India Befriends Afghanistan, Irking Pakistan

With $1.2 Billion in Pledged Aid, New Delhi Hopes to Help Build a Country That Is ‘Stable, Democratic, Multiethnic’

KABUL — After shunning Afghanistan during the Taliban regime, India has become a major donor and new friend to the country’s democratic government — even if its growing presence here riles archrival Pakistan.

From wells and toilets to power plants and satellite transmitters, India is seeding Afghanistan with a vast array of projects. The $1.2 billion in pledged assistance includes projects both vital to Afghanistan’s economy, such as a completed road link to Iran’s border, and symbolic of its democratic aspirations, such as the construction of a new parliament building in Kabul. The Indian government is also paying to bring scores of bureaucrats to India, as it cultivates a new generation of Afghan officialdom.

India’s aid has elevated it to Afghanistan’s top tier of donors. In terms of pledged donations through 2013, India now ranks fifth behind the U.S., U.K., Japan and Canada, according to the Afghanistan government. Pakistan doesn’t rank in the top 10.

Afghanistan is now the second-largest recipient of Indian aid after Bhutan. “We are here for the same reason the U.S. and others are here — to see a stable, democratic, multiethnic Afghanistan,” Indian Ambassador to Afghanistan Jayant Prasad said in an interview.

Such a future for Afghanistan is hardly assured, as the run-up to Thursday’s presidential election shows. On Tuesday, a pair of mortar shells hit near the presidential palace in Kabul while Taliban insurgents attacked polling stations across the country, as part of wave of violence aimed at preventing people from casting ballots in the election.

Despite backing the Taliban in the past, Pakistan doesn’t want to see an anarchic Afghanistan, say Pakistani security analysts.

“Pakistan is doing nothing to thwart the elections in Afghanistan and everything to help Afghanistan stabilize and have a truly representative government,” says Gen. Jehangir Karamat, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the U.S. and a retired army chief.

Yet India’s largess has stirred concern in Pakistan, a country situated between Afghanistan and India that has seen its influence in Afghanistan wane following the collapse of the Taliban regime. At the heart of the tensions is the shared fear that Afghanistan could be used by one to destabilize the other.

“We recognize that Afghanistan needs development assistance from every possible source to address the daunting challenges it is facing. We have no issue with that,” says Pakistani foreign-ministry spokesman Abdul Basit. “What Pakistan is looking for is strict adherence to the principle of noninterference.”

India is seeding Afghanistan with a vast array of projects such as a completed road link to Iran’s border and the construction of a new parliament building in Kabul. A view of the city, above.

The two countries have sparred repeatedly about each other’s activities in Afghanistan. Indian officials say their Pakistani counterparts have claimed that there are more than the official four Indian consulates in Afghanistan, and that they support an extensive Indian spy network. For years, Pakistan refused to allow overland shipment of fortified wheat biscuits from India to feed two million Afghan schoolchildren. India instead had to ship the biscuits through Iran, driving up costs for the program.

The World Food Program, which administers the shipments, said the Pakistan government gave its approval for overland shipment in 2008 — six years after the first delivery from India. “Why did it take six years … is something that WFP cannot answer,” a spokesman for the aid organization said. “However, we are indeed thankful to the government of Pakistan for allowing transit for the fortified biscuits.”

Mr. Basit, the foreign-ministry spokesman, didn’t respond to a question about the Indian food assistance.

India’s aid has extended well beyond physical infrastructure to the training of accountants and economists. For a nation devastated by decades of war, these soft skills fill a hole, says Noorullah Delawari, Afghanistan’s former central-bank governor and now head of Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, an organization that promotes private enterprise. “The country shut down for 20 years,” he said. “We stopped producing educated people to run our businesses and government offices.”

Some believe there is room for cooperation between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan since both countries share an abiding interest in its stability. “The opportunity is there,” says Gen. Karamat, “if we can get out of the straitjacket of the past.”

-Matthew Rosenberg contributed to this article.

Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui back in spotlight

by Maria

She went to MIT and Brandeis, married a Brigham and Women’s physician, made her home in Boston, cared for her children, and raised money for charities. Aafia Siddiqui was a normal woman living a normal American life. Until the FBI called her a terror (Rules Undefined)

Earlier in June, I had posted an article, Rules Undefined, featuring Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a 38-year-old, Al-Qaeda suspect currently detained in the US. News came yesterday that the government of Pakistan is now seeking lawyers to represent Siddiqui who could face a possible life imprisonment, according to Reuters.

Siddiqui was detained in Afghanistan for plotting casualty attacks at various locations in New York and prosecutors claim that she fired on a team of FBI agents, without any luck, while held in questioning.

Here’s a short excerpt on Dr. Aafia Siddiqui:

Born in Karachi, Pakistan, on March 2, 1972, Aafia Siddiqui moved to Texas in 1990 and after spending a year at the University of Houston, she transferred to MIT, where she was granted a $5,000 grant in her sophomore year to study the effects of Islam on women in Pakistan. Later on after her graduation from MIT, Aafia got married to Mohammed Amjad Khan; a medical student based in Boston. She continued to pursue further education at Brandeis University, where she completed her Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience. The couple returned to Pakistan in 2002 and decided to part ways, as tensions grew between the two. Aafia returned to the United States during the same year in hopes of securing a job in Baltimore, where her sister was working, but returned back to Pakistan, as her three children were still staying with her mother in Karachi.

Aafia, along with her three children (seven, five and six months old) vanished in the Spring of 2003, when she had left for the train station to travel to Islamabad.

The Nation

In 2008, mental health professionals concluded,

Ms. Siddiqui is not currently competent to proceed as a result of her mental disease, which renders her unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against her or to assist properly in her defense

However, Siddiqui was recently deemed fit to stand trial, as prosecution witnesses criticized her for inflating her mental disorder, despite defense lawyers arguing on her delusional disorder. A hearing will take place within a few weeks to determine Siddiqui’s representation in court, as ordered by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman.

In her response, Siddiqui wrote a two-page letter to the judge:

I really am innocent of the charges stated against me and I was in prison before that too and tortured badly to make me state what they wanted me to — and my children

It is uncertain what will come out of the trial and it’s equally uncertain whether Dr. Aafia is in fact an Al-Qaeda suspect. However, it is worth noting how similar Al-Qaeda suspects end up like Siddiqui,

“It is worth noting that upon their entrance to Afghanistan, the U.S. did not even arrest Al Qaeda suspects themselves. Instead, they offered ransoms for these suspects, leading factional leaders such as Abdul Rashid Dostum to round up political enemies and hand them over to the US. The US had no means of determining the guilt of these suspects, as there were almost no speakers of Pashto, Dari, or Uzbek” (Thomas Murphy, Gender Across Borders).

While the Al-Qaeda leaders are free, others like Siddiqui are paying their ransom, bringing to light a very interesting angle within the Al-Qaeda operations. These fundamentalists continuously target young children and adults, brainwash them in becoming suicide bombers, however it is unheard of an Al-Qaeda leader to be a frontrunner. The leaders are always the underdogs.

Al-Qaeda’s power rests with adolescents who are forcefully deprived of education and thus lured into warfare.

Education, should be the weapon to be used against the Talibans.

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Jinnah & Patel fireworks as BJP self-destructs

by: RupeeNews

Jaswanth Singh eulogized Mohammad Ali Jinnah in his current book. The Bharati media weaned on the milk of “Jinnnah hatred” don’t have a clue about one of the greatest political leaders of South Asia

The electoral loss in the last elections has had a serious impact on the the functioning of the Hinduist party run by Mahasaba extremists of the Rai, Sarawak, Haldi Ram variety who have not lost any opportunity to malign and murder Muslims, Christians and Dalits. The spiritual fountainhead of the BJP was the RSS. It was an RSS Hindu extremist who killed Mohandas Gandhi. The BJP hates Mohandas Gandhi and hate the Indian National Congress leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru. Sardar Patel was a hawk in the Congress and was supported by the Hindu Mahasabah who supported his policy action in Hyderabad and his bullying of the other smaller states like Junagarh and Manvadar hat had joined Paksitan.

