Short Fatima Bhutto clip on political expectations

How Pakistan’s president is scamming the West. by Fatima Bhutto

President Asif Ali Zardari, less than a year into his reign, has managed to engage Pakistan’s armed forces, the seventh largest army in the world, in a guerrilla war with the newly formed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, our very own Taliban, in the North West Frontier Province. Rumors of Talibanization air daily on Pakistani television, radio and print media: The barbarians are at the gate, we are told, and warned that if there was a time to rally around the nation’s oleaginous president, a man known locally as “President Ghadari” or traitor in Urdu, this is it. However, the time for scaremongering has past -- it is precisely President Zardari’s politically expedient use of national hysteria that has seen American drones welcomed over Pakistan’s airspace and has birthed a war that this government cannot win.

In the aftermath and fallout of 9/11, Pakistan saw its elite -- the power brokers of the country’s politics and economy -- turn against their traditional allies, the United States for the first time. As U.S. forces occupied first Afghanistan and then Iraq, Pakistan’s elite took an unexpected turn; they welcomed resistance to American foreign policy and supported, as they had never quite done before, Islamic parties that took control of local government and provincial cabinet positions in the North West Frontier Province.

Islamic parties in Pakistan traditionally perform poorly in national elections -- garnering only a handful of seats in the assembly, but the 2002 elections saw them enter coalitions and alliances that brought them to power on the national level. For the nation’s elite, a powerful but small minority and the stronghold of Western interests, this was a dangerous turn of events.

In 2008, months after taking power in a hastily organized parliamentary election, Zardari drew upon Pakistan’s overwhelmingly anti-American sentiment and empowered the nascent domestic Taliban, which entered prominence roughly at the same time that the president did, by capitulating to their demands for sharia law in the Swat Valley (the very same region that the government is now, one month later, bombarding with American assistance).

With one hand, Zardari gave the militants what they wanted -- no vote or referendum was held -- and Taliban law was imposed on the Swat Valley by force. With the other, Zardari pointed a crooked finger at the rise of fundamentalism and capitalized on a golden opportunity to bring the nation’s elite back into the government’s obsequiously pro-American fold.

The Taliban were pointed out as the largest threat facing the urban elite of Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore -- they threatened our values, our dress, our lives, and they had to be dealt with for us to remain safe. While the Taliban have certainly made inroads into Pakistan in the last year, there is no doubt that they were only able to do so with the consent of the government, a very powerful backer. Without the government aiding and abetting the Taliban (as in the Swat Valley), they have a long way to go before they can exercise power in any cohesive manner.

Zardari’s double game may have brought him billions more in American aid and assistance -- U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke being the president’s loudest champion in Washington, warning Congress that if billions of dollars are not delivered immediately to Pakistan the war on terror will be in mortal danger -- but it has lost him Pakistan. As we watch the number of internally displaced people rise steadily toward two million our army kills our own citizens, it should come as no surprise when the BBC Urdu service reveals that the government controls only 38 percent of the NWFP province -- a number that is sure to fall as the weeks go on.

First published: http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/blog/7153

I work with Real People

"I work with real people in the real world. The night before a woman is going to get her thirty-five dollars from the bank, she will be tossing and turning to decide whether she is really going to be able to repay the loan. Or scared that maybe something terrible will happen to her. And then she holds the money and she will tremble and tears will roll down her cheeks and she won't believe we would trust her with such a large amount of money.

Thirty-five dollars! And she struggles to pay that first instalment and the second instalment and she goes on for fifty weeks in sequence and every time she is braver. And when she finished her last one, she can say, she did it. It's not just a monetary transaction that has been completed. She felt she was nobody and she really did not exist. Now she can almost stand up and challenge the whole world, shouting, 'I can do it, I can make it my own'".

Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank currently has 6.6 million clients, 97 per cent of whom are women in rural areas in some of the poorest countries in the world. On Friday Yunus and his bank were awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Those women, those dispossessed and hungry, are no longer passive agents in their own misery. They are success stories; proof to the world that economic justice is possible and further proof that the economic fascism meted down by organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank, whose conditions directly disenfranchise those whom they claim to be serving, is no longer sustainable nor welcome among the poor of the developing world.

Allow me a brief comparison: Yunus, a professor of economics, made poverty elimination his business after the 1974 Bangladesh famine. His micro credit initiative was born out of his own pocket -- the Grameen Bank's unofficial first loan of $27 was given from Yunus to women in the Bangladeshi village of Jobra who were struggling to make and sell bamboo furniture. The bamboo makers not only repaid Yunus but also made a profit of five Bangladeshi Taka -- less than 50 American cents. The Grameen Bank was founded two years later and Yunus's work has been emulated through the Bank in over 20 countries around the world.

Paul Wolfowitz, current president of the World Bank, made his mark in a significantly different manner. One of the architects of the neo-conservative Bush foreign policy doctrine, Wolfowitz engineered America's illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Wolfowitz's war has so far, according to a report, cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis. Released last week, the report claims that one in every forty Iraqis has been killed since America launched it's monumentally criminal Operation Iraqi Freedom war plan three years ago.

Wolfowitz had been writing and lobbying for a military engagement in Iraq since the early 1970s, the same time when half way around his world Yunus was fighting for poverty alleviation and socio-economic justice -- true democracy. His resume continues unabashedly -- in the 1980s Wolfowitz was America's ambassador Suharto's Indonesia, at the time reeling from the state's atrocities in East Timor where tens of thousands of Timorese were killed in brutal army reprisals. Wolfowitz kept quiet. Jeffery Winters, Northwestern's Professor of Indonesian studies summed up the Indonesia years by taking Wolfowitz's alleged democratic allegiance to task "Indonesia's citizens across the spectrum had been struggling against authoritarian rule. They had been tortured. They had been jailed. They had been ruined in various ways, and the Wolfowitz embassy didn't speak up for them -- not once."

In the 1990's Wolfowitz spoke against opening a dialogue between the United States government and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, in the aftermath of 9/11 he led his government in a plan to invade Afghanistan, and currently, his head in the sand denying the gross human rights violations and brewing civil war in Iraq, Wolfowitz is under way with a new pet project –-- 'liberating' Iran.

Wolfowitz's appointment to head the World Bank in 2005 was heralded by the Institute for Policy Studies as "a slap in the face, it's a poke in the eye. It's bad for the international community in general, and particularly for people already pushed to the brink in poor and marginalized communities," while Yunus's Grameen Bank has amazingly continued its efforts in redefining the nature of sustainable socio-economic development.

