neighbourhood as forms almost of Islamist terrorism, mini September 11s.

His highly praised second novel,

Maps for Lost Lovers, released in 2004, deals with precisely such prosaic atrocities. The book is a portrait of a tortured and self-tormenting Pakistani community in the north of England that calls itself Dasht-e-Tanhaii, or Desert of Loneliness; it is working class and inward-looking, bound by secrets and taboos, fearing and hating the white world beyond its walls. The atrocities enacted include an honour killing, a brutal “exorcism”, paedophilia in the mosque and wife beating – each episode based on real events culled from newspapers. But the threat of violence in Aslam’s Lonely Desert is ultimately incapable of holding lovers back from the passion of life. Here is the novel’s great beauty: in the exuberance of individual desire, in the capacity of people to break their cages – also in the poetry of moths and flowers that cloaks Aslam’s postindustrial town with an Urdu-tinted mantle of transcendence.

Though elegant, the novel is unbalanced in its unrelenting focus on crimes of honour. It fails to show how the meanings of Islam are contested within Muslim communities by liberal, fundamentalist and traditionalist Muslims, by feminists and misogynists, leftists and rightists. But it was written with the love and deep knowledge of an insider. Aslam writes about parents and children in the way we all probably think of our own parents and children – with simultaneous compassion, admiration and revulsion. His characters are complex and sympathetic even when their behaviour is cruel. Each is a breathing individual, deeply human, credible on their own terms, whatever their writer’s political message.

In that same Independent interview, Aslam spoke of the visceral sense of responsibility he felt as a Muslim for the murderous excesses of other Muslims: “We moderate Muslims have to stand up,” he said. “I feel that a game of Hangman is being played on an enormous scale in the world, and that sooner or later I’m going to be asked certain questions, and if I don’t give the right answer somebody is going to get hurt.”

This comment prefigured Aslam’s new novel, The Wasted Vigil, which concentrates on the murderous excesses of Afghanistan, a land where Muslim violence reaches out of private homes and into the enormous scale of the skies.

What made this violence erupt? The CIA began funding and arming right-wing Islamists in Afghanistan even before the Soviet invasion in December 1979, in an effort to “increase the probability” that the Russians would intervene. In the resulting war perhaps two million Afghans died and up to five million fled the country. Afghanistan lost its infrastructure and its educated class. The Russians were eventually driven out, only to be replaced by squabbling “mujahideen” warlords who terrorised the population in pursuit of their private vendettas. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, with the approval of the United States, backed the Taliban, who made the roads safer and stopped opium cultivation, but at a huge cost. In a perverse marriage of the worst of the Deobandi and Wahhabi theological traditions, the Taliban’s boy commanders declared an Afghan year zero. Men were imprisoned for having “un-Islamic haircuts”. Women were forbidden to leave the house unaccompanied. All “ungodly innovations”, from kite flying to television, were banned. After September 11, American policy shifted abruptly. A new set of warlords were brought to power, and the Kabul bourgeoisie was partially liberated.

Today Afghanistan remains mired in war, corruption and poverty. The latest foreign occupation wants to educate the Afghans out of their barbarism, but doesn’t recognise that every prior foreign occupation has dramatically increased that barbarism. The Taliban, almost universally hated a few years ago, are resurgent in the guise of a national liberation movement.

Afghanistan is a vast human tragedy representing the moral and practical failure of all concerned, Muslim and Christian, Arab and Pakistani, Russian and American. It’s enough to enrage anyone. A novelist, however, must produce more than rage.

Aslam presents Afghanistan through the eyes of foreigners whose lives are painfully tied to the country. Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman aged and bearded like “a prophet in wreckage”, welcomes a succession of wounded characters to his house near Tora Bora. These visitors are connected and divided by bitter secrets, shared loss and burning questions. What has become of Marcus’s Afghan wife, his daughter and most brutally, his hand? What of the Russian woman Lara’s brother, a missing Soviet soldier? Or of the ex-spy David’s brother, or his lover, Marcus’s daughter, Zameen? And what of David’s son, Marcus’s grandson? The sad answers to these mysteries are revealed gradually through a narrative of flashbacks, on a canvas stretched between Islamabad, New York and Saint Petersburg.

At its best, The Wasted Vigil is a lament for what has been destroyed: the traces of Afghanistan’s Buddhist and Sufi past, its tradition of miniaturist art, its myths and stories, its delicate intermingling of histories like the scents in a blended perfume. And Aslam generates many startling images (most notably a camel carrying a car’s burnt-out shell) and extended metaphors. Perhaps the novel’s key character is Marcus’s house itself, in which the art and architecture of each room is dedicated to one of the five senses. Books fall in a random literary rain from the ceilings, to which they were nailed by Marcus’s tragedy-maddened wife to hide and save them from the Taliban. Similarly, the walls are covered in paintings, which in turn are covered with mud to protect them from fundamentalist vandals. But some are visible:

“Several of the lovers on the wall were on their own because of the obliterating impact of the bullets – nothing but a gash or a terrible ripping away where the corresponding man or woman used to be. A shredded limb, a lost eye.”

This literal blurring of art and reality works well in a context where cultural violence and murder jog hand in hand – the Taliban’s attacks on the Bamyan Buddhas and Sufi shrines, the American tanks crushing the ancient walls of Ur in Iraq. In the lands of America’s wars, history has often been a victim. Marcus’s house hides a secret Buddha underground, just as Afghanistan hides its Buddhist past. Afghanistan itself is figured as a collapsed building in which “everyone’s life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.”

Aslam excels in the poetic crossing of borders whereby the senses leak into each other and an idea can be conveyed by the beating of a butterfly’s wings. He presents a stare so strong it verges on sound, a character with “skin the colour of violins” and the “weather” of people’s souls. Unfortunately, it may be that this writerly strength contributes to the category errors in Aslam’s political thought, whereby bombs leak into beatings and honour killing spreads into mass terrorism.

The Wasted Vigil is handicapped by characters that are not quite fully imagined, not quite precise enough to convince. Almost interchangeably, the three non-Afghan characters speak and think about gemstones, perfumes and the classics of world literature, sometimes apparently only to give Aslam further opportunities to be poetic. All three often sound suspiciously like Nadeem Aslam with his committed anti-Islamist hat on.

There is one major Afghan character: Casa, a fundamentalist who, with his horrifyingly wrongheaded interpretations of Islam, seldom rises above stereotype. His religion is animated by hatred for non-Muslims of all varieties as well as traditional Muslims, women, blacks and intellectuals. Such bitter, monomaniacal characters doubtless exist in the real world, but Aslam (unlike in Maps for Lost Lovers) shows us not much more of their inner lives than we see on the TV news. Casa is partially offset by Dunia, a walk-on spokeswoman for a more liberal Islam, but the other minor Afghan characters include two warlords, a wife-murdering cleric and a duplicitous suicide bomber. The reader is told that ordinary Afghans despise the fundamentalists, but rarely sees ordinary people up close in their daily struggles.

