Observations at the Karachi Marriott

I was in Karachi just before New Year's Eve and I wrote this piece as an experiment, to see what I could write, after arriving in a city I had been away from for a long period.

When I recently arrived for a break from studies abroad, a group of us decided we should eat out. Since one of our number just had her birthday, days before I arrived, it was decided that a suitable place needed to be found. The decision was made to choose the Marriott, a place with many wonderful memories. From milky Rooh Afza iftars, to a bookstore that monthly would stock my childhood library for a few years, the Marriott seemed like a nice place.

And so we drove there under the darkening evening to a place we considered we knew. As the barriers approached, it seemed like a usual enough sight, but the twists and turns once we crossed the crash beam barrier were a minor adventure all to themselves. We went through one lane, twisted in a u-turn and then entered the parking lot. All the while we passed over at least three speed bumps, saw the car checked by a sniffer dog at the lesser barrier, merely a rope strung between two ends of the lane, themselves bordered by blast walls. It was interesting.

Parking the car, we got out and walked towards what was clearly an outer security room. The X-ray machine into which people had to drop their purses, briefcases, handbags, was worthy of any international airport. Passing through the metal detector, I was fortunate enough to not set it off and was spared a wave with the wand. Our audience with this semi-effective show of security theatre complete, we were cleared to walk the rest of the way to Marriott. That was at least a pleasant experience, a return to the Marriott of half a decade ago; when I had been under order to go to a seminar chaired, by a person who I think was a closet ex-Jihadi. This time the run in with religion in the interior of the Marriott was even stranger. There were two ladies standing as greeters. One was a lady in a respectable pantsuit, and I must commend Pakistan, or at least its major cities for now tolerating adult women who may wish to wear jeans. I guess a country’s beating hand can only harm so many women before it tires out. The other lady was a display of corporate religious confusion. Like a caricature from Arabian Nights, she had a hijab on that tightly covered her ears and hair, leaving her face and neck uncovered, which I think goes against Muslim regulations, since she didn’t have a chador wrapped on. However from the waist down she had a flowing smock in peach and the colours of the rainbow draped on. It looked like something a Hollywood costumer would dream up for a female character on 1001 Arabian Nights, crossed with whatever monstrosity a repressive Gulf Monarchy would toss out trying to look “modest but modern”.

It wasn’t the religious and clothing disaster, but rather the display of confused religious appeasement by the Marriott that looked strange to me. Here was a hotel that had instituted a minor labyrinth of security procedures that its customers had to enter, and simultaneously to protect the Marriott from attack by religious madmen, had one of its most famous branches attacked and destroyed by religious lunatics, and if we weren’t all used to so much security theatre by now, we would find the experience degrading. Yet to go to such lengths of behaviour to find one normal lady greeter, and one dressed to “appease” what should be clear by now is a bottomless pit of religious demands, is breathtaking as a corporate policy. I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that a literal bastion of the Pakistani elite, which has constituted fortress style defences to keep an enemy out, would still throw sops to that enemy in a confused attempt to maybe ideologically buy it off. Whilst protecting oneself from religious madmen, why not at least try not to care what they think about you, since they do seem determined to bump your hotel and its staff off.

After observing this weird display of confused religiosity at the door, the rest of the Marriott thankfully looked the same as I had seen it in the past two decades.

There was the usual reception area and its restaurant, with the lobby musician singing quite sweetly to the crowd. We passed by the bookstore, which was closed since it was after its hours. We walked to the restaurant, were seated and served. One must commend the waiters for their attentiveness to the guests and the food was scrumptious. One cannot be as effusive about some of the guests, as one particular gentleman on his phone seemed to loudly want the entire restaurant to know that he was making a VERY IMPORTANT deal. A teenage couple seemed to be sitting quite bored at their separate seats, obviously there unaccompanied, making one wish that I had the resources and initiative to take a date as a teenager to the Karachi Marriott.