The Bank has widened its scope from using credit as the most economically viable means of combating poverty, which it gives without taking collateral of any kind, and has branched out to deal in-housing loans, financing for fisheries, giving grant money to support literacy projects and education schemes and has a decidedly South Asian tinge towards the IT industry -- Grameen Telecom is planning to bring cellular phones to 100 million rural Bangladeshis in 68,000 villages and has cyber and software technology drives planned under Grameen Cybernet Ltd and Grameen Communications.

A previous Nobel Peace prize winner, Timorese Jose Ramos Horta, called Wolfowitz 'humane and sensitive'. The Nobel committee has come a long way in the selection of its laureates. Not since Nelson Mandela's selection in the early 1990s has such a deserving man been awarded the Peace Prize. Of course many other champions of peace and socio-political justice have taken home the medal and prize money, but let's not forget that Henry Kissinger, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin have also walked away after being lauded as men of peace. Ten years ago in an interview Yunus said, "One day our children will go to museums to see what poverty was like" -- today he is closer to ensuring that that dream and many others will be realised within our lifetimes.


P.S copied from fatimabhutto.com

spsf convention-Part 2

spsf convention

Lebanon diary-Enchanting Lebanon of yore

TRIPOLI, Lebanon: My life is torture, reads the graffiti on the third floor staircase of our building. With the frequent electricity cuts and no elevator to sweep me past it I often have to walk past that dark inking several times a day. Lebanon is at war, again. You cannot turn on the television or open a newspaper without a chilling reminder of that fact. Condoleezza Rice showed up unannounced in Beirut today because no one had invited her to reprimand the Lebanese and to remind them that this conflict is entirely their own fault. Condi’s visit aside, life here wasn’t always torturous. But how can I describe to you the Lebanon of my memory? It is so different from the Lebanon of today, so beautiful. I cannot bear to think of it as gone.

This Monday reports from Qana, the site of Israel’s Grapes of Wrath operation in 1996 (death toll some 200 civilians), described the town from the reflection of the broken glass lining the streets. The Daily Star’s correspondent reported that severed electricity cables, lumps of earth, ripped sheet metal from store fronts, stones, and pieces of concrete are what make up Qana’s landscape after twelve days of constant Israeli shelling. When I was in Qana just 17 days ago, the small houses that lined the streets were covered in World Cup flags See that house up there? The one with the Brazilian flag? pointed Mustafa, our formerly Iraqi Baathist taxi driver, the landlord just told me she hasn’t left her house for days since Brazil lost to France. She just sits on her balcony and wails. Not Brazil fans, we laughed. The streets by the Qana memorial were covered with rosebushes in bloom. Before we left the memorial built to honor the town’s dead, the gatekeeper plucked three large orange roses and gave them to us, something to remember Qana by, he said so that we would not have left with only the images of death and destruction to remind us of the little town of Qana.

Lebanon must be one of the few countries were you don’t hail taxis; they hail you. Pedestrians are besieged by honking taxis Are you alright? they yell out their windows, Can I take you somewhere? You refuse in Lebanon by shaking your head no, and putting your hand to your heart. Yis’slamu you say, may your hands always be safe.

Every evening the balconies of urban Lebanon are full of people, sitting out under the night’s stars perhaps smoking an Argeeley or water pipe, drinking coffee, and maybe even playing cards. You’re never alone here. Your landscape is made up of people. Your family on the balcony, your neighbours on theirs, the vendor selling roasted peanuts for 500 Liras downstairs, and the church bells and Muezzine calling the faithful together across the street.

There is not a highway in all of Lebanon from which you cannot see the sea as you drive. The roads and buildings are built looking out onto the water; you’ll never have to turn your back to it. When I asked my brother Zulfikar how he remembers the Lebanon of our childhood he remembered the olive trees.

I remember the banana groves in Sidon.

There is a television channel here that on principle gives Lebanon an audience with Um Kulsoom every night from 11 to midnight. The war has not stopped that. The music has not died. Fairuz, often called Lebanon’s ambassador to the stars, was supposed to sing at a festival in Baalbeck this summer. The festival has been canceled, but no worries say the organisers, Fairuz will sing next year. Yesterday in the car on the way home from some mundane war time errand buying water for the house, loading up on candles or batteries, a stop at the pharmacy my mother turned the radio on and we listened to Fairuz’s opera on The Days of Fakhreddin. Fakhreddin was a Lebanese prince who fought to liberate his country in the 1800s and once freed toiled to reconstruct the country of his memory and of his dreams. We didn’t drive straight home, but wandered Tripoli’s almost empty streets just listening to Fairuz.

There is so much more of Lebanon to show you so that you will know why people are staying here to fight and even to die. How do I describe to you the Lebanon of my memory?

The pebble beach at Baarbara where sweet and salty water mixes together, the result of freshwater springs hidden under the rocky terrain of the sea.

The hustle and bustle of downtown Beirut, the corniche where you can buy hot thimbles of Arabic coffee, the surprise when you discover there is valet parking at McDonalds (I swear, it’s true).

The falafel sandwiches at Abu Andre’s in Tripoli. The baklava at the Hallab Patisserie, in business since 1881.

The winding roads of Byblos.

The caves of Jeita.

The smell of the Cedar forests.

The Lebanese drivers, who when they are not trying to kill you with their stunt-like driving, are stopping to help you with directions.

The palm readers at the beach in Tyre. Do you want your fortune told? one of them asked my mother Ghinwa on our last visit to Tyre. No thank you, she replied. I like surprises.

Then before the palm reader left Yis’slamu.

And there is more. There is so much more.

Why would a people who have everything to lose be willing to risk it all?

For me, it is because the Lebanon of my memory is infinitely worth fighting for.

Lebanon diary-We are all Hizbollah

TRIPOLI, Lebanon: Apparently I am a hardliner. I’ve been told on several occasions since I’ve started writing about being under siege in Lebanon that my obvious support of Hizbollah means I should start growing a beard and stop listening to Western music. How can you reconcile yourself to Hezbollah’s intolerant/fundamentalist/Islamic/anti-secular/authoritarian agenda? I am often asked.