“There’s no message in my books,” Aslam told the Independent, but here he appears to have broken his rule. His free indirect style – by which the narrator experiences the world through his characters – breaks down, and the author breaks in, sometimes with thoroughly questionable generalisations (“The religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the study of science”) and orientalist falsehoods (Syria and Egypt suffered cultural collapse when the first Muslims arrived). The book’s final act of violence points to how interconnected western and eastern guilt are in Afghanistan, and how mutual the suffering, but the general approach does not allow enough convincing voices to challenge either fundamentalist or western stereotypes.

The novels style can slip to become an overblown parody of itself. Not every image or beautiful phrase fits snugly in place, especially when Aslam chugs them out without reason: why say “work” when you can call it “the labours of the world”? A sentence rhythm is sometimes ruined entirely by repetition, and there is at times floweriness without a restraining economy, so that even explosions and executions lose their impact. The Wasted Vigil should make the reader experience Afghanistan as if it is immediately present; all too often it offers only an unchallenging exoticism.

Our times call for fiction which challenges the simplistic assumptions of religious fundamentalists and imperialising secularists alike. Novel writing is always an excruciatingly difficult process, much easier to get wrong than to get right. The difficulty only increases when the novelist seeks to represent Muslims to a non-Muslim audience in an Islamophobic climate. It may be that here Aslam has tripped up, disabled by his strange sense of cultural guilt for September 11 and by the resultant pressure to rail against the easy target of right wing Islamism. He is an immensely gifted writer, capable of great artistry and feeling, who has already won a deservedly large audience. It is a shame, therefore, that this novel remains on the shimmering surface of things. Its reportage feels a bit like CNN with poetry added, or those technically brilliant Iranian films that seem made for Western festival judges rather than for a real public. As such, The Wasted Vigil is a wasted opportunity.
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By M K Bhadrakumar
Asia Times Online

The horrendous terrorist attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul on Monday has no precedents. Never has the mission there been attacked in this fashion - not even during the darkest periods of the civil war in the 1980s and 1990. Nor has any other diplomatic mission in Kabul been so targeted in the current phase of the civil war that began with the United States invasion in 2001.

The suicide attack claimed the lives of 41 people, with more than 140 injured. Among the dead were Indian Defense Attache Brigadier R D Mehta, diplomat Venkateswara Rao and two Indian paramilitary guards.

Unsurprisingly, Indian opinion makers have been swift in depicting the terrorist act as a moral evil, which it probably is. All the same, it is necessary to draw a line while presenting what happened as a kind of morality play of good versus evil. The danger is when the narrative begins depicting a moral universe where we are hated solely on account of our altruistic motives and intrinsic goodness.

Whereas, the reality is that we live in savage times where realpolitik and not morality often enough happens to be the guiding force inciting our monstrous enemies. A need arises, therefore, to take a more honest look at any hidden sewers that may exist. Such an exercise cannot and should not in any way detract from the total condemnation that the terrorists deserve. But it will serve an important purpose in so far as we do not fall into a false sense of innocence.

Even the death of a sparrow is a tragedy. Too many Indian lives are being lost in Afghanistan. The death of a brigadier, certainly, is a huge loss to India's armed forces. It is about time to ask questions why this is happening. First and foremost, do we comprehend the complexities of the Afghan situation?

The primary responsibility for this task lies with the Indian mission in Kabul, which should assess the situation correctly and report to Delhi. The Ministry of External Affairs will be the best judge to decide whether there have been any lacunae in putting in place the underpinnings of India's Afghan policy. After all, a distinct pattern is emerging in the recent past. Is it mere coincidence?

Each time an Indian life was lost, top officials in Delhi reiterated their resolve not to be deterred by terrorists. A high-level meeting of officials ensued to take stock of the security of Indian personnel in Afghanistan. Apart from diplomatic and other staff, several thousand Indians are involved in reconstruction work in the country.

We then moved on. But does that approach suffice? Is anyone listening out there in the Hindu Kush? Isn't a comprehensive re-look of policy warranted? Something has gone very wrong somewhere. The government owes an explanation.

One thing is clear. The Taliban are a highly motivated movement. They are not in the business of exhibitionism. Their actions are invariably pinpointed, conveying some distinguishable political message or the other. This has been so all along during the past decade. Anyone who interacted with the Taliban would agree.

Even on the eve of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, they were prepared to deal, but by then the Gorge W Bush administration was bent on the military path. In the present case of India's embassy, the terrorist attack was carefully targeted. Equally, its timing must also bear scrutiny. The overall fragility of the security situation or the prevailing climate of violence in Afghanistan alone cannot account for it. India is not part of the tens of thousands of coalition forces stationed in Afghanistan. But why is India being singled out? After all, Iran has been no less an "enemy" for the Taliban or al-Qaeda - or Russia and Uzbekistan for that matter.

The first point is that the Taliban have once again chosen to target Indian interests, which are located on Afghan soil. They haven't stretched their long arm to act on Indian soil. Even though India's army chief recently speculated that Kashmiri militants could have tie-ups with the Taliban or al-Qaeda, such a link seems highly improbable. (Why there should have been such a speculative statement at all on a sensitive issue at such a responsible level, we do not know). The Taliban message is that they have a score to settle with India's Afghan policy; that it is best settled on Afghan soil; and that they do not have any hostility toward India as such.

Two, the Taliban have ratcheted up the level of their attacks on Indian interests. Targeting the Indian chancery makes it a very serious message. It is unclear whether the Indian defense attache was specifically the target. Conceivably, he was. If so, the timing of the attack is relevant. India has sharply stepped up its military-to-military cooperation with Afghanistan. Media reports indicate that India is training Afghan military personnel and possibly supplying military hardware to the Afghan armed forces. The Indian authorities have not cared to deny these reports.

Needless to say, the Taliban would be keeping a close tab. The Taliban have infiltrated Afghan security agencies and would know the nature of the India-Afghanistan military cooperation. In any case, in the Kabul bazaar, nothing remains secret for long. The Taliban seem to have sized up that the Afghan-Indian "mil-to-mil" cooperation is assuming a cutting edge, and the resent it, seeing it as unwarranted Indian interference in their country's internal affairs.

Arguably, India's cooperation is within legitimate parameters. Delhi is dealing with the duly elected Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, which enjoys international legitimacy. But such things are never quite that simple in war zones. It took all the persuasiveness on the part of India's envoys to get the mujahideen to accept, with the benefit of hindsight, that India's erstwhile ties with president Mohammad Najibullah's regime in the 1980s were history and were not directed against the mujahideen but merely signified government-to-government relations, which were usual.

Again, as India learned at enormous cost, in the ultimate analysis, it became completely irrelevant that the Indian Peace Keeping Force saga in the mid-1980s in Sri Lanka began at the insistence of the established government in Colombo under the leadership at the highest level. The dividing line between the judicious and injudicious becomes thin when an outsider becomes involved in a fratricidal strife.

