Mission Accomplished

It is such a cliche, but truly - man never learns from his history. It was, admittedly, in the last century that the Vietnam War occurred but not more than four decades ago. Yet here we are again, gleefully repeating our same mistakes.

"The insurgents quite frankly can't tolerate the passing of a national constitution and they cannot tolerate a second successful round of elections in December and you can be sure they will fight." Major General Douglas Lute - Director of Operations for US Central Command

How Orwell would be twisting in his grave. Time for dissection. According to Major General Lute, the "insurgents....can't tolerate the passing of a national constitution and they cannot tolerate a second successful round of elections in December..." Let's put aside for now the fact that the then US admin of President Eisenhower did not permit elections to be held in Vietnam in 1956 for fear that Ho Chi Minh, wildly popular as he was, would win. Layman's terms: the US was afraid that, in an election, the person who would garner the most votes, would win. Horror of horror. Let's put that fact away, nevertheless, because it occurred during the period of another administration. There was a 15 August 2005 deadline for accepting the new constitution in Iraq. That deadline has had to be extended twice. In other words, the original deadline was missed. The main squabbling points regarding the deadline appear to be: the role of Islam, the role of federalism and the division of natural resources. Women, by the way, get all of one grand mention in the Iraqi constitution. Well, so much for liberating Iraq's women blah blah blah. Iraqi women's rights & Kurds, the two hot and sexy issues for the US admin prior to the war, are now dropped like hot potatoes. Well the Kurds have always been used and dumped by almost everyone in the past, so i am sure they are used to it.

It is oft-stated that the US always wins the war, but loses the peace. In realistic terms, how much regional and global legitimacy does a constitution have when it is overseen and pushed through by Zalmay Khalilzad, an American ambassador from the occupying force?

Next: what of the role of Islam? Is the US comfortable wiith seeing ayatollahs running the show in a country that has the world's third-largest known oil reserves? oops, that sounds a great deal like neighbouring Iran. How comfortably will President Bush sit in Washington knowing that Shiite-run Iraq may become similar in governance to Iran? Mission-not-exactly-accomplished, Dubya.

The dukhi of Afghanistan

Each and every conflict leaves public and private ghosts, individuals whose lives are irrevocably changed whether for better or for worse.

An interesting piece from the BBC's Tom Coghlan:

To the men of the Red Army who fought in Afghanistan, their elusive mujahideen enemy were always called simply the "Dukhi" - the ghosts. But when their last tank rolled back across the Oxus river in February 1989, the then Soviets left behind some Cold War ghosts of their own.

In the hills of northern Afghanistan, there are still men with pale skin who talk Russian when they are together.

Until 1981, Nasratullah was a soldier in the Red Army called Nikolai. Together with two others, now known as Rahmatullah and Aminullah, he survives from a total of five Soviet soldiers known to have been captured and converted to Islam.

They went on to fight against their old comrades with the mujahideen.

The ill-fated Soviet adventure in Afghanistan is often compared to America's disastrous foray into Vietnam. Russia says 13,000 Soviet soldiers were lost between 1979 and 1989. An estimated 1.3m Afghans, mainly civilians, also died.

Today, 45-year-old Nasratullah is a softly spoken, melancholic, chain smoker who earns $80 a month as a policeman. But until his conversion to Islam, he was a junior officer from an elite Soviet parachute regiment. He agreed to be interviewed only with the encouragement of his former mujahideen comrades. He remains close to the men who first captured him.

"We captured Nasratullah during an ambush in Kaligai village in 1981," recalls his white bearded former commander, Sufi Payda Mohammed, eyes rimmed with kohl. His mujahideen band operated in the steep-sided valleys of Baghlan province, along the key re-supply route from the Uzbek border to Kabul. The mujahideen commander remembers "a very terrible fight" during which they killed around 20 Soviet soldiers. Nikolai was the sole survivor, captured after he exhausted his ammunition and hid in a drainage ditch under the road.

The area around what was known as Soviet Base 80 is still littered with the rusting tanks and destroyed supply vehicles. Local people say Russian embassy officials returned to the area last year offering cash rewards for the location of the graves of missing Soviet soldiers. They left with six exhumed bodies.

Nasratullah himself tells a different, more ideologically-driven version of how he came to fall into mujahideen hands. He says he witnessed a massacre of more than 70 civilians at Kaligai. "We swore in the Russian army on the sword and the Bible to help society. It was against the law what was done," he says. In horror and disgust, he says he simply turned and walked away from his unit.

Prisoners were often killed by both sides, but Nikolai was found by villagers who cared for him and then passed him to the mujahideen. It was a year, he says, before he decided to convert. During that time he helped to mend mechanical equipment.

"I didn't choose to convert," he says today. "The religion chose me."