We had our dinner, paid and headed for the exit, stopping for a group photo in the lobby. At that time we saw entering the building, one more display of weird religiosity. With a white flowing gown, a head covered with a hijab so tightly you could bounce a coin of it, and arms and chest covered tightly in bright white cloth. With the flowing gown nearly a cape, she looked like a villain from the later Thundercats. So there was good reason for the Marriott to appeal to the religiously confused segment of the elite.

This whole cycle of supply and demand of religious pretension, especially amongst the Pakistani elite might be part of the problem for the baseline existence, tolerance or acquiescence to religious terror. And when I walked out of the lobby I was greeted by the sight of the huge mosque that stands in front of the Marriott. The black comedy of its placement was darkly ironic. Definitely that outsize and very obvious mosque had been put up as some sort of sop or appeasement to religious irrationalism. Fat lot of good that did the Marriott people with their Islamabad branch destroyed, their parking lot turned into a fort’s maze and even the public display of their hotel front’s Bauhaus architecture blocked.

Appeasing irrational religious urges does not seem to help much in cooling that irrationality or burning it out. It seems particularly pointless when the religious irrationality is melded to elite opinion, especially an elite that is targeted for assassination or elimination by religious revolutionary groups as stated by Al Qaeda and its fans within Pakistan. And no amount of kowtowing to religious strictures can protect someone from being a victim of terrorism if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s best to dispense with ornamental religiosity when everyone has been a target.

Adding Iblees, A Tale By A Takhalus & A Liberal Fascist Beghairat Mind

Can't fault them for original names can we? Iblees has the shortest, and of course it means Satan ;-) But Haseeb Asif has one of the funniest blogs all around; a blog that I've even compared to Salman Rushdie in his more wittier incarnations. You need to check it out.

A Tale By A Takhalus is run by a well known Pakistani Pukhtun twitter personality Takhalus. His knowledge of Pukhtunkhwa and its issues even takes Karachi exceptionalism into account, and his blog shows a willingness to teach even basic knowledge of Pukhtun issues, where it may be lacking in the readership.

Last is the now famous blogger for the Express Tribune, Syed Nadir El Edroos. Also known as Needroos, Nadir's knowledge of economics is especially relevant in his analysis of the issues that Pakistan faces and is always welcome in a journalistic world where Pakistanis, especially those on the right, seem to demonstrate either a lack of economic knowledge, or the most rudimentary understanding of it. The name's quite nice as well.

Wikileaks Assessments of Pakistan's Nukes

If anybody is interested, the internal wikileaked assessment on Pakistan's nukes is misleading, yes we likely do have 130,000 people working in the Nukes complex, but for the last 3 years I was hearing that we had 60,000~70,000 people deputed towards the security of those nukes. So of those 130,000 people, 60K to 70K are for protection, the other 60K to 70K are nuclear weapons technologists.

K = 1,000. If you didn't know.

Think Tanks Vs Universities - I Always Thought That Think Tanks Were Easier to Engage With Since High School

And university (getting in, staying in) was a right royal pain in the ass. But there was a reason. The Universities are ancient institutions with ancient and deeply rigorous standards. They have to be, to justify the insane quantities of governmental subsidisation all of them undergo. So they're rigorous to the point of driving us shortcut looking Pakistanis, insane. Hell, that's why we overthrow dictatorships (or try to). Democracy is safer, boring but less rigorous than the education the IMF backed technocratic suckups surrounding any dictator, went through. In Pakistan, the equivalent of serving corporate interests at this time would be serving the Pakistan Military`s (corporate) interest. Stupid idea.

But back to think tanks. They serve corporate interests and are endowed by private or corporate funding. Universities at some level have to serve the public interest.

Interestingly, in the United Kingdom, there`s been a spate of fake universities, in fact fraudulent, private universities, so much so that the mouthpiece of middle classiya Pakistan, The News carried a piece on a clampdown on them. Now if I could find it.....