In this particular case, there is an added factor. The Afghan army has pronounced ethnic fault lines. Ethnic Tajiks account for close to 70% of the officer corps of the army. So, when India trains Afghan army officers in its military academies to fight the Taliban - who are a predominantly Pashtun movement - India is needlessly stepping into a political minefield of explosive sensitivity. Either India does not comprehend these vicious undercurrents in Afghan politics or it chooses to deliberately overlook them. In any case, it demands some serious explanation.

Three, the United Progressive Alliance government in Delhi has incrementally harmonized its Afghan policy with the US's "war on terror". This is most unfortunate. India ought to keep a safe distance from the Bush administration's war against militant Islam. Besides, the US has complicated motives behind its intervention in Afghanistan - its geostrategy toward Russia and Central Asia, its agenda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's expansion as a global political organization, its crusade against "Islamofascism", etc.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently revealed in the New Yorker magazine what was an open secret - Washington has been using Afghanistan as a base for training and equipping terrorists and planning and executing subversive activities directed against Iran with a view to speeding up "regime change" in that country.

India does not share these diabolical US policy objectives and hare-brained dogmas. But unfortunately, influential sections within the India security community have labored under the notion that acquiring a sort of frontline status in the US's "war on terror" in Afghanistan would have tangential gains with regard to Pakistan. The temptation to harmonize with the US is all the greater when we see that US-Pakistan security cooperation has come under strain on account of Islamabad's growing resistance to the American attempt to shift the locus of the war into the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and the tribal areas within Pakistan that border Afghanistan.

Again, some others in India's strategic community hold a belief that it is time India began to flex its muscles in its region. Indeed, US think-tankers routinely encourage their counterparts to believe that India is far too shy and reticent for a serious regional power in the exercise of its muscle power.

At any rate, there is a widespread perception in the international community - including former US officials who held responsible positions and even British statesmen - that Afghanistan is the theater of a proxy war between Pakistan and India. But we can certainly do without such a proxy war. There are five good reasons for saying so.

First, it is tragic, immoral and contemptible if India indeed is cynical enough to overlook the suffering that it would be inflicting on the friendly Afghan people - who barely eke out a living as it is - by making them pawns in India's "low intensity" wars with Pakistan. Second, such a proxy war is contrary to India's broader regional policy, which is to make Pakistan a stakeholder in friendly relations with India. Third, India would be annoying or alienating the Pakistani military, which is a crucial segment of the Pakistani establishment. Fourth, it undercuts the climate of trust and confidence, which is gathering slowly but steadily in the overall relationship with Pakistan.

Finally, it is plain unrealistic to overlook Pakistan's legitimate interests in Afghanistan. It would be as unrealistic as to expect that India would sit back and take with equanimity if it perceived creeping Pakistani influence in the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Nepal or Bhutan. (Three top Indian officials recently visited Colombo to make precisely such a point about trends toward Sri Lanka's expansion of ties with China and Pakistan.)

Call it "sphere of influence", call it the "Monroe Doctrine" [1], but there are geopolitical realities that cannot be overlooked. Afghanistan poses fundamental challenges to Pakistan's territorial integrity and sovereignty. Therefore, Pakistan is highly sensitive about Afghanistan's external relations. It is inconceivable that Pakistan would take in its stride any Indian activities in Afghanistan, which it perceives as threatening its security interests. (Sophistries apart, Delhi's calculated political decision to maintain consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif is a case in point.) A futile cycle of tit-for-tat will ensue

whereby India and Pakistan would end up bleeding each other.

From the Indian perspective at least, its national priorities at the present crucial juncture of economic growth and development should be very obvious. It can do without mindless distractions and extravaganzas. It needs a peaceful external environment. China's fascinating example of national priorities is in front of India - almost mocking it.

The biggest danger is that in the present climate of euphoria over India's so-called strategic partnership with the US, Washington may egg Delhi on to a "proactive" role in Afghanistan. Indeed, this may be happening already to some extent. India (and China) has been approached by the Bush administration to send troops to Afghanistan. Understandably, with the Afghan war posing such a profound dilemma to the US, Washington would be immensely pleased if India, with its surplus manpower, geared up for a bit of load-sharing in the "war on terror".

Nothing would be more foolhardy on India's part than to be drawn into the US stratagem. There cannot be any two opinions that when the chips are down, the US would know that Pakistan is a fundamentally more valuable ally in Afghanistan than India ever could aspire to be. Simply put, geography favors Pakistan, and geography delimits a direct Indian role in Afghanistan.

India can only end up as a doormat for US regional policy. However, there are disturbing signs that sections of the Indian strategic community, egged on by the armchair cheerleaders in its media, are raring to go for a bit of action in the great game. Indeed, the great game in the Hindu Kush is a heady, exhilarating game. But it is also a high-risk one. It can even end up tragically, which was what happened to imperial Britain and the Soviet Union - and quite probably will happen to the US.

It is understandable if India were to retaliate against the Taliban for its hostile activities towards India. But that is not the case here. The case is more of the powerful pro-American lobby in India's security community hoping against hope that somehow or the other a justification could be found for a raison d'etre for India to get involved in the Afghan war. The easy route is to cast the Taliban as inimical to India's national security.

Part of the problem is also India's lack of understanding about the phenomenon of political Islam and its manifestations in its neighborhood. Carnegie scholar and author of Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy, Fawaz A Gerges, has tackled the intellectual challenge of disentangling myth from the reality of Islamism. He came up with some facts to consider: a) Islamism is highly complex and diverse; the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates which form the overwhelming majority (over 90%) of religiously political groups embrace democratic principles and oppose violence; b) Mainstream Islamists have become unwitting harbingers of democratic transformation in Muslim societies, learning to make compromises and even rethink some of their absolute positions; c) Mainstream militants serve as a counterweight to ultra-militants like al-Qaeda; d) Islamists, like their secular counterparts, are deeply divided among themselves and the intensity of the fault lines are very real.

Interestingly, Gerges had this to say about the Taliban: "There is nothing uniquely 'Islamic' about their internal governing style except the rhetoric and the symbolism. They have not offered up an original model of Islamic governance." Thus, once in power in the late 1990s, the Taliban did face a Herculean task of coping with political reality. If not for their cynical manipulation in the 1990s by outsiders - the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - the Taliban would not have been driven into the welcoming arms of al-Qaeda.