But the fact of the matter is Hizbollah is none of those things. They have come a long way since their formation in the 1980s. Hizbollah is no al-Qaeda killing innocent men and women in terror attacks around the world. I was in New York for 9/11 and I was in London for 7/7 and I know what it feels like to be paralysed by such senseless violence. But I have also been in Lebanon for 7/13, 7/14, 7/15, 7/16 you get the picture, sorry, but we are without a catchy slogan here. Hizbollah is not led by a Abu Musab al-Zarqawi a man who killed Shias in the name of Islam and kidnapped and killed aid workers like Margaret Hasan in Iraq and foreign journalists like Daniel Pearl in Karachi just because they were non- Muslims. Syed Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizbollah, lived in one of the poorest suburbs of Beirut. I say lived because the IDF has ensured that there is nothing left in the Dahiye but dust. He lost his eldest son fighting against the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon. He is no Saudi billionaire.

Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Assembly, spoke today of Hezbollah’s resistance in Lebanon. He spoke of being thankful to them for defending Lebanon and spoke of the United Nation’s complicity with Israel’s demands. But Berri is not just a Hizbollah supporter; he is also quite a football fan. In a moment of levity Berri pronounced, What they are doing to us is just like what that referee did to Zidane in the World Cup finals He was insulted, he had a right to defend himself and still they gave him a red card and sent him off the pitch!.

But I digress. I do not believe in the politics of religion or the exclusion and supremacy that is part of such ideologies, but for so long as there are Israeli tanks occupying the Southern Lebanese town of Maroun al Ras and Israeli warplanes are flying over Tyre and Sidon I will support Hezbollah’s right to engage in resistance.

I’m happy to report that it’s not just me. I am not alone. There are many more Pakistanis just like me educated, liberal, non-violent and leftist leaning who are supporting the resistance movement in Lebanon as if it was their own. This morning I got the following e-mail from a friend in London: I just got back from a protest march. There were some 10,000 to 20,000 people. Ghanaians, Colombians, Nigerians, Englishmen and women, old, young, Muslims with beards, Jews, Christians and of course Arabs...the main slogan on every one’s lips was, we are all Hezbollah... We want to say that we are all with you, we care. A kind journalist from Washington DC sent me a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of my favorite poets. He sent The Massacre of Beirut, written by Faiz in 1982 when he was in exile in Lebanon, banished by Ziaul Haq’s military government. Above the poem was the note: I cannot light a bulb for you or give you a bandage should you need it. But I can always send you some poems. I saw photographs of protesters in cities in Lahore, people who went out into the streets and marched in solidarity with Lebanon under the watchful eye of the police who had not sanctioned the gathering and looked more than slightly lathi-happy.

But if there are so many of us, why is the Pakistani government so quiet? (I didn’t vote for them, so I will use the instead of our). Why do the statements issued by the government sound like they were written by lawyers? They didn’t sound so unenthused last September when they suggested the possibility of recognising and making peace with Israel, excitedly listing all the numerous trade possibilities and American brownie points that could result from such diplomacy. The Syrian information minister was asked a question about Syria’s position regarding a full scale ground invasion of Lebanon by the IDF. What will we do? He said, repeating the journalist’s question, Stand by with our arms folded? Absolutely not.

Mass grave are being dug in Tyre, bodies piled on top of each other. Citizens of the once liberated South are now under Israeli occupation again and cannot drive on the roads without waving white flags out of their cars. There are over one thousand wounded and over one third of the fatality numbers are children.

26th July 2006:

Lebanon diary-Tripoli a ghost town

TRIPOLI, Lebanon: Yesterday I was walking back home with Mir Ali. Mir Ali is my little brother. He is two years old. I had picked him up from the nursery he’s been attending a few streets away from where we live. He was in a foul mood and insisted on crying most of the short walk home. I noticed two trucks outside the hospital next to our building and pointed them to Mir Ali, hoping they would distract him. It worked. We stopped and looked at them. Five men were crowded around the trucks, lifting large bags up to the men on the hospital roof. They were sandbagging something. It seemed only slightly interesting at the time.

This morning the IDF hit several targets in Tripoli. They bombed the sizable Palestinian refugee camp in Badawi, a petroleum refinery, and the city’s main cellular tower. The sandbagging now made sense. What didn’t make sense, however, was how I managed to sleep through the morning’s assault.

The first time Tripoli was hit it was one in the morning. The IDF struck the Tripoli port, a short distance away from where we live. The bomb whizzed through the sound barrier and exploded making our entire building shake. Zulfikar, my brother, and I jumped straight into action. We locked the steel door outside the apartment and began taping all the windows in the house. We moved furniture away from the windows and we refilled bottles of water, safeguarding against another water and electricity cut. Neither of us could sleep much for the rest of the night.

This morning’s bombings, on the other hand, didn’t even make me flinch. I suppose that’s what happens after eleven days of perpetual Israel bombardment. Tripoli was like a ghost town today. All the stores shut their windows and the streets were completely deserted. Most of our neighbors had packed their bags and headed towards the mountains, the war was getting closer. Not even Tripoli was safe anymore. We were housebound for the rest of the day.

Syrian TV broadcasted a special show today; they broadcasted the words and poetry of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Darwish had been taped years earlier in Damascus, speaking of the Palestinians struggle. If they cut off my arm, said Darwish, take it and throw it against the enemy. If they kill me, take my body and throw it against the enemy. Use my body as a weapon against the enemy. In this battle, we either exist or we do not resist, resist, resist.

This is the battle that will bring us peace, Fawaz Trabulsi, a professor and communist intellectual, said later in the day, an honourable peace, not the peace of the Oslo accords or the Saudi plan for peace. I met Fawaz once; he was hosting the late Edward Said at the American University of Beirut. I felt relieved to see him on TV and to know that he was alive and in good spirits.

I didn’t feel the same way when I flipped the channel and saw Condoleezza Rice speaking of a new Middle East being born. She scoffed at the idea of even a temporary ceasefire. She offered the IDF powerful weaponry from Washington and blamed Syria and Iran for supporting Hizbollah. Condi can do and say all she wants standing atop her little podium, but she’ll have to answer some tough questions. Is this new Middle East going to turn out like the new Iraq? Or perhaps the new Afghanistan? Will they also bring the Lebanese that curious American import, freedom? I hope they don’t forget to bring some democracy too. As for the accusations of Syrian or Iranian help to the Lebanese resistance, why is it so hard for Condi to remember that Hizbollah is an indigenous resistance group? They live in the South that is where their homes are. They know every nook and cranny of the place, every pebble and every path. When they finish their operations, they don’t go to the airport to fly home. They are home. They are not foreign fighters. They belong to Lebanon. Maybe the IDF is having trouble finding Hezbollah fighters because they know how to merge with their landscape, they are their soil.