(Gratuitous ideological point: Maybe neo-liberalising everything was a bad idea? It let the fraudsters loose.)

I sort of realised how easy and simplistic the messages are, coming out of think tanks, in comparison to universities because:

1) The pronouncements of Think Tanks, always seemed a bit too simplistic.


2) Before the neo-liberal era, (the Bretton Woods era of the sixties and seventies, and yes Bretton Woods ideas are not completely applicable anymore) the main engine of ideas was the university, not the Think Tank.

After the rich started getting richer, in the late seventies onwards (not just in Pakistan, but across the West), Think Tanks seemed to rise to greater prominence than universities, as a sort of rival generator of ideas. This was driven home by this piece by Adam Curtis where he writes on the strange rise of this competitor to idea generation, the Think Tank. And considering the furore over the report published by the Jinnah Institute (the Think Tank parade/charade comes to Karachi) the history of the Think Tank, as an alternative to the University as idea generating machine. The university, in world politics, were so important to the world`s history during the sixties and seventies, that it echoes down to this day. Even in Pakistan.

But I always felt that serving the corporate interests was easy, and it is. It`s so easy, a high schooler could do it. With a high school education. And then earn a high schooler`s wages for life. Which is why kids are told by their parents; get lost to university and come back with good grades.

The rise of neo-liberalism was paralleled and aided by the rise of the Think Tank industry. Corporate power in the west, and military corporate power in Pakistan rose during the last thirty years, aided by a think tank industry acting as a handmaiden, and corporate ideological armourer for it. The power of think tanks has gotten so great, as idea based rivals to universities, that with New America Foundation and the Jinnah Institute, those trying to serve democracy and stop the excesses of corporate military and corporate power are finding themselves needing to recreate the tactics of their ideological opponents. To have ready made ideas lying around, except this time in service to democcracy.

Maybe universities and their students should consider stepping up on this matter. If they can stop worrying about the constant problem of jobs and grades that plagues them.

In the meantime, have a look at the strange rise, and rise of the Think Tank.

110,000+ Armed Security in a city of 18,000,000.

Credit to Najam Sethi who gave two vital pieces of information that were necessary at 5:11 and 8:14, at what ails the PPP-MQM relation, and the breakdown of armed forces in Karachi, respectively.

In this city: There are 20,000 Rangers based inside Karachi, 35,000 police for Karachi, plus 55-56,000 private security guards.

That's an armed force of ~ 110,000+ armed men for a city of 18,000,000.

They can be deployed and within 15 days hunt down and capture the men doing this.

However from there it gets complicated.

Many will be released back into the streets due to an obsolete jail system and an overloaded judiciary. But that's not even the real hindrance that is stopping the government from starting an op against these men.

The real issue is that government relies on the MQM for seats. Much of the MQM's cadre will be swept up if an impartial sweep is started throughout the city. The MQM cannot afford to have large numbers of its men thrown into prison.

Also in the sweep many ANP men, and possibly members of the People's Aman Committee will see its men tossed in the cooler. But their criminals are joined through alliances, not party membership. MQM has party people who are in trouble. And the government needs the MQM. There is a way out; if the pol's can negotiate with each other and decide how much of their cadre its acceptable must face prison time for crimes committed. Also if they negotiate down from the angry maximalist positions each has taken regarding local administration systems & unresolved power sharing agreements in Sindh and Karachi/Hyderabad, that might help.

The census is abut to start, and in relation to that there is something regarding the demarcation of electoral constituencies, and the politicians are antsy about that. Most And a final compromise on the negotiated end of the commisionerate system, the Musharraf era elected Nazim (mayor) system and what version a democratically elected government would want.

A final solution....my God....here's an outline. The politicians from the PPP, ANP & MQM, and I have to stress, it must be *THE* leading politicians of these parties, must sit down and find where they can agree on the Venn diagram of what kind of local government Karachi & Hyderabad (and in contrast the rest of Sindh) must have, what common minimum principles/numbers they can accept on the demarcation of electoral constituencies and most importantly, what proportion of their cadres are completely criminalised and need to be taken off the streets.

