Monday, September 24, 2012

Reassessing the Afghanistan Crisis

Time to be honest about Afghanistan
More than 50 US and British soldiers have been killed by their Afghan partners this year. The attacks have been described as Taliban infiltration of the police, which could be addressed by better vetting. But the very words “Taliban”, “police”, and “vetting” are misleading.

Insofar as it is possible to understand the motives of the attackers (almost all are killed immediately) it seems that only a quarter have any connection to the Taliban. The “police” in question are a hastily formed, poorly trained militia. Ninety-two out of 100 recruits in a Helmand unit I visited last year were unable to write their own name, or recognise numbers up to 10. Their five weeks of training amounted to little more than weapons-firing and basic literacy. Thirty per cent of recruits deserted that year. With up to 10,000 villagers recruited in a month, “vetting” was not a serious option.
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This gap between the language of policy makers and the reality is typical. It is time to be honest about Afghanistan: we face a desperate situation and an intolerable choice.

If the US, Britain and their allies leave Afghanistan, there will be chaos and perhaps civil war. The economy will falter and the Afghan government will probably be unable to command the loyalty or support of its people. The Taliban could significantly strengthen their position in the south and east, and attack other areas. Powerful men, gorged on foreign money, extravagantly armed and connected to the deepest veins of corruption and gangsterism, will flex their muscles. For all these reasons departure will feel – rightly – like a betrayal of Afghans and of the soldiers who have died.

But keeping foreign troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 will not secure the country’s future either. Every year since 2004, generals and politicians have acknowledged a disastrous situation, produced a new strategy and demanded new resources. They have tried “ink-spots” and “development zones”; counterinsurgency and nation-building; partnering and mentoring; military surges, civilian surges and reconciliation. Generals and ministers called 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 “decisive” years in Afghanistan. None was. None will be.

We may wonder why politicians and soldiers have insisted for so long that things are improving. We have been isolated from Afghan reality, and obsessed with misleading jargon. But it is not all the west’s fault. Afghanistan is poor, fragmented and traumatised; and blame should also be put on the Afghan government and on neighbours such as Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of brains and hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested over a decade in understanding failure, without overcoming it. The culture and behaviour of foreign troops, diplomats, Afghans, the Kabul government and Pakistan are not likely to change in the next two years. What we have seen is roughly what we will get.

For complete article, click here

Future of the U.S. - Muslim Relations ?

U.S.-Muslim Relations: The Second Coming?
By Mohsin Mohi-ud din, Huffington Post, September 21, 2012

In the aftermath of the tragic attack of the US Embassy in Libya that claimed several US diplomats' lives, American flags burn across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, in over 12 countries. Many non-Muslim Americans are asking themselves: "why are they so enraged about an amateur film?; or, "why do they hate us?" The protests are no longer about the film. Increasingly, the public displays of anti-Americanism today reflect the state of affairs between the US and the 'Muslim world'.

Of the non-Muslims in the West, 58% consider Muslims fanatical and a median of 50% believe Muslims are violent. According to Pew Research surveys from 2011, median percentages of Muslims who identify the U.S. and Europe as violent, greedy, or immoral, is above 50%. On these facts, the ideological divide between the Muslim and Western world is a matter of concern to both U.S. public diplomacy and for the emerging democracies of the Middle East and North Africa.
With regards to the current crisis sweeping the Middle East and boxing with America's diplomacy, there are four important concepts to keep in mind.

First, the violent attacks on US embassies are promoted by, if not entirely designed by, extremist networks seeking to weaken the momentum of Arab civil society, who have bravely lead the calls for change across the region. Extremists were sidelined in 2011. With their leadership lost, terrorist and extremist networks are ready to destabilize their communities and social and political gains by emerging democracies. With inconsistent funds and no central leadership, the physical terrorism of the last decade increasingly is taking a constructivist turn. The extremist networks of today seek to impose cultural unity via the ideological fuel of existing trust deficits between America and Muslim majority societies. To this end, the reality of emerging networks of Islamophobia in the US have become the new tool of ideological terrorist for rapid destabilization across the Middle East.

For complete article, click here

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Prophet Mohammad's Charter of Privileges to Christians

Prophet Mohammad's Letter to the Monks of Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai

HISTORICAL CONTEXT:

In 628 AD, a delegation from St. Catherine’s Monastery visited Prophet Muhammed and requested for protection. The Prophet responded by granting them a charter of rights - copied below. St. Catherine’s Monastery is located at the foot of Mt. Sinai and is the world’s oldest monastery. It possesses a huge collection of Christian manuscripts, second only to the Vatican, and is a world heritage site. The original letter was taken away in 1517 by the Turkish Sultan Selim I and is now in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, but the sultan gave the monks a copy of it and sanctioned its terms.

TEXT:

This is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them.

Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by God! I hold out against anything that displeases them.

No compulsion is to be on them. Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries. No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims' houses.

Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God's covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate.

No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight. The Muslims are to fight for them. If a female Christian is married to a Muslim, it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray. Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants.