The problem with states like Israel and the new United States is that they think decades of oppression and occupation weaken those who suffer them. But it only makes the oppressed and the occupied bolder and stronger. A young woman from southern Lebanon was speaking on Al Manar today. Al Manar is the Hizbollah affiliated channel and is viewed as a reliable news source worthy enough for other channels to screen their footage and borrow their exclusives. The young woman was walking on the street when approached by the cameras. Her head was uncovered and in place of a Hijab, she was sporting a red bandana on her head, fashionably keeping her hair off her face. She was in jeans and black cotton shirt. We are so proud of Syed Hasan Nasrallah,she said speaking of Hezbollah’s secretary-general, I wish I could get a hold of an Abaya of his, one that he has worn and has sweat in, so that I could wrap myself and my baptize my children in it. I would cut it up and distribute it in the streets for all the people who are crying for the loss of Lebanon’s tourism industry so that some of his honour and commitment could rub off on them. I looked around the room at my mother and aunts; they weren’t cringing at the sweat comment as I was. They were nodding their heads in mesmerized agreement. I will live without water, I will live without electricity, and the tourism industry will bounce back, she continued, just let them keep fighting.

25th July 2006. By the way, Fatima is not Shi'a:

Lebanon diary-Who'll rebuild Baalbeck ruins?

TRIPOLI, Lebanon: Every evening my grandmother, Teta Kafia, turns on her small handheld radio to BBC's Arabic station and listens to the news. Today I sat with her and listened. The ancient city of Baalbeck is being ferociously bombarded by the IDF. The ruins at Baalbeck are so old that no one is quite sure who built them. It couldn't have been the Greeks, or the Romans -- the ruins of Baalbeck predate them. But like the Gardens of Babylon and the ancient libraries of Baghdad, they could all be gone tomorrow, another casualty of Israel's aggression.

We listened to transcripts of Hasan Nasrallah's interview on Al Jazeera. The secretary-general of Hezbollah spoke of two Palestinian children who were injured by a Hezbollah rocket fired into Israel, "I am responsible for them. We will support them, their treatment, their shelter, their food and their clothing is now our responsibility. We won't fail them". He spoke to the citizens of Dahiye, the southern suburb of Beirut. "Don't be afraid," he spoke to the men and women whose homes have been decimated and whose neighbourhoods are no more, "Tomorrow, we will rebuild everything that has been destroyed. We will reconstruct everything".

That's what you call responsible resistance.

We listened to the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, speaking out against the Israel assault. "No one should defend themselves with abusive force which does not protect innocent human beings," he said. He was speaking to an audience of young socialists. He was wearing a Palestinian keffayieh around his neck. We listened to Zapatero being called an 'anti-Semite'.

We listened to the Michel Aoun, a Christian MP whose constituency of Achrafieh was hit by helicopter strike two days ago, speak out in support of the resistance led by Hezbollah.

We listened to Condoleezza Rice threatening to visit the region.

'Stay home,' I thought.

We listened to the news of Israel calling up thousands of army reservists. And my heart slowed down. I thought of my friend David in New York. He had served in the army as a young man, serving in Southern Lebanon in the late 90s. When David finished his tour of duty, he joined the peace movement. He protested weekly in Tel Aviv to pressure Israel to withdraw from the South. We took a political theory class together and shared a favorite professor. We spoke so often of Gandhi and of Martin Luther King Jr. and of the power of passive resistance and civil disobedience. He signs his e-mails 'love and peace, David'. I thought of David being on the other side and I wanted to cry.

We listened to newscaster tell us of the 40 air raids the IDF had completed today.

We listened to the arrival of US Marines, back in Lebanon 23 years after their headquarters in Beirut were razed to the ground. They've returned to help evacuate the Americans stranded in Lebanon. There are 57,000 foreigners waiting to get out. I'm sure there are some prepared to stay. Today when I went to pick up lunch for my family I heard a man with an abnormally thick Australian accent sitting on the table nearby where I was waiting. He was talking on a cell phone, gently telling some frantic family member far away that he had decided to stay. At least for a while. "Let's see where this goes," he said, "I'm not ready to leave". I couldn't tell whether he was originally from Lebanon or not. Not that it made any difference, he was Lebanese now.

We listened to the news that the IDF had stopped dropping leaflets over cities like Tyre and Sidon. They used to drop leaflets in 1982, "leave your homes" they would read. "Your city is going to be attacked". They're going to stop with the leaflets. The Hezbollah blew up a container of them as they were falling from the sky earlier in the week. Now the IDF is taking a more technologically sophisticated route - they are leaving pre recorded messages. Your phone rings, you pick up and a voice tells you "leave your homes. Your city is going to be attacked". I wondered what was next -- text messages?

We listened to the reports that garbage collection all over the country has slowed to a halt. Just as it had during the civil war.

We listened to the statement from the increasingly fearless President Emile Lahoud. Phosphorous bombs were being dropped on the southern city of Nabatieh. Phosphorous bombs. It was true; they were using them again, just as they had during the 1982 invasion.

I felt overwhelmed, all this news and no good news. I left Teta to her news and went into the kitchen. After sitting with my brother Zulfikar for a while, I got up and came to the computer to write this entry.

As I typed and neared the end of this piece, Teta came into the living room.

"70," she said. "It's not 40 anymore. They've done 70 air raids today".

24th July 2006:

Lebanon diary-That is not the America I know and love

BEIRUT: Today I received a message from a Lebanese-American acquaintance of mine in the States. While we’re interested in what’s happening over there in the Middle East, could you please not email your articles to us anymore? Sorry to offend, but it’s just that they’re political. If the government sees them in our inboxes, well... who knows what might happen. We have families, you know.

Though all men are created equal, some are more equal than others. After the passing of the Patriot Act, after the military tribunals set up to try and condemn terrorists, after SEVIS the computer programme that tracks all international students as well as their class schedules and their attendance, and after Guantanamo Bay the American government has finally succeeded in their aims. Their citizens are now self-censoring. They are now mindful of the thought police. Through their fear of everything outside their borders they have become thoroughly de-politicised. This is how fascism works after all; you have to participate in it. And how timely it is that there are those who are no longer asking any questions.

Yesterday House Resolution 921 was introduced into the American Congress. Permit me to give you a sampling: Whereas Israel has demonstrated its willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of peace and has suffered completely unprovoked attacks while maintaining great restraint, the House of Representatives reaffirms its steadfast support for the state of Israel and recognizes Israel’s longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcomes Israel’s continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties and thus declares its continued commitment to working with Israel and other United States allies in combating terrorism worldwide.