It is entirely up to our politicians to work this out. There is no Uncle Sam or General Kayani to hold their hands. They must realise that they cannot completely wipe any of the other two of the board, and for better or worse, everybody will have to live with each other. A path out of this bloody deadlock we are in, may appear if they can reach some sort of binding decision on how Karachi/Hyderabad should be governed and simultaneously, with the criminals taken off the streets.

The Best Chronology on Pakistani Violence from Partition to 2007...and my Response to It

Note: i'Ve basIcally beeN looking for something like this. A resource that pulls together all the various and DIsparate events of violence that Pakistan has suffered and perpetrated. This thematiC chronology of mAss violence goes beyond all the usual, easily available TImelines that exclusively fOcus on islamist violeNce. The ethnic violence perpetrated in Pakistan is a mythic chronicle to itself and deserves to be told. This is a great resource for it, describing all the violence that took place in chronological order, with all the players laid out, and the murder described, from the time of 1946-47 till when the "war on terror" in Pakistan ramped up in 2007, ending with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. There is a smorgasbord of violence to pull out and relate to in this chronologically arranged list of Pakistan's multiple conflicts. I pulled out the one that is clearly related to what is going on in Karachi; because well; I was there :-). You pull out and write about what you think relates to you.

I remember clearly, very clearly, because for some reason it stuck out in my mind that summer, or close to summer 1994, Karachi became insanely violent. You sometimes start questioning your own memory of when you are in your early years, attending Kindergarten, but dammit, my memory was right. Not out of any hazy compromise between my memory and that of the historical media consumed, but BECAUSE IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Knowledge of violence is prominent in memories leading to the summer of 1994, accompanied by the feeling of fear and uncertainty in the air, because IT DID HAPPEN, I didn't just imagine it as other people who can't remember what happened when they were 5, 6 or 7, either repress, pretend to forget or actually forget.

I Remember.

I Remember it was April ~ Spring 1994 When Violence Ramped Up in Karachi. I knew, for some reason, despite being a child then, and never seeing the exact days and attacks laid out, that April ~ Spring 1994 was when it happened.

The relevant section to be scrolled down to is:

"2.3 The MQM Versus the Pakistani State and the MQM-Haqiqi"

LOOK AT THE DATES:

1992; June 19 is listed as the date when:

"the Pakistani army intervened in a government-initiated military crack down code-named “Operation Clean-up”, allegedly in order to quell the chronic ethnic unrest in the province. Following the army operation, which resulted in a thousand of so-called terrorists and dacoits killed (Verkaaik, 2005.), a vendetta ensued between the two rival factions of the MQM. The MQM (A), whose leadership had to go underground, set about recovering by force its lost offices and the localities of Landhi and Korangi controlled by the MQM (H). It soon took the shape of a proxy war between semi-autonomous gangs trying to control small patches of the city and which lasted for months causing the death of many bystanders."

And then there is no entry for two years until suddenly......

APRIL 1994. The normal tick, tick, tick, of a few dead, then weeks of peace was blown to smithereens by a massive quantity of violence. And then the slide to hell began:

"1994; April 29 to May 5, The six-day insurgency: The MQM violently opposed the provincial government of Sindh as well as the federal government headed by the Sindhi leader of PPP, Benazir Bhutto. The MQM militants attacked more than 70 law enforcement agencies in the province and killed 32 people, mostly by sniper-firing (Haleem, 2003: 469). Till June, 62 policemen and more than 500 civilians were targeted (Haq, 1995: 1003)."

Long live memory and human experience. The direct way we learn.

A note of thanks to Shahreyar Mirza (twitter, tumblr) for finding the Chronology of Mass Violence & bringing it to our attention.

How To Publish a Hindu Newspaper in Muslim Pakistan

Just watch this please.

