poisonous ways of snakes and scorpions-50 killed in KPK

[Toramana]

ISLAMABAD, May 13 (Xinhua) -- At least 50 people were killed and dozens injured in a twin suicide blast that took place early Friday morning at a military training center in Charsadda, a city some 30 kilometers northeast of Peshawar in northwest Pakistan, local media quoted the top official of the police department in the city as saying.
According to the local Urdu TV channel Samaa, the attack took place at about 6:10 a.m. local time when a motorcycle and a horse cart both laden with explosives attacked a Frontier Corps (FC) training center in Charsadda.
The blasts took place at the main gate of the training center when FC personnel were on their way back after morning exercises.
Most of the people killed and injured in the blasts were army personnel and some of them were civilians as the military training center is located nearby a market, said local media reports, adding that over 15 shops were also destroyed in the blasts.
Police have cordoned off the area shortly after the blasts were reported. Journalists are kept away from the blast site. Local media reports quoted eyewitnesses as saying that ambulances were heard rushing towards the site.
All the killed and injured have been shifted to a local hospital in the city and a hospital in the neighboring city of Peshawar.
Friday morning's terrorist attack is the most serious one of its kind in Pakistan since the killing of the al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden by the U.S. special task forces in Pakistan's northwestern city of Abbottabad. Both al-Qaida and Pakistan Taliban have vowed to avenge the death of bin Laden by threatening to launch attacks in Pakistan as well as in other places of the world.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english201...c_13872958.htm

[BarakzaiAbdali]

This is Toramana's attempt, as predicted, to counter the post Ghundal made about the girl being killed by an American gernade. As expected, he has not dealt with the original impetus. He is attempting to morally equate the Taliban and the Americans.

Toramana, I expect a detailed response from you to Dr. Barkawai, a Cambridge scholar, below:
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http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth...424785830.html


Breaking bread with terrorists

Asymmetric warfare is the result of conflict between the powerful and the powerless, reinforcing a cycle of violence.

In an earlier moment of resistance against the Western world order, the Hong Kong Chinese opened a front in the bakeries. They nearly wiped out the entire European community on the island by kneading arsenic into their bread. But the bakers were too generous with the arsenic, which caused the Europeans to vomit before the poison could take effect.

The British were trying to open up Chinese markets for the sale of Indian opium. It took them two wars to do so in the mid-nineteenth century and the "terrorist bakers" provided part of the excuse to get the second war started. The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, railed against those who would kill British subjects by "murder, assassination, and poison".

The irony that he was practising narco-colonialism on a grand scale by force of arms, addicting Chinese in order to balance payments, perhaps never occurred to him.
When those who are weak in conventional military terms seek to fight the strong, they often do so through unconventional tactics and ruses. To do otherwise is to be stupid and risk being mown down by superior firepower. Yet tactics like poisoning families as they break bread expose the weak to charges of barbarity.

These tactics fuel the desire for righteous revenge in the West, for "justice" as those US citizens celebrating bin Laden's death called it. Palmerston made his remarks at an election rally, where he also spoke of insolent barbarians. Such desires have a way of licensing their own forms of savagery and reprisal.

A blinkered vision of warfare

This cycle in the war of the weak against the strong is an old one. The strong can afford traditions of warfare which prize decisive combat between military forces. They are genuinely shocked and horrified when their opponents find ways to shoot them in the back or massacre their loved ones. Yet the strong somehow do not see the great suffering they inflict, whether through violence or the kinds of mass slow death that capitalism specialises in for those enmeshed in its lower rungs.

As Victor Davis Hanson comments, "we in the West call the few casualties we suffer from terrorism and surprise 'cowardly', the frightful losses we inflict through open and direct assault 'fair'."

The great problem for those leading revolts in the era of European empire was that their local resources, no matter how cleverly deployed, rarely could match the global power of the West. A troop convoy on the way to fight Palmerston's war of choice in China was diverted to crush the 1857 rebellion in India.