This was a long time coming. I’m surprised it took the political dynamos in Washington eight days after Israel’s gargantuan attacks on Lebanon to put such a resolution together. Yesterday, a generic White House spokesman drew links between Israel’s annihilation of Lebanon with America’s war on terror. The spokesman said they shared dimensions of the same struggle. However, those who intoned that Israel’s bombing of southern Lebanon has dimensions of a Nazi blitzkrieg were dismissed as anti-Semites. Odd, considering we’re all Semites here. America, before passing this monstrous resolution, reaffirmed Israel’s right to self-defence and through a US-Israeli joint consensus called for another week of hitting Hizbollah targets.

Let’s recap the damage done by this strategy: 70 killed in Lebanon today, all civilians, except for one Hizbollah fighter. Twenty civilians killed in Srifa, near Tyre, with another 30 wounded and 15 houses demolished. Three migrant Indian workers killed in a glass factory in the East Bekaa Valley. Four civilians killed in a woodworking shop in Loussi village, also in the Bekaa, and another three wounded. Two trucks carrying relief goods in the Christian suburb of Achrafieh today were destroyed by an Israeli helicopter strike, prompting the acting Interior Minister Ahmad Fatfat to warn civilians to stay away from all trucks, even those carrying Red Cross medics, as they were being specifically targeted. Twenty residential buildings were also blown to smithereens around Lebanon. That is the total of so-called Hizbollah targets attacked by Israel today.

The Speaker of the Assembly, Nabih Berri, responded to the day’s death toll by holding America responsible. Like usual, the United Nations kneels down before Israel, he said, reminding people of the American veto power in the Security Council and of America’s tremendous financial support of the Jewish state. With every day that passes in Lebanon, Israel is proving itself as an exception. It is under no obligation to follow international resolutions or standards, rather it is given a free reign. Those 30 Israelis killed by Hizbollah rockets are victims of terrorism. The 330 Lebanese who have died are victims of self-defence and should be pleased that they were treated with Israel’s famous great restraint.

It is not just Israel that needs to be held accountable for what amounts to war crimes in Lebanon; the American government needs to stand trial too. Israel is the perpetrator of great violence, there is no doubt in that and no desire to take the heat off them, but America is directly responsible for what is happening in Lebanon today by virtue of its financial dealings with the Jewish state. By pumping Israel so full of monetary assistance $3 billion annually in direct assistance according to a paper published by Prof John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, of the University of Chicago and Harvard respectively America has ensured Israel’s permanency as a war machine. Yossi Gordon, the Deputy Budget Director of Israel, assured his citizens today that they had nothing to fear. Israel’s finances are in tip-top shape, in fact the best they have been in years; they even ran a surplus over the first half of 2006. On top of all this, the deputy director hinted at the possibility of allocating 100 million shekels (equivalent to about $22.5 million) to the citizens of northern Israel who have been put out by this current war.

Let me make myself clear. I went to college in the United States. I attended protests, I signed my name on petitions, and I argued politics with classmates and friends. America is where I fell in love with the writings of Thoreau and Malcolm X and where I discovered Seymour Hersh and Howard Zinn. It is where I came of age and where I made many dear friends. I was in New York when 9/11 happened. I was told by almost everyone back home in Karachi not to say I was from Pakistan in the weeks that passed, lest I find myself the victim of a hate crime. But I didn’t heed their warnings. I told people I was from Pakistan and the first thing I always heard in response was How is your family over there? Are they safe? I was never told to go back to where I came from nor was I ever told that I should silence my beliefs to ensure my safety.

That message I received yesterday stands by itself. Every other message or email I have received from America has been written in solidarity with the Lebanese people and has expressed the immense disgust the people feel over what their government is allowing and condoning. Every single email. My aunt and uncle, also American citizens, have postponed their trip back to the States. They’re staying here in Lebanon with the rest of us, ready to take the news of every air strike and every bombing with unparalleled courage and defiance. None of my friends in America will be home much this week; they’re attending protests in Washington, New York, California, and Boston. Not all of those friends are naturalised citizens, some are Pakistanis like me. But it’s a free country, isn’t it? And they are availing of their right to express themselves freely and without fear of persecution. That’s the America I know. Not the one that is conducting itself without a moral or ethical compass and is quickly degenerating into a police state. That is not the America I know and love.

Sunday 23rd July 2006:

Lebanon diary-'Go back to Karachi where it’s safe

BEIRUT: We don’t want to be a battleground for other countries, huffed Saad Hariri, son of the slain former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, implying an unseen Iranian hand in Lebanon’s affairs. Let those countries who border Israel take on the task of fighting them. This is all about Syria, declared the equally confident George W Bush. Geography classes must have been really hard on those two. Someone ought to remind wunderkind Hariri that Lebanon shares a border with Israel. It should also be pointed out to George that what is happening in Lebanon today is not about Syria, but about Israel’s extraordinarily vicious pathology and the international coterie that constantly supports its right to violence in the Middle East.

On a personal note, things at home aren’t so good either. My grandfather is dying. We can see it in his eyes. He was ill when we first arrived in Lebanon a month ago. He has been ill for a while now it’s cancer. When he was initially diagnosed the doctor gave him six months to live. He has been extending that death sentence for almost four years. But since this conflict with Israel started, my grandfather, Abboud Itaoui, has begun to noticeably slip away. He is dying with his country.

When Hizbollah first captured the two Israeli soldiers, he had taken to bed rest. By the time Israel began its bombardment of Beirut, he was on a morphine drip. Today, with Israeli ground troops having entered the once liberated shores of southern Lebanon, I don’t know how much longer my grandfather will last. It must seem odd, unusual certainly, for me to connect my grandfather with Lebanon, to place his health and the country’s well being on the same page. But to me, my memories of Lebanon memories of the pebble beaches of Tripoli, the mountains in Baalbeck, and the alleyways of Hamra street in Beirut are irreversibly connected to my grandfather. It was through him that I discovered Lebanon. When I was eight years old and my family and I would travel from Damascus, Syria to the mountain village of Akkar, where Jiddo, my grandfather, was born he would read me stories at night, mixing Arabic and English both. When I was 17 years old and shopping for a winter coat that I would take to college in New York, Jiddo took me to the stores in crowded downtown Beirut. I was 17, but he held my hand as we crossed the street. Every street. When I was 20 we travelled to the Cedars, where Khalil Gibran was born and where he wrote his most famous poems. Jiddo was beginning to suffer the onslaught of his cancer at the time, but he never had anything but Gibran on his mind that week.