Here's the original source.

Here is Boing Boing's take on it.

I want to buy this man a USB stick.

Syed Saleem Shahzad. A Lookback.

Even though I disagreed with the guy, I bloody did not want him dead. Where does Al Qaeda end & the Pak Mil begin? RIP Syed Saleem Shahzad.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyTLW
TheseLongWars

This is what I wrote when I heard of Saleem Shahzad`s murder. We knew thanks to twitter that Mr Shahzad had been disappeared, but like many people we expected something like the Umar Cheema incident, where a reporter gets picked up, roughed up and released. Instead, we are confronted with the potential murder of Mr Saleem Shahzad at the hands of the intelligence services.

I may be saying potential, but that is what the news reports say. The opinion, rippling up and down the twittersphere, is that despite reporting on the intersection of Islamic militants and Pakistan's intelligence agencies, it is the latter part of the equation that has firmly done in Mr Syed Saleem Shahzad. Mr Shahzad's last piece, the first of a promised two parter, on the infiltration and presence of Al Qaeda cells in the Pakistan Navy, is likely what sealed Mr Shahzad's fate.

Mr Saleem Shahzad's name was likely one I had come across, as a hyperlinks would casually direct one to the Asia Times website over the last decade. And why wouldn't they? Before this current generation of journalists and bloggers, with their synthesis view of the War on Terror, growing up with it (seeing as we were just merely teens when 9/11 happened) Asia Times had a staff with multiple alternate ideologies running, right through the time of the Asian financial crises of 1997, when the print version of the newspaper folded and "Asia Times Online" took shape.

Mr Shahzad, along with Pepe Escobar, covered Pakistan from their own perspective for the early part of the last decade, whilst other voices also began rising to the surface.

However, as this new Pakistan focused journalism rose up, Mr Shahzad continued on the stories that were most attractive to eyeballs outside Pakistan, namely, the rise of Islamic extremists and their links within the Pakistan government and military. The new breed of Pakistanis journalist was more interested in what was payed to play by the domestic Pakistani consumer.

Mr Shahzad did not focus his stories intently on this "inside the loop" version of Pakistani news. He continued to focus on the line that was sold outside Pakistan, because let's face it, it effected those countries through violence; the continuous rise, and rise of Islamic extremism. And of course its murkier, and murkier connection with the Pakistani state.

This was no longer the open and shut training of Afghan Mujahideen in the eighties or of training Kashmiri guerrillas in the nineties. After 9/11, and in fact, after the airlift of evil, or as I call it, the airlift of buying General Musharraf credibility.

Parading the caught members of the airlift of evil would have been the easiest way to bring Pakistan to the reputational cul-de-sac it finds itself in, plus could have nipped the seeds even of the Taliban insurgency.

For God's sake, Pakistan AIR FORCE officers would have been taken as Prisoners of War inside Afghanistan in November 2001. I remember that time. It would be the current pressure Pakistan is facing, multiplied by a factor of ten or twenty. The Pakistan military, and General Musharraf should thank their lucky stars that President Bush and V.President Dick Cheney were incharge.

The thought of Pakistani Air Force officers being paraded around as POW's inside Afghanistan by the Americans in late 2001, would have bought the military to the DOMESTIC crisis point it faces right now within Pakistan; our soldiers being caught so closely in co-operation with the Taliban right after 9/11.

We were bought a good ten years.

The reason I bring the Airlift of Evil up, is that with the capture of Osama Bin Ladin a thousand yards from Kakul, a decade long obfuscation campaign has officially ended. The last ten years since 9/11 have been spent by ordinary citizens and reporters trying to decipher and cut through reams and reams and of bullshit spun by those at the top of multiple governmental heaps. Those would be the government heaps of the United States, and Pakistan. The Bush junta, and the Musharraf junta, constantly spinning a line of BS to keep people distracted from their own incompetenct complicities in crimes of commission over the last ten years.