Much of the currently perceived threat to regional stability from the Taliban is a dark illusion that has been exaggerated and distorted. But then India became trapped by a fear and adversarial perceptions had crystallized by the late 1990s. India promptly, unconditionally, surrendered the right to question the myth about the Taliban. Indeed, Taliban functionaries kept conveying to India directly and through intermediaries that they didn't harbor ill will toward India to provoke such vehement Indian support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

Maybe India overreacted; maybe the searing pain of the blood-letting in Jammu and Kashmir in the late 1980s and early 1990s percolated into India's thinking; maybe the specter of Islamic extremism genuinely haunted the country; maybe Pakistan's hostile manner prompted India to retaliate; maybe the hijack of the Indian Airlines aircraft to Kandahar in Afghanistan in 1999 and the humiliation that followed was too much to accept; maybe the destruction of the famed Bamyan statues in Afghanistan in 2001 was already an affront to India's civilization. Certainly, one thing led to another.

But 2001 was a cut-off point. India should have stopped in its tracks and reassessed. The Bonn conference in the winter of 2001 following the invasion of Afghanistan was the occasion for an ancient country like India to have pointed out to the world community that there could be no durable peace unless the vanquished and the defeated party was also brought into the settlement. The Europeans would have understood. But India's political leadership let the country down. Instead, India revived belief in its role to battle evil. On the other hand, if India had plodded through, the myth might have easily fallen away. And that might have offered a permanent solution to India's Taliban problem.

Note
1. The Monroe Doctrine is a US doctrine which, on December 2, 1823, said that European powers were no longer to colonize or interfere with the affairs of the newly independent nations of the Americas. The United States planned to stay neutral in wars between European powers and their colonies. However, if later on, these types of wars were to occur in the Americas, the United States would view such action as hostile. President James Monroe first stated the doctrine during his seventh annual State of the Union Address to Congress, a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States. Most recently, during the Cold War, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (added during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt) was invoked as a reason to intervene militarily in Latin America to stop the spread of communism. - Wikipedia

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

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Afghanistan’s minority Sikhs and Hindus say they are facing increasing persecution from the government and its Islamic fundamentalist allies.

They claim widespread discrimination is threatening their rituals and traditions, and that many are now considering joining an exodus that has seen thousands leave in recent years.

“We have had too many problems, especially under the [Hamid] Karzai government,” said Ravinda Singh, who heads the Sikh section of the Hindu and Sikh Council.

“The Taliban told us we had to do all our religious ceremonies in private, but they did not stop us from doing them. It was a government that was not recognised by the world, but it was better than now,” he said.

Hinduism was widely practised in Afghanistan before the introduction of Islam in the seventh century, when a mass conversion led to the slaughter of thousands of Hindus. So overwhelming was the massacre that the mountain range was renamed Hindu Kush – meaning “Hindu slaughter”.

The Sikhs were first brought to Afghanistan from India by the British in the 19th century and together with Hindus dominated the economy. Recent violence, however, has seen thousands flee.

Although no official figures exist, community leaders estimate 5,000 Afghan Sikhs and Hindus are left in the country. In this Islamic society, they are the only non-Muslims who remain in any significant numbers.

But despite being proud of their Afghan heritage, they claim they are not afforded the same respect and rights as other ethnic minorities.

Although the country’s ethnic groups are mentioned in the national anthem, Sikhs and Hindus are not. They also say they have no representatives in the government and parliament.

For them, much of the blame lies with the warlords – commonly known as “mujahideen” – who first came to dominate politics in Afghanistan in the early 1990s.

Before 1992, there were as many as 50,000 Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan. But when fundamentalist militias started fighting each other on the streets of Kabul, the number began to fall drastically.

“Our problems started when the jihadis rose to power,” said Mukesh Kumar, a Hindu and father of four.

“They came here to the temple and stole all our furniture. We have another temple in the old city and they robbed that as well. They even took the marble and tiles from the floor.”

Like other members of his community, Mr Kumar was keen to stress the difference between the mujahideen and the Taliban who came after them.

“The Taliban were fine; they just didn’t let us display any icons. Sometimes they also tried to get us to pray with them,” he said.

With many of the warlords from the 1990s now holding positions in the government and parliament, the problems for Sikhs and Hindus have started once again.

Community members claim the growing lawlessness pervading Afghanistan has affected them most. They say Sikh children are bullied at school; sometimes even the boys have their turbans ripped off their heads. Adults have also been beaten, threatened and insulted.

Their biggest fear, though, is that they may no longer be able to lay their dead to rest.

In autumn, a group of protesters disrupted a cremation ceremony in the south-east of Kabul, complaining about the fumes it would let off and saying it was against Islam. Sikhs and Hindus have since been told they must carry out the ritual elsewhere.

“This is our native country and we have a special love for it, but the conditions are not fair for us,” said Dayan Singh Anjaan, 44, a pharmacist.

“This is the hardest time we have had. A century ago our grandfathers bought some land and built those high walls so we could cremate our dead.” Mr Anjaan, who served in the army of the former communist government, also pinpointed the mujahideen warlords of the 1990s as being the source of today’s unrest.

“We are very worried about our children’s future because the situation is getting worse and worse,” he said.

Haji Mohammed Yaqub Ahmadzai, first deputy at the ministry of frontier and tribal affairs, defended the government’s treatment of Sikhs and Hindus, insisting they had the same rights as Muslims.

“The problem with the crematorium is that the city is getting bigger and bigger every day,” he said. “The crematorium used to be in a deserted area, but now it isn’t and that’s not good for the surrounding environment or the health of the people who live there.”

Cremations, he said, were allowed to take place at a new site on the fringes of Kabul. Read the full story

Last week I found myself, briefly, in the land of menace and fortified shopping malls, prestige cars and electric fences, natural beauty and violent crime. And I found myself thinking about all the South Africans migrating to Australia. For although public debate about African migration tends to focus on Sudanese refugees, many more African migrants arrive from South Africa - and they tend to be white.

"Packing for Perth" has become slang for whites leaving South Africa, so popular has Australia become as a destination. At the time of the 2006 census, there were 104,120 people in Australia who were born in South Africa. More than half had arrived since Nelson Mandela became president in 1994. And yes, they do all live in St Ives. At least, St Ives is the Sydney suburb with the highest number of South Africans, followed by Rose Bay, Vaucluse, Dover Heights and Cherrybrook.

All migrant groups develop a reputation, justified or not. The Poms whinge, the Lebanese form gangs, Chinese kids steal places in selective schools. With white South Africans, the stereotype is that they are brash and rude, condescending to anyone they perceive as inferior, especially those serving them in shops.

A South African living on the North Shore, giving advice to prospective migrants on an online forum, puts it this way: "South Africans are considered to be arrogant and pushy, and often have a difficult time adjusting to the environment. I have had CEOs commenting to me that I am 'not the typical South African, you're lovely'." She adds that South Africans used to being go-getting and entrepreneurial in the workplace will have to "tone down immensely in order to gain respect".

I have been gently asking around, trying to find out where this cultural difference comes from. Some have suggested it is simply a difference of manner, others say it is about the sense of entitlement whites developed during apartheid.