Guerrilla warfare could beguile and tie down Western armies, but ordinarily it could not achieve decisive results. One of bin Laden's predecessors in resistance, Omar Mukhtar of what is now Eastern Libya, repeatedly flummoxed Italian forces with his lightning raids and local support in a fight that lasted twenty years from 1911.

The Italians responded with one of the great tools of counterinsurgency: concentration camps. They transferred and locked up around 100,000 people from Mukhtar's home region, draining the sea around the guerrilla fish in the Maoist idiom.
Invented by the British to deprive Boer guerrillas of their civilian support, the concentration camp would morph into the strategic hamlet in Malaya and Vietnam and the concrete barrier in Iraq, all designed to separate insurgents from those who succour them.

Mukhtar had but the resources of one mountainous area with which to oppose the modern state of Italy. How could a local people counter the weight of the strong and their world order?

End of empire
It was the Second World War which finished off the European empires, draining their resources while Japanese victories punctured forever the myth of white superiority. For those who tried to hang on to colonies, Mao, Fanon, Ho Chi Minh and others had evolved answers.

In various ways, they developed political strategies that could be served by guerrilla tactics. Military operations became armed propaganda exercises, aimed at local and faraway populations. They turned to the idea of the nation to mobilise the masses, requiring the West to devote large numbers of troops to obscure, hot places.
Back in the West, a combination of media and democratic politics made those wars politically unsustainable over time, leading to the axiom that guerrillas only had to avoid defeat to win. Western armies were very rarely defeated in the field, but eventually were forced to withdraw by their own politicians and publics.

But victories in taking over countries only reproduced the problem of the local and the global in new form. Another of bin Laden's predecessors, Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi of the Sudan, had managed to wrest control of the Sudan from Britain's Egyptian clients in 1885. No matter, the country could be left isolated for fifteen years before it was convenient to organise an expeditionary force to retake it.

The struggle for liberation
The nation-state can serve as a kind of large concentration camp, walling off from one another peoples with shared interests in resisting the West. Revolutionary leaders in places like Egypt, Cuba and Vietnam took state power amid a hostile world. They could be subject to sanctions, embargoes, and covert attack while they struggled with their own internecine conflicts, inflicted disastrous economic policies on their populations, and became corrupt.

Eventually they faced a choice between withering on the vine or re-entering the capitalist world order on unfavourable terms.

This was the stalemate between the local and the global that bin Laden sought to bust open with his spectacular attacks on the US. With the greatest armed propaganda operation in world history he sought to generate a revolt that did not respect sovereign borders.

Westerners mocked his idea of the Caliphate as a seventh-century throwback. They did not appreciate what a creative response it was to the division of the world into nation-states, which could so easily be turned into clients of the West and partitioned off from one another. As an al-Qaeda website once noted with contempt, "A 'Karzai' regime exists officially in all the Muslim countries."

But bin Laden lacked a politics with which to capitalise on his armed success. His brand of Islam divided rather than unified even those who shared the faith, and had no appeal for those outside it no matter how much they suffered from Western power. After all, who wants to fight a revolution only to live in something like the Taliban's Afghanistan?

In the late 1980s, El Salvadoran guerrillas struggling against a US-supported client regime considered using their immigrant population in Washington DC for terrorist attacks on the city's subway. Despite their desire for revenge, they cool-headedly rejected the idea out of fears that it would simply call forth a more direct and violent reprisal from the Americans.

In essence, 9/11 was like a brilliant guerrilla raid that exhilarates young fighters and gives them the taste of a victory they can never achieve. Its immediate effect is to call forth legions of imperial storm troopers on missions of reprisal, missions that wreck the rebellion and inflict suffering on those it sought to liberate.


Like bad schoolboys, bin Laden's followers never quite learned the lesson. They repeated smaller scale terrorist attacks that sowed division and generated reprisal. About the only people receptive to their propaganda were other groups of would-be young terrorists. They were enough to keep the conflict going

–

and the reprisals coming

–

but never sufficient or minded to build anything serious politically.
In the long arc of the decline of empires and great powers, the main consequence of 9/11 and the wars that followed is to hasten the decline of the US. Precious resources needed to regenerate the US have been spent on wars of reprisal as well as the fantastically corrupt arrangements for economic reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having allowed business to feed so well at the public trough for a decade, US politicians now deny their own people desperately needed funds for healthcare, education, and modernisation.