His former captors deny that any of the men were forced to become Muslims, or did so through fear.

They were renamed by the clerics who converted them. Nasratullah then spent eight years in the frontline with the mujahideen. According to his comrades, the Soviet converts were decent fighters and particularly useful for listening to Soviet radio traffic. "If you are in the frontline then you must fight and you must kill," is all he will say about fighting against his countrymen.

Nasratullah says he was born in 1960, in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. He will not give his last name. His father was also a soldier in the Red Army and Nikolai attended a military academy, which he will not identify. He volunteered for service in Afghanistan and served there for three months before his capture. In July 1988, Moscow offered an amnesty to all Soviet prisoners of war in Afghanistan, whatever they had done during their captivity. None of the Soviet converts took the offer, though all have visited their former homeland since the war.

"They said that they felt like white pigeons among black crows in Russia," says Sufi Muhammed. "They told us 'we were devout and wanted to pray, but our families had no belief and didn't understand us'."

When he visited Ukraine in 1996, Nasratullah met some of his old Red Army comrades. He says he was relieved when they did not blame him for his conversion, or for joining the mujahideen. Like many of the veterans of Vietnam, the Soviet veterans have suffered wide disillusionment. There were mass protests in June by some of the Ukraine's 150,000 Afghan war veterans, many of whom survive on a state pension of $40 a month. "Russia and Afghanistan are not so different," says Nasratullah. "I have a good life here, though the economy is not very good."

Under the Taleban, Nasratullah and his fellow Soviets came to the attention of leader Mullah Mohammed Omar who, impressed with their devout lives, gave them homes and businesses. All three have local wives and families. Three years ago, Nasratullah had a daughter he named Mosal. But after the Taleban fell in 2001, the houses were reclaimed and none of the three is considered rich. Locally, they are regarded as curiosities, and admired for being devout. Nasratullah says that while he has the support of his old mujahideen comrades and his Islamic faith he will never leave Afghanistan.

"Mongolian eyes"

Brits who are brown-skinned and possess "Mongolian eyes", better watch your back.

The report quotes an unidentified officer who followed Mr de Menezes to the bus stop as saying: "I could not positively identify this male as Hussain Osman... but he had distinctive 'Mongolian eyes'." (Source: Britain's Daily Mail).

Excerpts from a leaked report to ITV into Menezes's killing/manslaughter reveals now that a surveillance officer was outside Menezes's residence; had this highly-professional intelligence officer not been busy urinating at a critical moment in time, perhaps he might have identified Menezes as *not* being one of the individuals wanted by the authorities - Mongolian eyes nothwithstanding. Contrary to media reports issued immediately subsequent to the Brazilian's death, the innocent commuter had not run from any officers, nor jumped any barricades, nor was he wearing a bulky, padded jacket. So much for placing our trust with the media or the police. The latter had apparently given this individual no indication he was being pursued. The innocent man had also been physically restrained in the train by one officer, without exhibiting manifest resistance, when a second officer fired seven shots into his head and one into his shoulder. Some of the officers involved in this series of events have apparently been given a paid holiday. i hope they get a beautiful tan while snorkeling and scuba-diving, wherever they may be.

Only a deluded fool would possess any trust in the media now. They accepted at face value diverse statements from the police and witnesses, with little to no attempts at corroboration. At the centre of this entire pathetic state of affairs lies an innocent human being gunned to death, and a mother and a father in some remote dusty Brazilian town mourning their son. All three of these poor Brazilians will very shortly be forgotten, at least as soon as the international media spotlight moves to cover slightly more sexier stories - perhaps the next pretty Caucasian American girl declared missing.

"Jews do not expel Jews"?

Currently, many media outlets are focusing upon the Israeli government's attempts to forcibly remove Jewish settlers from select Gazan locations - i.e., from Occupied Palestinian Territory. Some of the published pictures include defiant, weeping protestors holding out on rooftops, Jewish worshippers clinging to the Torah scrolls in synagogues, human chains of female and male protestors with yellow ribbons tied to some part of their clothing (the ribbons signifying their opposition to Prime Minister's Sharon removal orders), Israeli policeofficers cradling a Jewish baby in a settler's residence, Israeli female policeofficers escorting female protestors away from their synagogue holdout, an Israeli male policeofficer hugging an elderly Jewish settler as he was getting into his car to leave his home, a Jewish settler burning an Israeli flag. Such are the pictures that the world has been treated to by select media outlets.

At one point even i started to feel bad - especially when i saw pictures of tots crying, being shielded by Israeli policeofficers. At times like these perhaps, a little historical context and perspective are required. This is Occupied Palestinian Territory. These acts need never have taken place had not this very same government of PM Sharon's decided to expand their settlements and encroach upon others' residences. When Palestinian families are evicted, they do not have the luxury of months of advance warnings, police officers holding and comforting their babies... no, they are given at the most five minutes' warning prior to a bulldozer coming up and reducing one's home to rubble. What some Jewish settlers experienced in Gaza, is incomparably superior to what many thousands more of Palestinians have had to experience at the hands of the same authorities.