No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world)."


ORIGINAL




For reference, see:
Prophet Mohammad's Promise to Christians by Professor Muqtedar Khan: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=36388
Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies: http://www.islamic-study.org/saint_catherine_monastery.htm
YouTube clip of this historical document: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0SsRmC6O5k
'Splendor in the Sinai' - A Research paper on the authenticity of the document:

Monday, September 10, 2012

Pankaj Mishra on 'The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia'


Interview: Pankaj Mishra's Eye-Opening Asian Perspective on Modern History
by Nadia Rasul, Asia Society, September 5th, 2012 

Versatile Indian critic and journalist Pankaj Mishra expands his portfolio significantly with his latest book,From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, a wide-ranging and frequently pugnacious history of the intellectual currents underpinning nationalist political movements in China, Egypt, Japan, India, Iran, Turkey, Vietnam and the rest of Asia from the late 1800s through the present day.
From the Ruins of Empire begins with the Japanese victory over the Russian navy in 1905, which Mishra considers a turning point in the history of modern world, one whose ramifications echoed throughout Asia and the Middle East. Russia's defeat, writes Mishra, proved to the subjugated peoples of the Middle East and Asia that the Western colonial powers were not invincible. From there, Mishra gives an alternative perspective on the making of the modern world through the intellectual and political journeys of three itinerant Asian scholars: the Persian Jamal al-Din al-AfghaniLiang Qichao from China andRabindranath Tagore from India.
Published this week by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States, the book highlights a variety of Asian responses to Western imperialism, ranging from the idea that Asia's subjugated peoples could be powerful again if they held true to their religious and cultural traditions to a belief in radically changing the old ways of thinking. As the book's latter pages make clear, these diverse anti-colonial responses spanning the past two centuries continue to shape contemporary changes in power dynamics throughout the Middle East and Asia.
frequent presence at Asia Society events, Mishra will discuss his new book at Asia Society Texas Center in Houston on September 26 and at Asia Society Northern California in San Francisco on October 2. Mishra responded to Asia Blog's questions via email from London.
What motivated you to write an Asian perspective on recent history? Is there still a need, in 2012, to counter a dominant Western narrative of modernity?
It's not just an intellectual need. You only have to look at the bewildering transformations in the non-West today to realise they don't conform to a Western sense of the past or the future or meet Western expectations as reflected in newspaper commentary and foreign-policymaking of the last two decades. History has not ended, as was widely assumed after the collapse of communism. And globalization has not led to a New World Order organized around Western-style capitalism and democracy.
Parties with an explicitly Islamic orientation run Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia; they remain popular in large parts of the Muslim world; the extremist Taliban are making a comeback in Afghanistan. The Chinese have achieved some astounding economic growth through state capitalism. India, which is often showcased as a Western-style democracy in Asia, is facing huge challenges of socioeconomic unrest and religious-ethnic secessionism. There has never been a greater need for multiple perspectives on global history — an alternative view to the conventional and narcissistic one created by Western interests, concerns and preoccupations.
You focus on two intellectuals who are less well known in the West, the Persian Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and China's Liang Qichao. How did you first become acquainted with these two, and at what point did you know you wanted to develop the book around them?
I had come across these two in various books over the years, but it was only when I started reading monographs about them that I realized they offered a unique perspective on their worlds — those of late 19th-century- and early-20th-century China and the Muslim world. These were unknown not only in the West, where people like Gandhi, Ataturk and Mao Zedong are much better known, but also to those of us in Asia who had grown up on nationalist histories.
Were the anti-Western ideas of these intellectuals always well received within Asia itself?
They were not anti-Western in a parochial sense. Both these thinkers and Tagore stressed the great need to learn from the West and were full of admiration for its manifold achievements in the arts and sciences. What they protested against was the idea of coercion built into Western imperialism and capitalism. What they were unwilling to do is overhaul and upend their societies according to Western dictates, or do so in order to match the specifications of their more Westernized colleagues who, while distrusting and despising the West, wanted to borrow the secrets of Western power — heavily armed and homogenous nation-states, for example. So they had to enter very fraught debates within their own societies about how to respond to the power of the West.
You quote Jamal al-Din al-Afghani's 1879 speech in Alexandria where he argues that colonized peoples will find it "…impossible to emerge from stupidity, from the prison of humiliation and distress, and from the depths of darkness and ignominy as long as women are deprived of rights." Do we know if al-Afghani returned to or developed this theme later in his career? Was it taken up by any of the succeeding thinkers he influenced?
Yes, this was a very important strand in the thinking of almost all the major Chinese, Muslim and Indian thinkers of the time. It was a very important part of their preoccupation with creating a self-aware and productive citizenry — one that could engage in a collective endeavor of self-strengthening against the West. And this had important ramifications. The Chinese Nationalists and Communists empowered women and campaigned against many oppressive practices such as foot-binding. Women participated in large numbers in the anti-British Egyptian revolution of 1919.
For complete article, click here