Guerrilla raids and imperial reprisals both achieve little but further human suffering. Nonetheless there may come a day not too far off, in the violent world of competing powers to come, that we may long for the world order built by the Anglo-Americans and for the grand ideals of many of those who resisted them.

Tarak Barkawi is Senior Lecturer, Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. He specialises in the study of war, armed forces and society with a focus on conflict between the West and the global South in historical and contemporary perspective. He is author of Globalisation and War, as well as many scholarly articles.

[Toramana]

Be a moral person and send your kids to be trained as suicide bombers instead of pursuing good life for them (while choosing horrendous deaths for others ) in the security of a post modernity society (being an enemy of it at the same time...)...I know what is inside that gibbirish...

Only a sadist can justfy the killing of innocent people who have got nothing to do with rabbid ideologies and the world politics associated with it...

[Toramana]

I don't understand your logic. Your saying poisonous snakes and scorpions when they attacked a legitimate military target. All in the mean time, you will attack someone if they call the Pak army snakes and scorpions for attacking a legitimate Talib target. Obviously collateral damage will be done on both sides. Whose the snake, and/or scorpion?

Isn't having a base by a market place, cowardly? That's like having a Taliban base by a market place, but the blame will be lop sided.

If one is not completely insane, one would not call that a legitimate military target...Why should our our brother and sisters die for the restoration of desert honour?

[BarakzaiAbdali]

If one is not completely insane, one would not call that a legitimate military target...Why should our our brother and sisters die for the restoration of desert honour?

First of all, the professor is agreeing that the tactic is futile... however, unlike you, he is agenda-less and therefore he completely understands the actual mechanism of action (i.e asymmetric warfare).

He is recounting history and compares the campaigns to the southern american guerilla campagins

This is why you cannot win... its because your party politics clouds your judgement.

So confront the point he makes... answer him paragraph by paragraph... otherwise you lose your validity completely.

[Toramana]

Who is it innocent? The report said most of the death were FC. Sorry, but people who serve in ANA/NATO/PAK army/Taliban are not innocent people, they signed up to fight and perhaps die.

FC should know not to have their base so close to a marketplace.

So you say they are not innocent.....some of you have justified suicide attacks on innocent people...i think this should not go un-noticed....

[BarakzaiAbdali]

I don't understand your logic. Your saying poisonous snakes and scorpions when they attacked a legitimate military target. All in the mean time, you will attack someone if they call the Pak army snakes and scorpions for attacking a legitimate Talib target. Obviously collateral damage will be done on both sides. Whose the snake, and/or scorpion?

Isn't having a base by a market place, cowardly? That's like having a Taliban base by a market place, but the blame will be lop sided.

He is a propagandist... he will not answer you with committment and try to prove his case. The proof of this? He refuses to answer the issue that the Cambridge Professor raises regarding how the initial insult to stability by the interventionist empire creates the response in the first place.

This is because he (Toramana) knows that he moral imperitive lies on the side of the invaded not the invader... he is attempting to flip reality... but knows that a reasonable person (e.g. Scheuer, Fisk, Buchanon) none of these folks that are not jingoists or agendaless will latch onto his party politics logic.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

So you say they are not innocent.....some of you have justified suicide attacks on innocent people...i think this should not go un-noticed....

You are rabid because Admin Khan and other Afghans here expressed alarm and dismay at the death of the little girl... so you are throwing out a thousand red herrings to reverse opinion and to attempt to somehow equate these deaths.

Once again, deal with Matthew Hoh's assessment that civilian casualties are commensurate with the presence of NATO and ANA troops.

Bottom line: You lack logic in your argument and refuse to confront the asymmetry concept. Until you do, your propaganda falls on deaf ears.

[Toramana]

First of all, the professor is agreeing that the tactic is futile... however, unlike you, he is agenda-less and therefore he completely understands the actual mechanism of action (i.e asymmetric warfare).