Friends of ours have written to us from home asking whether it would be safer for us to bring Jiddo to Karachi during this especially painful time for him. It would, but he would never leave. He was a young man when he fought in the war of independence against the French, joining the youth of Lebanon who had had enough of France’s outdated colonialism. He was born here, his children were born here, and he would never agree to the idea of fleeing, especially not now. Five hundred thousand people have already been forced to leave their homes and become refugees in foreign lands and over 300 civilians have been buried during this conflict; Jiddo refuses to add to either of those numbers. He will not run away and he continues to cling to life, with strength formidable for his age and illness.

Today I said goodbye to friends that are leaving the country, braving the uncertain roads through Syria. Israel bombarded the Baalbeck-Homs highway today, the last open road from Lebanon to Syria, leaving the country completely under siege. I said goodbye not knowing if I would see them again. Of course I would. You’re being dramatic I was told. But death is on everyone’s mind these days, not just mine.

New TV, a liberal news channel with the Lebanese flag placed underneath an upraised fist and the Arabic Sameedoon or standing strong as its logo was showing interviews with survivors of the assault in Dahiye, a poor suburb in Southern Beirut last night. We will stay here and die, said a young man but we will never let them occupy our country again. He was not a Hizbollah fighter or an official of any kind, just an ordinary Lebanese man, and his statement is reflective of the spirit of so many of his countrymen.

Later on Euro News, a French channel perhaps one of the few non-Arabic channels you find there was footage of the now commonplace destruction you see everywhere. Buildings leveled to the ground, mothers crying, and children injured and alone. But there was something else. Amidst all the rubble were a flock of white pigeons sitting on the upturned ruins of some family’s balcony. As confused as I was to see the birds sitting rather calmly in the middle of all that chaos, I was even more confused when I saw a man gingerly stepping over the rocks and the debris, a large steel cage in his hand, tiptoeing carefully towards the pigeons so that he could save them and place them in the cage, along with the yellow canaries he had already rescued.

So much of this war continues to confuse and surprise me. Friends of mine from all over the world have been frantically emailing me since Israel declared that they would turn the clock on Lebanon back 20 years, worried for my safety and begging me to find a way out. I’ve gotten emails from Israeli friends of mine in New York, from loved ones in Karachi, and from those across the border in Damascus. Go back to where it’s safe. read one email from New York, Go back to Karachi. This very friend, I might add, has refused to visit me for years on account of how dangerous and frightening Karachi sounded when viewed through the lens of Fox News pundits and the New York Times.

I wish I could tell everyone who emails that I am infinitely lucky. Lucky to be here with my family, to be stranded among such brave people, everyday people whose courage makes me feel like I am in the presence of giants. I am lucky for so much more. I am lucky not to have lost as the people of Tyre and Sidon have. I am lucky not to be among those 300. I am lucky that I don’t have to rely on CNN or the Wall Street Journal for information. I am lucky not to be 18 years old from Tel Aviv, about to be drafted into the IDF. I am lucky to witness the power of resistance and to have front row seats to the battle of David against the new Israeli Goliath. But most of all, I am lucky to have my Jiddo, who continues to show me Lebanon and the character of its people through his eyes.

Lebanon diary- Part 1- by Fatima Bhutto

BEIRUT: My friend Omar left Beirut two nights ago. His family’s house, close to the sea, was rocked by the sound of explosions and air strikes all night and all day long. After having to spend many an hour sheltered in their corridor, Omar and his family decided to head to the mountains for some respite from the war. And they’re the lucky ones.

Omar, whom I’ve known since kindergarten, just sent me the link to a website called www.fromisraeltolebanon.org. Its opening page reads From the Lebanese people to the so-called civilized West thank you. Underneath the caption comparing the 1941 Nazi blitz of London to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon are pictures of both cities. You can only tell them apart because the London photos are in black and white. That’s it. The civilized West are not the only ones the Lebanese people are thanking, they’re also thanking the Arab nations who apart from Syria have come out excitedly calling for Lebanon to cease and desist with this nonsense they call the resistance.

The website is obviously sensationalist. There is a photograph of young Israeli girls in Kiryat Shmona writing messages on Israeli rockets, and below it, a photograph of a young Lebanese girl killed by one of those very rockets. There are exclamation marks everywhere, the text is set in bright red, and there are so many haunting pictures of the children killed by Israel’s bombs and missiles. Within 24 hours of it appearing online, the website was shut down. Last night it was there, this afternoon it isn’t. Even the internet is picking sides. But the war of disinformation is one that also has to be fought by the Lebanese today.

Medical envoys are being targeted by Israel in the southern most part of the country, as are trucks transporting food and relief goods to the injured and displaced. The 270 murdered by Israeli warplanes and artillery are mostly civilians. Firefighters from areas like Jiyyeh and Dahiye are being forced to ask local residents if they might have any water to spare, because you see, they just don’t have enough.

And all organizations like Human Rights Watch and the United Nations are interested in doing, it seems, is placating Israel. The UN has offered to set up a security zone in the far south, near the border with Israel replicating the set-up Israel had going until 2000 whereby they occupied Lebanon under the guise of patrolling a security zone. They’re sending envoys to the region who pose by the rubble of Beirut shaking their heads in horror and clucking their tongues in disbelief and then in the same breath call for Hezbollah to be disarmed. So that Lebanon can be left to fend for itself, since the Arab world has turned its back on them.

Don’t ask me what to do shrugged the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa (Egyptian). King Abdullah II (Jordanian) warned of the region being dragged into adventurism that does not serve Arab interests. Hold your breath, we’re not done yet. Saud al Faisal, his Excellency the Foreign Minister (Saudi Arabia) stepped in to condemn Hezbollah’s retaliation against mass Israeli attacks as irresponsible. Ah. So there we have it. The Axis of Acquiescence. Thanks to American petrodollars, the leaders of the Arab League speak a new language. Arab interests translates into whatever it is compatible with American interests; Donald Rumsfeld now sets the agenda and lets us know, along with the one dimensional help of Thomas Friedman, what it is the Arabs really want. Irresponsible now applies to the resistance movement, not the criminal actions of the Israeli state. And revolution unless dictated by Washington is adventurism.