To try and make sense of these problems, we the ordinary people were left with groups like Asia Times Online, and their ideologically charged reporters, such as Pepe Escobar, and the Urdu press influenced Syed Saleem Shahzad.

In those ten years, the Islamist virus entered Pakistan, mutated and turned in all different directions. Syed Saleem Shahzad remained focussed on it.

I first really took note of Saleem Shahzad's name when he appeared on an independent Canadian news program/Youtube channel called "The Real News". The Real News is known for having an independent bent, as it is lead by Paul Jay, an independent journalist and film producer, who's been running the Real News since the summer of 2007. I especially recall, "The Real News" introducing Beena Sarwar on film (this was the first time I had seen her on tv) in the time around the emergency and in the period leading immediately to what turned out to be the surprisingly independent February 2008 elections. Pepe Escobar was his regular international correspondent, and it is likely that he bought Saleem Shahzad in. When I first saw Saleem Shahzad on The Real News, I was not totally impressed with what I saw, but I had to admit that Mr Shahzad was somewhat on the right path. At that point, in and around the summer of 2007, the Musharraf regime was collapsing, and one was hoping that everything would be resolved with minimum bloodshed. That was not to happen.

During 2008, I ventured onto Asia Times Online, time and again, to try and make sense of the prevailing low level chaos that was ensuing. Even though I got some valuable editorial insight, the air of excessive speculation, and excessive reliance on ideology (an unreconstructed Marxism in the case of Pepe Escobar and prevalent ideological conservatism in the case of Saleem Shahzad and Spengler) was a bit of a turnoff for me. I read Asia Times on and off through 2008 and 2009, but came to feel they were not good for illumination on the development of Pakistan's democratic politics. Cyril Almeida lightly references this feature of Asia Times, when he describes Syed Saleem Shahzad's publisher and the last story that Mr Shahzad did that is likely the reason that got him killed:

Saleem was not mainstream media. He was committed to his work, yes; he knew well the contours of militancy in the region, yes; but he was not mainstream media. He traded in the currency of explosive revelations and, at least in the minds of editors and news directors of major media houses here, there was often that little bit of uncertainty surrounding the reporting.

His last piece was illustrative of this. That the PNS Mehran attack was facilitated by someone in uniform, retired or serving, seemed fairly clear to many. There had also been rumours for months about navy personnel picked up by intelligence agencies for links to jihadi groups, but the veil of secrecy was tight and veteran trackers of militancy had not got very far on the details.

Saleem’s last piece, though, was a narrative perfectly formed, all the pieces falling into place in a way most people familiar with such stuff would at least have raised an eyebrow at. The theory didn’t get much play locally or internationally and it would be fairly plausible to assume the second part of his two-part series would have been received with similarly cool interest.

After summarising the nature of Mr Shahzad's last story, and critically looking at the nature of his publisher, Cyril Almeida does turn to the very obvious facts of the present case:

So, we are left with the case of a journalist picked up from central Islamabad whose work had long since ceased to make waves in the media, and yet he was brutally tortured to death. That’s what makes the ‘why’ part so thoroughly unsettling, if not downright scary.

Cyril goes on to point out how now there will be a difficulty in determining what is going on in the further recesses of our deep state, a condition already difficult, exacerbated by this murder. The appropriate phrase is "chilling effect", but just the amount of outrage this murder has caused will lead many to question whether overt criticism of the military establishment can be stopped. The military establishment now knows that technologically, it is now difficult to stop people from overtly criticising it, however, the purpose Syed Saleem Shahzad's murder may serve may be to stop deep investigations of the deep state, those sort of attempts at understanding, where you are sometimes unsure whether you are speaking to a witness or a participant.

And that is what happened in the line of reporting Syed Saleem Shahzad was pursuing.