He is recounting history and compares the campaigns to the southern american guerilla campagins

This is why you cannot win... its because your party politics clouds your judgement.

So confront the point he makes... answer him paragraph by paragraph... otherwise you lose your validity completely.

No first you should answer me why don't you prefer for others what you have preferred for yourself? Why not send your kid to participate in the asymetric warfare if it is moraly justified (which you think it is).

[BarakzaiAbdali]

No first you should answer me why don't you prefer for others what you have preferred for yourself? Why not send your kid to participate in the asymetric warfare if it is moraly justified (which you think it is).

Ah, Idiot Saib watch this... this is the other ANP tactic... shift the blame to others not on the holy soil.

To answer you Toramana, we are not. If they want to stop... so be bit. The Taliban fighters and insurgents can become doctors, lawyers, karzai's foot stools, jiggalos etc. I would not be upset at all with a single one of them.

However, if they do decide to respond in a human fashion and pick up the gun, I wont do as you do and ignore why they do so.

So even if you want to criticize me for "being in America" you still have not addressed that boy in Khost or in Wana who picks up the gun. What is your criticism of him?

[ghundal]

Toramana, you are neither a snake or a scorpion, but a hyena. Hyenas watch on the sidelines as their prey is killed by some other animal. It sounds like they are laughing. Then, once the the hunter has left, and the either dead or suffering animal is laying there, then they pounce on it. I don't blame the Hyena. They don't have guts, but thats the way Allah(swt) made them. They also need to eat. Animals in general do not commit crimes. You on the other hand are justifying and supporting the bloodshed of Afghans for your own sick reasons.

Snakes and scorpions on the other hand are very noble creatures. The snake only kills to eat, or in self defense. Same as the scorpion, it only stings in self-defense.

Snakes also have a photographic memory believe it or not. All Afghans will remember treachery. The fact that you, with no shame, support their bloodshed throws credibility and any decency out of the window.

[Toramana]

You are rabid because Admin Khan and other Afghans here expressed alarm and dismay at the death of the little girl... so you are throwing out a thousand red herrings to reverse opinion and to attempt to somehow equate these deaths.

Once again, deal with Matthew Hoh's assessment that civilian casualties are commensurate with the presence of NATO and ANA troops.

Bottom line: You lack logic in your argument and refuse to confront the asymmetry concept. Until you do, your propaganda falls on deaf ears.

The rabbidness and extreme sadism of those who think that it is justified killing innocent people that have got nothing to do with aggressive world politics and the counter savage ideologies say in Khyber Bazar or in Jalabad is evident ... Something drastically wrong with their human-side....

[کیش]

Here's another one:

I never heard you call US snakes and Scorpions for firing hell-fire missiles at a compound which perhaps killed/wounded X amount of fighters. What about the destruction of infrastructure, farm animals, shops, villagers who might be around the blast. Do you not care about this scenario? Or are the FC the only innocent people in the area.

[ghundal]

unfortunately, he is resorting to now false words. He never disappoints.

He has not ever protested drone strikes, or Pak army operations. He supports US-NATO.

Is this not strange. He talks of this and that, but almost all KP and FATA Pashtuns are are against US NATO, but he is not.

He never seems to care about the deaths in Afghanistan.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

The rabbidness and extreme sadism of those who think that it is justified killing innocent people that have got nothing to do with aggressive world politics and the counter savage ideologies say in Khyber Bazar or in Jalabad is evident ... Something drastically wrong with their human-side....

Who said justified? Just as war in the initial. is not justified... killing in general is an aggressive act. Do you think that if I sit in a cool air condition room and wear a silk tie and an armani suit and that I make a call and cause a satellite guided missile to hit a home or a sudanese pharmaceutical factory that such an act is civilized?

Yet this is the rub... you cannot be taken seriously until you answer the good professor. Point by point, paragraph by paragraph. He details many examples. Start with paragraph one about the Chinese bakers. What made the British have right to call them barbarians while occupying their nation?