Grieving Pashtun

[Yousufzai]

Old, but still worth looking at.

In January 2013, 18 Pashtun tribesmen were killed during a night raid by the Frontier Corps in Bara. Seven of the dead belonged to one family alone, five belonged to another.

After the killings, locals drew inspiration from Hazaras in Quetta, and displayed the bodies of their relatives outside the governor house, demanding justice and an end to military operations in the area. Although the police baton charged the protesters and removed the bodies by force, the sit-in did result in the removal of the FC commander in charge of the area.

Something that gathered a lot of people's attention at the time was a picture of Shabbir, a tribesman who had lost five members of his family, at the protests. A lot of Pashtun pages on Facebook and Tumblr shared the image, but I haven't seen it on here, so I thought it would be worth posting. The sheer pain and grief on his face is heartrending:



I can not imagine what this man is going through.

[Al-Afghani]

This is a sad picture, but we must remember who is responsible. The Taliban doesn't wear an identifying uniform which makes it hard for security forces to target them, and innocents get caught in the crossfire.

[Yousufzai]

This is a sad picture, but we must remember who is responsible. The Taliban doesn't wear an identifying uniform which makes it hard for security forces to target them, and innocents get caught in the crossfire.

What? Yes, we must remember who is responsible: the security forces.

And there is absolutely nothing that could possibly justify the murder of those people. It wasn't a mistake. The families who lost their loved ones lived just a few hundred yards from a major FC check post. Would insurgents live so close to a place like that? And would they just stay in their homes after attacking?

You can not methodically kill 18 people (some of them elderly) in their homes without facing any kind of resistance, and not realize that they're innocent.

[gadoonwal]

This is a sad picture, but we must remember who is responsible. The Taliban doesn't wear an identifying uniform which makes it hard for security forces to target them, and innocents get caught in the crossfire.

Talibs can not fire a single shot in air without permission from ,,isi,,and army.
This is a dirty war imposed on pashtuns by pakistan and westren world.

I DIRECTLY hold pakistan responssible for the suffering of pashtuns.
yes,many jahilans pashtuns are also commeting crimes by supporting the extrem ideas of ,,isi,,,s dirty war.

[DaZahroJaam.]

so what is your theory?? why did they go out of their way to pick an innocent family and murder 5 or 18 (?) of their members randomly at a time when so much else needs to get done?? from the prospective of a selfish and what is known as an unjust system, drone strikes cost money. why waste it to kill random people for no obvious reason??

this is what is known as wocho sara lamda swazedal. it's very unlikely that these people (taliban) roam around such communities without the knowledge or suspicions of the members of that community. out of fear or compassion, they have chosen to allow these people to make such communities the base for their activities and this is the consequences the locals have to suffer from in return.
maybe if they banished them for the possibility of this outcome, if not for the defense or resistance of their own beliefs, such incidents as this could have been avoided.
this is why you don't want lice headed barbarians to take charge of things. they purposely hide amongst your community and use your families as shield and at your expense. times have changed. pashtuns need to smarten up and start taking a firmer stance and with the sort of passion, bravery and false bravado with which the books of history are filled with to protect their future.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Old, but still worth looking at.

In January 2013, 18 Pashtun tribesmen were killed during a night raid by the Frontier Corps in Bara. Seven of the dead belonged to one family alone, five belonged to another.

After the killings, locals drew inspiration from Hazaras in Quetta, and displayed the bodies of their relatives outside the governor house, demanding justice and an end to military operations in the area. Although the police baton charged the protesters and removed the bodies by force, the sit-in did result in the removal of the FC commander in charge of the area.

Something that gathered a lot of people's attention at the time was a picture of Shabbir, a tribesman who had lost five members of his family, at the protests. A lot of Pashtun pages on Facebook and Tumblr shared the image, but I haven't seen it on here, so I thought it would be worth posting. The sheer pain and grief on his face is heartrending:



I can not imagine what this man is going through.

My dear friend, punitive expeditions are something that the Pakistani Army (and now the Afghan Army) have picked up from their benefactors of old.

Sell outs and morons and watan feroshee types are eager to blame victims for having rather predictable responses to imposed war.

In their idealistic vision of war, a bunch of lawyers and doctors and well shaven men get together, put some roses on their vests, and fight like a 3 musketeers movie.

All across the world from Latin America to Vietnam to Afghanistan the reality is far far different. Perhaps even in Ukraine and in Eastern Ukraine we see the same phenomena.

There are no white knights in war... there is merely pain and suffering.

However, there are aggressors and there are defenders and those that react. I hardly think that these folks sporting Korean era weaponry, fighting with next to nothing in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan are the "aggressors" or instigators here and many many many people including in the CIA, academia, etc all make it known that they understand the exact same thing.

To give us a balanced sense of history of how this is an artifact of the past as well, here was an excellent story from Churchill's own time. In his era the Brits sought to pacify FATA.

Here are some choice quotes from the young whiskey bound Churchill regarding who and what he faced in those rugged hills:

http://guardianlv.com/2014/02/taliba...ton-churchill/

Upon Churchill’s arrival in Malakand, the future Nobel laureate formed a low opinion of the Talib-ul-‘Ilm (seekers of knowledge), the forefathers of the

modern

Taliban. In one of his dispatches as a war correspondent for the

Daily Telegraph

, Churchill describesdthe Taliban “…as degraded as any on the fringe of humanity: fierce as a tiger, but less cleanly; as dangerous, not so graceful.” Churchill held the Taliban responsible for the pitiful conditions of the Afghans. These so-called holy men repelled Churchill for their loose moral conduct. According to Churchill, the Taliban incited the common Afghan to rise in rebellion against the British: ” …they live free at the expense of the people, keep them in the grip of miserable superstition, and enjoy droit de seigneur …no man’s wife or daughter is safe from them. Of some of their manners and morals it is impossible to write.”
Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2014/02/taliba...QqAdymbvzuo.99

And what was the *******'s mission?

General Bindon Blood. General Blood, upon her insistence, took the young Churchill under his wings and enrolled him in the Malakand Field Force on a punitive mission against the Afghan Taliban.

Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2014/02/taliba...QqAdymbvzuo.99

There were mental retards back then who also blamed the victim, their names were Kuli Khan Khattak and a few other key players in the game that were the Karzai equivalents of a bygone era.

They too whispered to their constituents that compromise with the Brits was a way to become a power in the region and it would be far far better for them in the long run.

If you read about the aerial bombardment campaigns of the Brits, they leveled whole villages with their new airplane toys and so many innocents died.

In Pashtun nostalgia these folks are remembered as the rugged deadly and self liberated freedom in the blood Pashtuns of yore... how ironic that in their lives they are maligned yet in death they are celebrated.

Well, Pashtuns can now ponder on that era and decide for themselves whether they are better or worse off. The end result was the creation of Pakistan and there certainly have been some Pashtuns in the former NWFP who have benefited from what was left behind.. some of that infrastructure... but what have they lost? Dominance, language, autonomy, priceless treasures...

It certainly is a major quandary we face in this era: Have some people with their own ambitions come into our lands and build us supposedly free stuff and try to ride it out while they impose their value system and ideas by force vs complete autonomy and the likelihood of a century or more of rugged miserable struggling in the era of nation states where it is paramount that regional autonomy goes hand in hand with Afghan autonomy.