Here he is, on The Real News, on 20th May 2011, TWO DAYS BEFORE the attack on PNS Mehran, describing how there is a possibility of a mutiny brewing within the Pakistan military over the close co-operation with the United States. He had been tracking this in his news filings over arrests made in the Pakistan Navy of cells of Islamic extremists. Al Qaeda had threatened retaliation if those captured terrorists weren't released. That is why we had those bombings of Pakistan Navy buses.

Mutiny Inside the Pakistan Military

Much of what Saleem Shahzad said in this video is worth investigating. I don't have space to go into every salient thing he said, I would mention though, the fact that the ISI mis-reported to Musharraf who was behind the December 2003, completely fucking up relations between the Jihadis and the military (a month of rage, May 2004, was carried out in Karachi, attacking higher military leaders, possibly not unrelated to this) and General Kayani earned his chops, by actually being in charge of finding WHO tried to kill Musharraf in December 2003. Needless to say, Syed Saleem Shahzad, correctly predicted that there would be a partial mutiny inside the Pakistan military (it happened in the Navy, I think we may have to wait for the actual Army shoe to drop *shudder*) and just to add to the Saudi-Iran angle of them using Pakistan as a proxy battle ground, there is a LOT to be said for this, but just to blow your mind, here is a trailer with video of an Arab Sheikh handing out money to the families of kids who were used as camel jockeys in a Gulf Arab Emirate, on whom this is a documentary. The more important point is, here is a Gulf Sheikh, just randomly handing out money to a group of poor south Punjab Pakistanis.

If Pakistanis want to talk about sovereignty, they will also have to talk about how they are allowing all these countries to use their territory as a proxy battleground for all their stupid sectarian feuds. Saleem Shahzad's further points on the Taliban being stunned whilst simultaneously grieving for the loss of Bin Ladin are also valid assessments to make.

After the murder of Saleem Shahzad, from Pakistan's side, there has been loud anger, and a voicing of a desire for resistance and protest. Some of the responses have carried great personal steel, and resolve to not let matters continue in the way that they are. Others are not always too secure in this view.

Munizae Jahangir is right. This is a government that has been unable to even convict anybody for the murder of Benazir Bhutto. It was also interesting to see The Real News reference Asian Correspondent.

People will continue to speak against the excesses of the military establishment. But they are constantly unsure whether these criticisms or protestations will have much impact.

As for poor Syed Saleem Shahzad, he left a book. That was published just two weeks ago.

Called "Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11". I'm buying and reading it.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is survived by his three children and widow.

Adding my Twitter Account

As it has become obvious to everybody, I have a twitter account. Unfortunately, between that, work in real life, and an immense flood of news since 2011 began I've slightly neglected my blog. I think it's fair to add the twitter account to my blog, sot it's now there on the right, the These Long Wars twitter account. Now that they're linked together, I think I can find more motivation to update regularly. It was something I wanted to get to, but finding the widget was getting in the way. Twitter is useful.

Ted Rall Speaks to The Young Turks About the Rise of the Obamabots. It's Great When Stuff You Like Comes Together

I like Ted Rall. I also like the Young Turks. Its great when two things you like come together. The Young Turks are an independent news group from the United States, who started out from Youtube, talk radio and Air America and have expanded to the point where their founder Cenk Uygur (pronounced Jenk You-Gur) can now and then be seen on Dylan Ratigan's show.

Cenk is the one who interviews Ted and is the "Young Turk" who named and founded the show with his friend Ben Mankiwiecz. Mr Mankiewiecz is the son of a famous advisor to the Democratic party. The show, the Young Turks has it's own interesting take on Pakistan, which has now considerably changed and been updated with the capture of Osama Bin Ladin from right next to Kakul. I wanted to blog about The Young Turks and their take on Pakistan earlier, but I'll definitely do something on them at a later date. Cenk should consider having Mr Rall on MSNBC, where his views could be seen more favorably and disseminated more widely.

For now, please enjoy Mr Ted Rall's independent take on the Obama presidency, the political red lining that took place during the Bush years (that continued till three years back and could return again) and the rise of the Obama Bots.