However, even though the governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt are ever so ready to submit to the dictates of Tony Blair and George W Bush, their people are not. A woman journalist confronted Secretary Moussa at an Arab League press conference in Cairo when he stumbled into doubletalk about diplomacy and advocated a let’s just wait and see strategy. Diplomacy? she said, you’ve been talking diplomacy for 50 years. Why don’t you just use your oil already? Moussa giggled nervously. This was Cairo, journalists aren’t supposed to be able to ask questions like that anymore, a law had been passed only weeks before cracking down on the freedoms of the press. He ignored the question and pointed to another journalist, who stood up and began to shout at him. By the end of the press conference, Moussa and his Saudi counterpart weren’t being asked questions, they were being taken to task. They were berated over their lack of solidarity with the Lebanese people, over their lack of support to the resistance led by Hezbollah and the Palestinian people, and for having presided over the death of Arab unity.

Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General, spoke to the citizens of Mousse’s and al Feisal’s countries. I know that your governments are incapable of doing anything, he said, but you are concerned and should take a position over what is happening. And they did. Protests are taking place all over the Middle East. At a large demonstration in Damascus, the people and their leaders showed their solidarity with their neighbors and carried large Lebanese flags. Imagine, the red, white and green of the Cedars, held high in Syria a year after Syrian troops left Lebanon and the two countries entered a phase of particularly tense relations.

But it happened, and elsewhere too, in Tel Aviv for one. Funds are being set up to send monetary assistance to the Lebanese Red Cross and to the Lebanese people who are not fortunate enough to have off-shore bank accounts. Emails with links to local news sources are being sent and first hand accounts from the front line are being forwarded all around the world. Pictures of Karim Qobeisi, a two-year-old boy from Nabatieh who survived an Israeli explosion, are being seen. His face is covered in dried blood, somebody else’s perhaps, and his hand and elbow are in casts. He is being shown to those who insist that Israel’s right to self-defense is non-negotiable and who insist they are fighting terrorists.

The outside world has to know what is happening. They have to know that there is an unbelievable amount of children being killed every day. They have to know that while there are Lebanese bemoaning the Hezbollah and the closing of the summer sales, there are also those that are determined to fight back against Israeli aggression and claim the resistance movement as their own. They have to know that there is no such thing as we had no choice, not here, not for these people. They have to know that the violent and hyper paranoid Israeli military has been defeated before, and can be again.


21st July 2006:


P.S: First published in The News

Last speech of Mir Murtaza Bhutto

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Jr.

I don't know the details of this video. Marvi, Bezanjo, Zoya????? do comment

SZAB vows to sacrifies his children for Pakistan

The disappeared by By Fatima Bhutto

Who are the disappeared?

The first time I came into contact with an image of the disappeared was a year ago. My mother and I had gone to a rally being held near the Karachi Press Club. We had walked from Regal Chowk in a crowd of people and stood outside the Press Club to listen to the many speakers who had converged that day in protest against the city government's forced evictions. After everyone had spoken and the crowd began to disperse my mother's face turned towards the gates of the club. A young woman was sitting in front of a photograph, her fingers were tightly wrapped around the edges of the frame and her eyes had a distant, angry look to them. Her two children sat beside her and picked at the carpet they were sitting on. We went over to be with them. The woman's husband had been picked up in the middle of the night some months before. No one told his family where they were taking him or why. There was no warrant for his arrest; no charges had been filed against him. She had not seen her husband since.

A few days later we were at a Karachi stadium, not alas for sports, but to attend a series of talks set up by the World Social Forum, and it was there that we saw the faces of the disappeared once again. Relatives handed out photographs of loved ones snatched away by intelligence authorities, photocopied papers were passed around listing the details of many midnight abductions, and people sat in solidarity with those who lay in an unimaginably painful limbo -- not knowing whether to mourn the men they assumed were dead -- or to carry on clinging to the hope that they might still be alive.

Amnesty International, citing the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, says that while disappearances were relatively rare in Pakistan before 2001 -- the year the twin pantheons of American free trade were brought to the ground -- they have since become rampant, even outside of the 'war on terror' aegis. It has recently been reported that as many as 4,000 Pakistani citizens have disappeared under Pervez 'nobody-voted-for-me' Musharraf's government and are thought to have been illegally detained and tortured in secret prisons, packed off to Guantanamo Bay, or killed.

Disappearances are not unique to Pakistan, not at all. But we have finally caught up with the many, and may I add dictatorial regimes, around the world that have used this tactic against their own people to silence dissent, quell resistance, and crush 'anti-state' activity. It was mothers, old women, tired of waiting for their sons to return home, who had led the movement to uncover the truth behind disappearances in Argentina during the military junta that presided over 30,000 unlawful abductions in the late 1970s. In Chile, under the military government of Augusto Pinochet (who now lies in a Santiago hospital recuperating from a heart attack -- an organ many people assumed could never hurt him on account of its being wholly absent in his body before), 3,000 men and women have disappeared. The Gestapo dabbled in disappearances too, as has the CIA in the various countries it unpopularly lorded over for the better part of the twentieth century. And now the state of Pakistan can claim its own unknown victims.


They are Baloch nationalists, Sindhi activists, professors, labour leaders, and political workers. They are fathers and sons. But they are denied even their names and identities as their cases are often unkindly reported in the media with the importance of ticker news 'Man, 48-years-old, suspected of having links with terror organisations reported missing'. It just scrolls by. Before you have a chance to register the information, you've already missed it.

Why had they been taken? What were their crimes?

Distributing illicit pamphlets? Speaking out against the state? We're never told. That is part of the secret. That is part of why the disappeared can never be seen again. But because of the eerie and almost daily sight of women holding up photographs at public gatherings and outside government plazas and offices, at least we have seen the faces of the disappeared -- proof that they once existed, even if they will never again be found.

Why disappearances in particular?

Because with the absence of a body and no press conference listing the crimes of the accused to contend with, the state is officially distanced from any acts of violence or barbarism. They cannot be held accountable for what you never saw; silence and invisibility greatly benefits the brutality of the state. It is a terror enacted wholeheartedly on the populace's imagination -- as opposed to their bodies. You could have disappeared and no one would ever know what happened to you; your guilt presupposed over your innocence without having been tried in a court of law, condemned to a life -- or death -- forever unseen and unsung.

This week the government, for so long playing a tedious game of see no evil/hear no evil, has finally outed itself. Last Saturday the deputy attorney-general admitted that the whereabouts of 20 men picked up by intelligence agencies were known to the government. A case registered with the Chief Justice of Pakistan has forced an end to the authority's silence. On Monday seven other men who had disappeared two years ago were finally released, no charges had been proven against them. Four other men were also 'found' and returned to their homes in Swat, Kohat, and Hazara. Oops! Just kidding! They weren't Al Qaeda operatives after all, sorry about that whole hide and seek thing, here are your family members back -- You're welcome! The Supreme Court didn't find this charade funny and following this week's unexpected developments in justice for the disappeared is set to take up several other cases detailing illegal abductions filed by relatives of Pakistan's many missing men.