During the forcible removal of the Jewish settlements, some of the Jewish protestors screamed, "Jews do not expel Jews." That is accurate. Jews expel Arabs.

Will Islam progress?

Will Islam progress beyond this century and by "progress" i don't mean just grow quantitatively, but qualitatively?

It is almost becoming a cliche to state that Islam is one of the world's fastest-growing faiths. In almost every continent, not only is it quantitatively increasing but, contrary to media coverage, a greater number of its adherents are females rather than males - all the attempts at painting Islam as a repressive religion for females notwithstanding.

There is a difference between "Islam" and "culture-specific Islam" - the latter seems to be practised by many individuals raised since birth as Muslims. "Culture-specific Islam" is an oxymoronic phrase because Islam by its very nature transcends culture and heritage. Shoulder-to-shoulder do its followers stand during salaah, a Nigerian next to a Bolivian next to an American, all equal in the eyes of Allah. However, in reality, that egalitarian belief is seldom implemented by those raised since birth as Muslims.

i am beginning to know a few Muslim reverts (individuals who have decided to revert to Islam). One of the aspects that strikes me the most about their personalities, generally speaking, is their lack of cultural baggage. They consciously made a decision to adopt a faith subsequent to independent study of that faith - they actually read a meaning of the Quran (often not being able to read the Quran in its Revealed language), they study the hadiths, they actively hunt out books on diverse topics within Islam, and if they have questions/concerns/criticisms etc., they try to seek out an educated and qualified Muslim scholar to address their concerns. Once their heart and mind are both satisfied, they declare the shahada.

i think, if Islam will genuinely "progress" beyond this century, it will be upon the shoulders, sweat and tears of individuals such as the ones above - the new generation of Muslim reverts, the Johns, Julies, Toms, and Smiths. They are the ones untainted by centuries of cultural superstition, dogma, cultural prejudice, customs, biased beliefs, passed from parent to child (as is the case, for example, in many Pakistani Muslim families). Reflect on your "average" Pakistani wedding - feasts fit for royalty, lavish affairs that parents save up money for since their son's/daughter's birth, extravagant dowries paid (dowries? Islam? come again?), finest silks/chiffons/georgettes bought for members of the other side, elaborate logic-defying customs clung to obstinately, the literal showing-off of the presents/suits/shalwar kameezes/rolexes purchased by the bride's side of the family, tonnes of food literally thrown away, wasted, food sufficient to feed a village, wasted in order simply to show that one is financially capable of wasting food...Oftentimes, the only point at which Islam makes a presence during a Pakistani wedding is during the signing of the nikaah, subsequent to which it's bhangra-time where both genders may or may not dance together, or gossip-fests to discuss who's bahu has yet to produce a male heir.

It is the Muslim reverts who may yet bring back purity to Islam, who may yet be the 'modern' generation that not just reads the Quran, not just recites the Quran, but lives the Quran.

"To make God laugh...

...tell Him your plans."

"Democracy cannot defend itself...

...by aping its opponents."

A thought-provoking, articulate, & informative piece by Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti. Excerpts:

[...] I for one would advocate a transfer of resources from the identity-card project (which ministers now admit to having "oversold") to direct policing and intelligence budgets. Intelligence and prevention are key and Britain's 2 million Muslims, far from being this country's problem, are an essential part of our best defence against future attacks. Far from inspiring or reassuring them, Friday's neo-McCarthyite hectoring has rattled many moderates who had previously begun to rally in vigorous defence of their families, faith and country of birth or adoption - Britain.

However, Muslims should not be alone in their fears for the future. If Mr Blair is allowed to construct the Britain that he has mapped out, it is not the rules that will have changed, but our society. We will be just that little bit less distinguishable from the violent, hateful and unforgiving theocrats, our democracy undermined from within in ways that the suicide bombers could only have dreamed of.

[...] Democracy cannot defend itself by aping its opponents, and mercifully the "rules of the game" do not change because players, however powerful, grow tired of them. Previous generations endured the terrors of war and left us our rights and freedoms. This legacy is greater than any one man or moment. It must not be sold in a summer.

Caption: A man holds up a banner reading "Allah loves London. We are not afraid" in defiance of the bombings during two minutes of silence in remembrance of the victims at Trafalgar Square (AP Photo/Sergio Dionisio) (source).

devils & dust

"I got God on my side
I'm just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
Fear's a powerful thing
It can turn your heart black you can trust
It'll take your God filled soul
And fill it with devils and dust"
~ bruce springsteen