On websites devoted to this diaspora, this is evident in the recurring conversations about the difficulties of getting used to not having "domestics" and "garden boys" outside Africa. As one imminent migrant writes about Australia: "We will have to drop our standards - of that we are very certain. Just looking at the average house over there and the way in which people live - it seems a bit backward and years behind."

Though this fear of not being served by lackeys recurs, the most popular theme on the websites seems to be a genuine love for their country mixed with a feeling of being forced to leave for the sake of the safety, given the massive rates of violent crime in the country which was supposed to become a rainbow nation of peace and harmony. There are tales of carjackings, home invasions, neighbours murdered. But this is often this is described in racist terms. One expat living in Perth writes of his realisation "that you can't mix 10 parts coal with one part vanilla ice-cream, and then expect the ice-cream to remain intact".

The view of whites as civilised and blacks as violent is one I find hard to stomach, given the violent history of apartheid, which I saw briefly for myself on holiday at the age of 10, when on a train to Cape Town I saw the white policeman in the next compartment point a gun in the face of black children my own age, standing on a train platform.

But there is more to the story of South African migration than some damn rude shoppers and a few racists. The country has given us many notable citizens. The Booker and Nobel prize winning novelist J.M. Coetzee lives in Adelaide. Gene and Brian Sherman, gallery owners lauded for their commitment to contemporary art in this city, also came from South Africa. As did the lawyer Andrea Durbach, who directs the Australasian Human Rights Centre. Many migrants hated apartheid and actively fought it.

There are benefits and drawbacks to all immigration. Are we contributing to the African brain drain by accepting so many skilled South Africans? Does this further the effects of apartheid because it is the whites who have the educational advantages that allow them to leave? And is it really possible for us to claim the moral high ground when we would probably leave our country too in the same circumstances?
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FROM Baghdad, to Bangkok, to Brisbane, the drama was played out, but coach Pim Verbeek, expressionless and stoic, never seriously doubted tomorrow's World Cup qualifier would go ahead.

Sectarian rivalry, international politics, football politics and Sepp Blatter's unquenchable thirst for a headline were all in the melting pot.

But if the match hung in the balance, Verbeek was having none of it. On the manicured turf of Ballymore all week, the players trained as normal. At the team hotel, they were told by their coach to ignore the fuss because he was "100%" sure the game would go ahead. In other words, situation normal. In the end, after Blatter's typically theatrical attempt to paint himself in the role of game-saviour, Verbeek was proved right.

And so, at the end of an abnormal week, things are as they were always meant to be.

On the surface, the odds seem to be in Australia's favour. Iraq is bottom of the group after picking up only one point in its opening two qualifiers. Indeed, since the Asian Cup success, it has only won two in 10.

There are other factors, as well. When Iraq's under 23s were beaten in Gosford in February, three of their players and the assistant coach slipped away and claimed political asylum. Ali Mansur changed his mind, but the other two, Ali Khader and Ali Abbas, are living in Sydney and have been accepted as refugees.

It was a blow to Iraqi soccer's unity, and pride, and Ali Abbas, in particular, might have been playing against the Socceroos tomorrow if things had worked out differently.

As it is, coach Adnan Hamad has enough problems on his hands. Nobody knows the players better than Hamad. He has nurtured them through the ranks, from the team that won the Asian under-20 title, to the team that inspired the world to finish in the last four at the Athens Olympics.

But sometimes familiarity breeds contempt. Hamad has had to get tough on players still dining out on the Asian Cup success. He wants to see the pride back in the shirt tomorrow, but after being stabbed in the back by their own government, he knows that won't be easy.

Verbeek knows it won't be easy, either. "I know these Iraqis very well, they are used to playing against the outside world," Verbeek said.

Any Iraqi team that still has goalkeeper Noor Sabri, defenders Bassim Abbas and Ali Hussein Rehema, midfielder Qusay Munir, playmaker Nashat Akram and striker Younis Mahmoud cannot be taken lightly. Verbeek knows it, and intends to make sure his players know it, too.

With their World Cup hopes on the line, the Iraqis will be desperate, and dangerous. The Socceroos cannot afford to draw, so everything is on the line.

Under Verbeek, Australia's defence has grown stronger, and for the first time, he has almost a full deck of midfielders. But stopping goals is only half the equation. The other half is scoring , and who's going to hit the net?

If ever Australia needed Scott McDonald to live up to the hype, now is the time. Inside a packed stadium, the atmosphere will be charged with anticipation. Read the full story

Australia has told the United States it will no longer honor a deal to swap refugees who attempt to reach the two countries by boat, the Australian immigration minister said Thursday.
The informal agreement was reached a year ago so that the two allies could refuse to accept such asylum seekers. But
no refugee has ever been transferred under the deal, and Australia's new government has changed policy on the issue.
When the deal was struck, around 90 asylum seekers _ Sri Lankans and Burmese _ who were being held at an Australian-run immigration detention camp on the Pacific island nation of Nauru were eligible to be resettled in the United States if they qualified as genuine refugees.
Australia, in turn, agreed to resettle up to 200 Cubans and Haitians annually from asylum seekers intercepted at sea while trying to reach the United States and held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Immigration Minister Chris Evans said Thursday that Washington had been told that the deal was scrapped after his government came to power in elections last November. He did not say when the United States was notified.
Australia was no longer prepared to accept refugees held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay, he said.
«I just made it clear that it's inappropriate,» Evans told reporters. «We're not looking for third-country resettlement and swapping our refugees for their refugees _ I never understood the proposal.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has dismantled the previous government's policy of sending asylum seekers intercepted at sea to island detention camps to wait for years until another country agreed to accept them.
Evans said the deal with Washington was part of former Prime Minister John Howard's plan to prevent these refugees from ever reaching the Australian mainland.

However, most have since been resettled in Australia and the islands camps closed.
The deal had been widely criticized by human rights groups. Doubts were raised about whether presenting Australia as a backdoor to the world's richest nation would deter asylum seekers from journeying into Australian waters by boat.
An official at the U.S. Embassy in Canberra said Thursday she could not immediately comment. Read the full story

The Post Farooq Ahmed

A decade long occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet forces was from 1979 to 1988. Then a civil war and power struggle broke in Afghanistan from 1988 to 1996 among various Afghan factions. Afghanistan remained ungoverned even after the post-9/11 invasion by the US coalition forces and establishment of an Afghan government.
Afghanistan supplies about 93 percent opium, which is 90 percent of the global market illicit drugs trade and 193,000 hectares of land in the country are devoted to illegal cultivation of opium-poppy. Production has been raised by 49 percent in Afghanistan in the last year.
In an environment of criminalisation of narcotics, the Afghanistan law enforcement agencies and coalition forces efforts are in total shambles. The ongoing efforts to rebuild state institutions and to control the drug industry in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly consolidated. Afghanistan’s drug trade poses the gravest threat to the long term security, development and effective governance of Afghanistan, particularly since the Taliban are believed to be the biggest beneficiaries of drug sales.