Today is international human rights day. While I have problems celebrating these sorts of days -- shouldn't every day be international human rights day? -- the time is upon us to mark this occasion in a meaningful and powerful manner. Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean playwright and poet, writing on the thousands of disappearances in his country said "distance has become necessary to kill comfortably, to erase that killing before it happened and after it happened. So it can happen again". Our passivity to the injustices being perpetrated against our society only makes killers more comfortable.

Do something different today, be active, be enraged. Visit the Asian Human Rights Commission website at www.ahrchk.net and read their latest release on disappearances in Pakistan. The AHRC have demanded a commission be set up to investigate illegal abductions and appeals to "all concerned people, including journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers and relatives of victims, to become actively involved in pressing the government to see such a commission established and the persistent abductions and killings brought to an end at once". They're speaking to you. Sign up today and raise your voice in solidarity with the thousands of disappeared all over our country.

CNN Talk Asia Interview pictures

CNN Talk Asia Part 3

CNN Talk Asia- Part 2

CNN Talk Asia- Part 1

Fatima Bhutto exposing election rigging;2008

Mashal bardar jaloos on 19 sep from Al-Murtaza larkana 2008

The Pink City by Fatima Bhutto

Asalam alaikum, Namaste, welcome to the Pink City' came the voice on the phone line. I had traveled to Jaipur, the heart of Rajasthan in India, to speak at a literary festival and after a long drive from Delhi I was met by a kind and welcoming voice.

I had gone to India to speak on Pakistan and to be a conduit for a message other than what we see reported on our country every day -- hate. I wanted to speak for what a majority of Pakistanis truly want, inside our borders and outside, peace.

Our countries, India and Pakistan, are sister nations. We are one half of each genetically and physically. We have, like siblings, more in common than we appreciate and our differences, though vast, are not impossible to overcome. They are barely visible.

In Pakistan, we greet brothers with a hand on the heart or a palm cupped towards to sky. 'Adab' we say, respect. Or salam, peace. In India, friends and strangers alike are met with two hands pressed together at the base of the heart. Namaste in Sanskrit, a joining of the fingers and skin, recognizes a counter divine. I bow to you it means.

The first time I visited India as an adult, I was with one of my best friends Sabeen. Sabeen is as close to a sister as I could get. We lost our fathers together and we became friends through a shared pain and burning desire to see justice in our lifetimes. It's fitting that we travelled to India two years ago. Sabeen is the ultimate Bollywood devotee. She is not afraid to admit it either. I'm wobbly on that front. I'm difficult and stubborn, Sabeen is temperate and forgiving. I'm veg, she's non-veg. You get my point here. It was in the passion of bargaining for some trinket or the other that Sabeen huffed at a merchant and said 'Come on bhai, we're from Pakistan'. I stared at her in horror. Why was she trying to get us maimed? I shot her angry eyes and clenched my face; surely she would realize that flouting our Pakistani-ness might not be the best way to endear us to our neighbours across the border. I was so wrong. The minute our nationality, our connection, had been revealed the shopkeeper fell over with friendship. He waived the price altogether. It was a small token, but it was as you do with siblings. 'Welcome' he said to us. 'I have family in Karachi' he said next.

There are plenty of tales just like this. When the 2005 earthquake ravaged much of our Northern regions, we were not the only ones to be hit; there were victims on the Indian side too. The Pakistan India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy, whose founding members include Dr Mubashir Hasan, a pioneer and Pakistani treasure, and the brave civil rights activist and journalist Teesta Setalvad initiated joint relief. The Pakistan chapter sent relief aid to the Indian victims of the quake and the Indians sent relief to our devastated and destroyed. The forum is a joining of people's movements, of their aspirations and dreams for a peaceful future between our two countries. They have come together on resolutions ranging from demilitarization, Kashmir, and religious intolerance in both countries. Speaking in the early weeks of 2004, Dr Mubashir Hasan outlined fourteen steps for peace the forum advocated to Islamabad and New Delhi:

'Commit to partnership, equality and mutual respect'

'Commit to resolving political and other differences through peaceful and democratic means'

'Recognize the difficulty of modifying historical and public stances on the issue. Understand the imperative of finding and acceptable solutions…strive towards reconciliation and rapprochement'

There is no reconciliation without truth (that's a direct note to you venal supporters of the mercenary National Reconciliation Ordinance). And here it is -- there is more fortune in peace between our two countries than war will ever bring us. We must build bridges between our people, not bombs.

On the drive from Delhi to Jaipur, the only thing that broke the interminable voyage were fields of sarson, yellow buds alive with colour, just like we have in Lahore. Papaya plantations marked a patch of land between the green and yellow of the grassland. I thought of Sindh's mangoes. I have a sweet tooth myself. India's batsmen, Pakistan's bowlers -- can you think of a mightier team? Take that, West Indies.

I was accompanied on this most recent trip by another dear friend, Laleh -- you may remember her as the Indian who shopped quite liberally on a road trip through the interior of Sindh. I ate Rajasthani thali with Laleh and felt the insides of my head sear with heat from the pepper of the food. We travelled by taxi in the day and passed on one side the pink stucco bricks of Rajput palaces and on the other a crimson red communist flag, sickle and cell flapping in the wind at a traffic light. We didn't compete over our countries, playing the usual one-upmanship of nation states; instead we traded stories both familiar and unusual about our two homes. I told Laleh about Kot Diji, the fort we had missed on her last trip to Pakistan, and she told me about the Ajanta Alora Caves, the site we could visit on my next trip to her country.

In all journeys away from our loved ones we discover certain truths. I love Pakistan. I am proud to be a citizen of this country and to be counted among the millions who call this home. That is not my truth, that I've always known. On my last night in the pink city, I was watching television. The US Secretary of Defence was ready to send ground troops into Pakistan the headline blared. At that point, our differences became pointless. It was no longer us against each other; there were larger threats now. Siblings, though stymied by rivalries at times and shadowed by each other's ghosts, are still siblings. They have to protect each other in order to survive. We can't help our pasts, but we have an amazing opportunity to push for radical change in our futures.



Originally published in The Daily News.

Ghinwa & Fatima Bhutto's Birthday Celebration; 2008