Ironically is was Sardar Patel who actually banned the RSS for its terror activities against the Congress and its spiritual leader Mohandas Gandhi. It the RSS banning that may have encouraged Mr. Jaswanth Singh to speak up against the leader of the Congress.

Mr. Singh may have miscalculated. Sardar Patel is still the spiritual Godfather of the RSS and an icon of one of the stalwarts of the BJP–Mr. Narendar Modi.

NEW DELHI: Expelled BJP leader Jaswant Singh targetted L K Advani on his return to Delhi on Thursday, accusing the latter of not returning the

favour done by him when the former deputy PM had been embroiled in the “Jinnah-was-secular” controversy.

Jaswant denied he had accepted the BJP resolution setting out its position on the Muslim League leader. Asked about his role when the Advani controversy broke out, he said, “I never subscribed to the June 10, 2005, resolution of the party. Even then I had stood by Advani and against the treatment meted out to Lalji. I stood up for Advani’s right to say what he did.”

Asked whether he felt Advani had “failed to return the favour” and defend him at the meeting of the parliamentary board in Shimla, Jaswant told reporters, “My grandfather had told me never remember a favour you have done and never forget a favour done to you.” The leader sounded somewhat downcast as perhaps the event began to sink in.

But Jaswant also attacked RSS, while replying to questions and retorted to BJP’s allegation that he had gone against the core belief of the party. “I don’t know which part of the core belief I have demolished. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was a tall Congress leader who banned the RSS. What is the belief which I have disturbed,” he said. He added that the party had not clarified which of the eight references to Sardar Patel in his book it had objections to.

The mood in BJP seems to be set against the leader with party members saying that the Jinnah episode had gone on far too long. They said the book and his remarks, along with a rash of dissidence, needed to be tackled firmly and a message was required.

Some did feel that he should have been first suspended and others also argued that sacking Jaswant over the phone was distasteful. Perhaps the leader could have been called to meet senior party leaders. But from the manner in which he was asked to go, there did not seem to be many sympathisers. It was also felt that if he pressed on with his martyr act, it might prove counter-productive.

Jaswant said he had written about Jinnah’s intractability and constant changing of positions that contributed to Partition. “Certainly Congress leaders were responsible as were the British,” he said. But his explanations seem to have come too late as the BJP’s door are firmly shut.

On its part, BJP on Thursday fielded senior party leader Arun Jaitley in Shimla to justify the party’s decision to sack Jaswant. Jaitley said the party would ordinarily have no objections to any intellectual exercise by a party functionary as long as it did not violate the core beliefs of the party.

“The issue is not your right to author a book but the issue is what you say and what you write. The basic issue that remains is content of the book. No political party can allow any member, a frontline leader, to express views that go against the core ideology of the party,” he said.

Jaswant, however, failed to see enough reason in that argument and said, “I am not going to argue with a lawyer’s contention.”

In Shimla, Jaitley sought to make a distinction between Jaswant’s views on Jinnah and what was said by Advani in 2005 during his visit to Pakistan. “There is a basic difference between what the two leaders have said. What Advani said was a tactical reference to Jinnah’s speech in Pakistan’s constituent assembly to tell the people of Pakistan what situation they have come to. But to say that Jinnah was demonised in India, that Indian Muslims feel like aliens and to denigrate Sardar Patel goes against the national consensus and party’s core beliefs,” Jaitley said. Advani failed to return favour: Jaswant TNN 21 August 2009, 07:26am IST

Mr. Jaswant Singh is disappointed with Mr. L.K. Adhvani for dumping him for similar violation of the BJP code of conduct–eulogy of the Quaid e Azam. However the reason why Jawant got the axe seems to his criticism of Sardar Patel.