Western governments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars bulldozing poppy fields, building up counter-narcotics squads, and financing alternative crops in Afghanistan. In retrospect, might history not judge this war to be every bit as destructive and wasteful as the original ‘Opium Wars’? Convergence of interests of terrorists, drug barons and warlords has made Afghanistan world’s largest narcotics economy. Drug money is one of the major sources of funding terrorism, not only in Afghanistan but also in the region. Russia accuses the US military’s involvement in drug trafficking from Afghanistan. There is mounting evidence that this trade is protected by the US military.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called opium a ‘cancer’ worse than terrorism. At the moment, Afghanistan’s opium exports account for somewhere between two-thirds and one-third of the country’s GDP. To date, the results of all efforts are utterly dispiriting. According to a US government report from 2006, the amount of land dedicated to poppy production grew last year by more than 60 percent. In spite of the presence of large number of Nato/ISAF and coalition forces in Afghanistan, drug trade is on the rise.

Senior Democrats sent President Bush a letter urging him to recognise that the US needs a change in strategy in Afghanistan to repair the grave damage done to our nation’s security. The US must refocus the attention on grave and growing al Qaeda threat, increasing the military, diplomatic, and economic development efforts in Afghanistan. The current problems with regard to Afghanistan’s internal security situation are primarily due to a weak Afghan government with a limited writ and international community’s inability to provide the requisite financial assistance. The failure to improve the socio-economic condition of the common people and slow pace of reconstruction efforts are impacting the development in Afghanistan.

In an endeavour to safeguard our national interests and help Afghanistan chart its own course, Pakistan is exercising a ‘complete hands off’ policy with regard to the internal situation in Afghanistan and believes in a holistic approach to the problem, based on winning hearts and minds. It would be a comprise of social sector reforms, economic development, appropriately represented power dispensation and conducive security environment. Pakistan’s only interest is to see a peaceful Afghanistan having friendly relations with all its neighbours, while striving to improve the condition of its people, presently living in abject misery.

The governance philosophy preached by the Taliban, though internal to Afghanistan, also poses threat to the very fibre of Pakistani society. Therefore, Pakistan is equally averse to the spread of this negative philosophy. It is logical that the prevention of cross border militancy is not just the responsibility of Pakistan. The US, ISAF, Nato and Afghan forces are equally responsible and need to do more to interdict such movement. In order to ensure that our territory is not used by the terrorists for their activities inside Afghanistan, Pakistan has decided to implement various border control measures that include fencing of selected areas along Pakistan-Afghan border, increased patrolling, more check posts and installation of Biometric Border Crossing Control System (BBCCS). Along a border over 2,560 kilometres, Pakistan maintains nearly 1,042 border posts as against 100 maintained by US and the Afghan troops. Some of the Afghan refugee camps had been reported to be safe havens for Taliban sympathisers involved in terrorist activities across the border as well as within Pakistan. To address this problem repatriation of over 2.5 million refugees in Pakistan has been started with the active cooperation of UNHCR, Afghanistan and international community while Afghanistan is resisting and impeding the process on various pretexts. The repatriation is likely to be completed by year 2009.

Pakistan is actively cooperating with US, ISAF, Nato and Afghan National Army within the framework of the Tripartite Commission. On the other hand the Americans have been violating our territory with unilateral strikes inside Pakistan, which has led to an increase in anti-American sentiment.

Pakistan’s contribution in the war on terror has been phenomenal. The major component of our effort has been along the Pakistan-Afghan border. To support the anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan and to effectively curtail movement across Pakistan-Afghan border, security forces have deployed over 100,000 troops in Fata along the Pak-Afghan border. Pursuing the strategy of political engagement in synchronisation with socioeconomic development of tribal areas is priority of the government. The end objective is to eliminate the politico-social support base of foreign terrorists. A holistic and effective strategy is being implemented to achieve this objective.

Development activities initiated by the government in the area were not only widely recognised at all levels but were also accepted by the tribesmen immediately. All uplift projects were meticulously planned with the prime objective of improving the social economic lot of the people of Fata. As soon as the security situation will improve in Fata, the new political setup would like to initiate the development programme for the uplift of the area.

Although there have been some problems in our peace deals with the militants in Fata due to their violations, however, the efforts are in hand to address the current problems through a combination of new political means. Pakistan will continue to play a key role in the war on terror and also bring about a societal change at a home so as to take its rightful place that has been bestowed upon us. An average Pakistani’s perception about the war on terror is very different from the West. There is no doubt that Pakistan is going through difficult times. There are countless problems but Pakistan has the will and strength to overcome them. The internal dynamics of Pakistan with regard to terrorism and extremism are deeply affected by the international developments, particularly from untamed Afghanistan. Read the full story

Sydney Morning Herald
Peter Manning

Australia's a remarkable country. Cambodian, Yugoslav and Vietnamese Australians who once shot at each other now live in the same city, sometimes the same suburb. The same goes for Arab and Jewish Australians. There are Jewish fighters from 1948 who successfully established the state of Israel and there are Palestinian refugees living in Sydney who were driven from their homes.
But you should have heard the groans of disapproval when Kevin Rudd's paean of praise for Israel's 60 years of democracy in Federal Parliament on March 12 was mentioned two weekends ago at the Arab Film Festival in Parramatta. In this swinging federal seat, the largely Arab-Australian audience was not impressed.


I suspect it wasn't disapproval of Rudd's perceived romance with Israel (they're used to that with John Howard and Bob Hawke). It was the seeming insensitivity of a new Prime Minister so intent on collecting brownie points.
Mention was made of Rudd's highly popular acknowledgement in his February 13 address to Parliament of the sufferings of the indigenous people of Australia. But how could he congratulate the Israelis without even a mention of the dispossession of 78 per cent of the land of the Palestinians, an event that saw 700,000 of them (most of the population) driven out of historic Palestine?

Palestinians call it "the nakba" (the catastrophe). Today, 5 million Palestinians live in refugee camps in surrounding Arab countries, unwelcome visitors waiting to return to their homes and villages. The continuing reality of "the nakba" poisons Western-Islamic relations around the world.

This month has a particular ring to it. It is the height of "the nakba". Whereas Israelis and Jewish people everywhere may celebrate May 8 as the day Israel was created 60 years ago, for Palestinians the catastrophe of the loss of their land spread over months. It began when the United Nations voted on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine, and it continued throughout 1948.

For many decades afterwards it was the Israeli propaganda narrative that the Palestinians had simply abandoned their country, not fought enough for it and left for friendly Arab countries. The narrative conveniently defined the Palestinians as ignorant and cowardly.

But since the opening of the Israeli archives in the past decade, that narrative has been demolished by a younger band of Israeli historians - Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev and others - who have argued that the period from December 1947 to May 1948 involved a series of massacres designed to terrorise the native population into abandoning their homes and fleeing to safety.

