The Great Debate UK
from Afghan Journal:
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and the enemy within
Steve Coll, the president of the New America Foundation and a South Asia expert, has raised the issue of the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons in the wake of the assassination of the governor of most populous Punjab state by one of his bodyguards. It's a question that comes up each time Pakistan is faced with a crisis whether it a major act of violence such as this or a political/economic meltdown or a sudden escalation of tensions with India obviously, but also the United States.
Pakistan's security establishment bristles at suggestions that it could be any less responsible than other states in defending its nuclear arsenal, and its leaders and experts have repeatedly said that the professional army is the ultimate guardian of its strategic assets.
But Coll in a blog at The New Yorker says at some stage in a domestic insurgency when your own people are fighting you, the lines between the guerrillas and the security forces often get blurred with dangerous consequences. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 incensed by her decision to send the Indian army into the holiest Sikh shrine to flush out militants a few months before.
The Pakistani police officer who killed governor Salman Taseer was similarly no Lee Harvey Oswald, but a regular government employee who was apparently angry over the governor's strident defence of a Christian woman convicted of blasphemy, a case that exposed deep rifts in Pakistani society. Coll writes :
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Pakistan and the narrative of shame
Manan Ahmed has a piece up at Chapati Mystery which should be essential reading for anyone interested in the current state of Pakistan and its prickly relations with the west, particularly with the United States.
Starting off with a re-reading of Salman Rushdie's "Shame" (one of those books that I expect many of us read in our youth without properly understanding) he returns to the original inspiration for the title - "Peccavi", Latin for "I have sinned." According to an apocryphal, yet widely believed, story of British imperial conquest, "Peccavi" is the message that General Charles Napier sent back to Calcutta when he conquered Sindh (nowadays one of the provinces of Pakistan) in the 19th century. He then discusses how the modern-day view of Pakistan is defined by shame, or by a perception which over-simplifies it to "Peccavistan".