And in Pappe's latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2006), he draws from the archives of David Ben-Gurion, Haganah and Irgun papers and other sources to reveal how deliberate and articulated was the famous Plan Dalet of March 10, 1948 - the plan by Jewish leaders to ethnically cleanse Arab cities (like Haifa and Jaffa) and villages getting in the way of the creation of the Jewish state.

The result was a series of massacres during April and May 1948, the most important in Deir Yassin on April 9. Jewish soldiers burst into the village and sprayed it with gunfire. Those not dead were gathered together and shot. A number of the women were allegedly raped and then shot. Ninety-three villagers were reported to have died.

The Herald of April 10, 12, and 13, 1948, reported the horror as "Jewish terrorism". In such attacks, many were robbed by Jewish troops of their jewellery, furniture and goods.

Today, many Jewish Australians remember this war firsthand, even if many did not witness the sort of horrors alleged at Deir Yassin.

Equally, many Palestinian and Arab Australians have their own stories. I have spoken with some. Their memories are as sharp as a tack. One man from Jaffa recalls as a boy being fired on as he tried to board a ship to leave his home town. Further up the coast, refugees from the Holocaust were arriving on boats that were "illegal" in the terms of the British Mandate.

Jewish Australians were made to feel, once again, acknowledged and proud by their federal Christian leaders on March 12. Arab and Palestinian Australians, also damaged by their history, were left feeling outsiders, abandoned, in exile, just as a new government arrived so full of hope and promise.

It would be good if Rudd in May could redress the balance.

Peter Manning is adjunct professor of journalism at UTS and the author of Us And Them: A Journalist's Investigation Of Media, Muslims And The Middle East (Random House, 2006). He is completing a PhD on "The Creation Of 'The Palestinian' In The Sydney Press". Read the full story

The Age

So this guy is walking down the street when another guy riding a bike shouts at him: "What are you looking at, you black f---wit?" The object of his attention stops, turns around and shouts back: "Hey … I'm brown!"The offender is so surprised by the witty comeback that he falls off his bike. "It serves him right for being colour blind," quips comedian Nazeem Hussain.

It might sound like the stuff of stand-up comedy, but it's a true story. It happened to Hussain just last month, as he was walking beside the River Torrens in South Australia. And, let's just say Hussain wasn't exactly forthcoming in helping the man get to his feet. "I basically laughed and ran," he says. "I didn't feel the need to help someone who called me a black f---wit."

Hussain, 22, recounts the story in good humour, and he includes the anecdote in his show, Fear of a Brown Planet, in which he co-stars with Aamer Rahman, and which is on at the Comedy Festival (The Age is a sponsor of the festival).

Here's another true story. When Hussain's sister started to wear the hijab, she noticed that some people began speaking to her five times more slowly. "Maybe they thought that the hijab blocks out understanding of English," he muses.

But all this poking fun at Muslims — and poking fun at people who poke fun at Muslims — has a point. "Laughter is universal," Hussain says. "You can talk to all audiences with humour. If you can laugh together, you can live together."

The first week of the show sold out, so clearly there are plenty of people who want to hear the message. But is this message simply preaching to the converted?

Research for VicHealth last year exposed the contradictions in Australian society over attitudes to race.

On the one hand, most people rejected the "socio-biological" arguments for racial superiority that prevailed in previous centuries. But more than one-third of the 4000 surveyed believed there were certain ethnic groups that did not "fit" into Australian society. The most commonly named groups were Muslims, Middle Easterners and Asians.

Those who are the most "visible" in their difference are most likely to be discriminated against, says Hass Dellal, executive director of the Australian Multicultural Foundation.

"Either you're Asian or indigenous or a Muslim wearing a hijab, or so-called Middle Eastern in appearance or African," he says. "Some people blatantly discriminate because they see these people as something different."
What's more difficult to nail, though, is whether the incidence of racism — or racial discrimination — is growing. The numbers paint a mixed picture. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission received 140 race discrimination complaints between July and December last year, and expects the number for 2007-08 to surpass the 250 of the previous financial year.

Its state counterpart, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, had 155 complaints on the basis of race in 2006-07, a fall from the 196 reported the previous year.

A 2006 Victoria University study of 500 refugees who came to Australia through the humanitarian entry program found a quarter had experienced racism and discrimination regularly. But, says one of the senior researchers, Associate Professor Michele Grossman, 90% felt positive about living in Australia.

They believed government policy had been favourable in terms of welcoming refugees. The discrimination was felt in their everyday interactions in areas such as housing, transport and education.

There seems to be agreement among the experts that Australia generally is one of the least racist countries in the world. Instead, they point to "pockets of racism" across the country.

"We are seeing more complaints," says federal Race Discrimination Commissioner Tom Calma. "Does that mean there is more racism or does it mean people are now realising they have an avenue to complain?" Even Calma can't answer the question, but he says the strong support for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's recent apology to the Aboriginal stolen generations suggests the vast majority of Australians are not racist.

Monash University politics lecturer Waleed Aly, a former board member of the Islamic Council of Victoria, confirms the complexity: "Australian society tends to proceed on assumptions that are fundamentally fair. That said, you'd be hard pressed to find a migrant group that hasn't suffered discrimination in Australia."

A version of this paradox was articulated this week for the Guardian newspaper by black British TV presenter Trisha Goddard, now living back in Britain after working in Australia in the 1980s and '90s.

"When I first went out to Australia, I thought it was the most racist place in the world. Every day was a struggle. It was blatant 'send her back where she came from' stuff. But I started rating, and the thing about the Australians is once you've battled through and made it, they don't care. It's like class: there is no class, you can be as rough as guts, but you make your money and you can sit next to the Queen. In England, you'll always be on the outside."

Racism has long had a place in Australian culture. The White Australia policy, which from the 1850s favoured European immigration, was finally buried in the 1970s by the Whitlam government.

But still, the issue has reared its head through different waves of migration. In generations past it has targeted migrants from Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Witness the ugliness of the 2005 Cronulla riots, in which young Anglo and Lebanese men clashed. Or reports of Muslim schoolgirls being harassed after the September 11 attacks. Or the unforgettable image 15 years ago of Aboriginal footballer Nicky Winmar holding up his football jumper and proudly pointing to the colour of his skin in response to racist jibes from spectators. (The AFL has since taken a strong stand against racism.)

Most recently, a hostel in Alice Springs was accused of racism after refusing accommodation to some Aboriginal women.

There were 119 anti-Semitic incidents in Victoria reported to the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission last year. "I've heard of situations where parents have told their kids 'don't wear the skullcap'," says chairman John Searle. "That is very distressing that here in Victoria in 2008 there can be concern and a fear of displaying your identity."

Last year, former prime minister John Howard, who regularly spoke of "integration", was accused of snubbing multiculturalism when he dropped "Multicultural Affairs" from the Immigration Department's title.

In the months before last year's election, then immigration minister Kevin Andrews — the minister who introduced the citizenship test featuring questions about Australian "values" — fuelled the flames when he expressed doubts about the ability of the Sudanese to integrate in Australia. He was quickly howled down.

Laurie Ferguson, the current parliamentary secretary for multicultural affairs, became the latest politician to bring race to the spotlight with his recent comments that refugees should be spread across a wider range of suburbs to avoid "white flight" from state schools — where Anglo-European parents apparently avoid government schools with large numbers of students from other racial backgrounds.

The words have been condemned by ethnic groups — Peter van Vliet of the Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria says they are "inflammatory, provocative, simplistic".

Ferguson last week said he did not believe there was any more evidence of racism in Australia "than any other country on this earth".

But the Government is reviewing the effectiveness of gestures such as Harmony Day, set up by the Howard government, and Ferguson wonders whether more attention should be directed to the issues that are "more hard-edged and intense".

Words, perhaps, that could be used to describe the tensions that flared in Dandenong and Noble Park last year. Senior Constable Joey Herrech was among those whose job it was to put out the flames. A police multicultural liaison officer, he watched the media storm brew after the bashing death of Sudanese teenager Liep Gony near Noble Park train station in October. Gony's death, allegedly at the hands of Anglo-Australian attackers, and the subsequent comments made by Kevin Andrews, sparked broad debate about the "settlement" issues of African refugees, and community outcry on both sides of the ideological divide.

The tension prompted police to install a brawler van and temporary police unit at the train station and step up patrols. The police have since reported a drop in crime around Dandenong and Noble Park.

"It's a really unfortunate way to summarise it, but (Gony's death) was the pinnacle. Something had to change," Herrech says. "The really unfortunate part was that someone died, but what it has done is clean the slate."

But in 20-year-old Angok Leuth's eyes, the events of last year did little to improve relations between police and Sudanese youth. The environmental science student and his cousin arrived on their own as refugees from Sudan's civil war in 2005, winding up in Dandenong, where many of the country's 23,000 Sudanese-born residents live. He was nearing the end of his VCE studies at Dandenong High School last year when the death of classmate Gony turned the public spotlight on him and other tall, dark young men like him.

"They put the blame on us when we were the victims," he says. "Even at the shopping centre or at the local station people were giving us looks like we were bad people or we were trying to bring things to Australia that weren't Australian, like we brought gangs to Australia."

Racial discrimination had been heaped on Leuth well before Gony's death. So when a young girl threw a tennis ball at him one day because "you're so dark I can't see you", Leuth simply notched it up as one of many negative encounters. Most hurtful, he says, is continually being defined as a refugee. "I feel like this is a home to me, but I don't understand why I'm called a refugee when I've got my Australian citizenship," he says.

Also feeling disconnected are the mostly Lebanese-Australian Muslims Fadi Rahman works with in Sydney's western suburbs. For these young men and women, being called a "wog" is commonplace. So is being called a terrorist. It all adds up to an insidious type of "ignorant racism" that Rahman says is evident across Australia. "There is a new scapegoat now for people and it just happens to be in the form of the Arab Muslim community," he says.

EACH area has its own unique issues, and there is no one way to combat racism, researchers say. The University of NSW is mapping racism across Australia, led by chief investigator Professor Kevin Dunn. Dandenong, for example, has to grapple with the multitude of ethnic groups living side by side and the impact that the rapid growth of emerging communities such as the Sudanese and Afghans has on the area's more ethnically homogenous neighbours.

In the case of Camden, on the outskirts of south-western Sydney, community outrage recently blocked proposals for an Islamic school in the area. Dunn pinpoints the discriminatory attitudes among some Camden residents as due to a lack of exposure to diversity. "There's nothing in their everyday lives, or not much, to confront their stereotypical image of Muslims."

Dr Helen Szoke, chief executive of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, says racial discrimination in the workplace is a big issue, too. She has heard of Muslim people Anglicising their names on their resumes to improve their chances of getting a job interview.

A study of 38 migrants from Bangladesh and India tells of migrants' frustration at their skills or overseas qualifications not being fully recognised. One man who had been a senior mechanical engineer in Bangladesh could get work in Australia only as a mechanic. Some told stories of less experienced people getting promotions ahead of them. But, says study author Dr Ahmed Munib, an honorary research fellow at the Barwon Psychiatric Research Unit at Melbourne University, "Some people actually succeeded after lots of struggle and hardship … once they got their qualifications in Australia they had been able to proceed in careers quite quickly."

Amid the persisting debate about new migrants and their settlement needs and abilities there has been one enduring race-based concern — Aboriginal Australia. At various times dispossesed, dispersed and denied the right to vote and, in some cases, rear their own children, Aboriginal Australians have, since European settlement, experienced racism at its rawest.

"You only have to look at the conditions Aboriginal people live in in regional, remote and metropolitan Australia. No other Australians endure those conditions," says National Indigenous Times editor Chris Graham.

That discrimination also takes more subtle forms. In one case reported to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, an indigenous woman with an above-average income was looking for private rental accommodation in a country town and had applied for several properties managed by one real estate agent. Each time she applied, she was told it was no longer available, although she later discovered the properties were still vacant.

But Kevin Rudd's apology might be the stimulus for changing attitudes towards indigenous Australians. Waleed Aly says it tapped into a sense of unease that perhaps Australians weren't doing all they could on race. That, he says, suggests that we are aware of the criticism that Australia has problems with racism and that we want to shed that image.

"I would argue that Australia is among the least racist societies on earth," he says. But he has no doubt that Australia is perceived poorly by other countries on matters of race. He believes past policies on refugees, Tampa, the stolen generations, the White Australia policy, Hansonism and Cronulla have damaged Australia's reputation — somewhat unfairly.

"The reality of Australian society is complex, but the international vision of Australian society is usually simple." And superficial.

One leading multiculturalism researcher, the Australian National University's James Jupp, argues it is the outdated images — of Anzac, of battlers and of the outback — that should be a starting point for change. "Lots of countries have myths that are out of date, in fact most countries do, but it makes people who weren't born here feel that the country doesn't belong to them," he says.

Meanwhile, Nazeem Hussain will continue to use humour to educate people. His comedy show includes "workshops for whities". For instance: "Just because I'm at the petrol station, doesn't mean I work here. So don't look at me sideways like I'm supposed to jump over the counter and start serving you."

Carol Nader is social affairs editor. Dewi Cooke is social affairs reporter.

■ Top-level public service jobs four times more likely to be held by a person from an English speaking background.

■ A 2004 study comparing job outcomes for migrants three years after arrival found that 47% of those from Britain and the US were using their qualifications, compared with 3% of migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds.

■ 92.5% of Victorian Government appointments to boards and authorities are of people who do not identify as being from a culturally or linguistically diverse background.

■ 9% of Victorian local government councillors born in non-English speaking background countries.

■ A 1999 study found that only 3% of roles in Australian television drama are filled by actors born in non-English speaking countries. Read the full story