The Taliban’s unofficial newspaper, The Nation, has written an editorial today asking the military to surrender to Taliban but REAL Pakistani Nationalists want to FIGHT.

The article in today’s The Nation is called ‘A sinister enemy’ and indeed The Nation is a sinister enemy of Pakistan for what it writes.

In this backdrop, the straight option for the Pakistan Army is to give up its penchant for US military equipment and terminate the ongoing offensive.

Can you believe it??? The Nation is demanding that Pakistan Army give up. While The Nation is writing its surrender letter to Taliban, our brave soldiers are searching for troops that these very Taliban have kidnapped and are holding prisoner. The Nation would just give them up as dead.

But REAL Pakistani Nationalists will NEVER SURRENDER to these Talibans. Look at the new poll information that is reported in Dawn:

No Muslim country surveyed recorded majority support for suicide bombing, Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. In Pakistan, only ten per cent like Taliban and only 9 per cent support Al Qaeda.

As many as seventy per cent Pakistanis have unfavourable views of the Taliban and sixty-one per cent reject Al Qaeda openly.

Actually REAL Pakistani Nationalists do not want to give up American military support for surrender to Taliban.

It is not surprising that American cooperation with the Pakistani military is popular, given the confidence that Pakistanis have in it. As many as eighty-six per cent say the military is having a good influence on the country

So why The Nation wants to surrender? Because they are Taliban lovers, not Pakistanis.

http://realpaknationalists.com/

CAMP WILDERNESS, Afghanistan: Pakistani offensives against Taliban bastions have stemmed the flow of fighters into Afghanistan, according to a US general, but local officials want further action. Pakistan last year embarked on a series of ambitious offensives to evict the Taliban from their rugged and isolated northwest sanctuaries. The army went after fighters who swept through the Swat valley perilously close to the capital, moving on to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan heartland South Waziristan and other tribal districts that hug the Afghan border. “I think overall the effects that we see is that it is putting a strain on our common enemy,” said Major General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in eastern Afghanistan. “Now it’s actually fighting in two directions… We know that they are having more difficulty with their supplies, their finances, their leadership.” The US general told AFP on a visit to ISAF’s Camp Wilderness, deep in the mountains of eastern Paktya province, that Pakistan’s military push was most effective when coupled with Nato action over the border. “There was a period of time in summer where the cross-border activity was actually lower than it had been in the last two years,” he said. “So, yes, you can see the effects of it. It has decreased the cross border activity for the period of time that we are working together.” Militant training camps and safehouses in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt mushroomed after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan sent Afghan Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other Islamist fighters flooding into the region in late 2001. But critics say Islamabad is picking and choosing which groups to pursue, with little effect on the nearly nine-year Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. “Those operations are not effective for Afghanistan,” said Abdul Qayum Katawazy, governor of Afghanistan’s Paktika province, which borders North and South Waziristan and southwest Baluchistan in Pakistan. “The Pakistani military are fighting those Taliban that are against the Pakistan government,” said Katawazy. They do not want to fight militants who are against the Afghan government and coalition forces but who do not oppose the Pakistani authorities, he added. Brigadier General Mohammad Asrar Aqdas, commander of the Afghan army in Khost province, which borders Pakistan’s North Waziristan and Khurram tribal districts, praised the operations but said he also saw few benefits. “We haven’t felt any positive effect from the operations yet. This operation was not in all of Waziristan and all the insurgent camps,” he said. Washington has criticised Islamabad for targeting only the militants that attack within Pakistan while taking a softer stance on groups using their territory to target foreign soldiers over the border. Pakistani officials bristle at any suggestion that they are not doing enough, when thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed in the military assaults and Taliban attacks. While the blame game rages on, US military officials say fighters continue to move back and forth over the two countries’ porous border, either to attack foreign troops or travel on elsewhere. US troops stationed at Camp Deysie just south of Camp Wilderness – a key militant infiltration route from Pakistan to the big Afghan cities – are preparing for more attacks as winter snows melt on the frontier mountains. In the nearby Ibrahim Khel village, locals are deeply wary of their neighbour’s intentions, fuelled by decades of conflict and mistrust. “If the military of Pakistan want to remove the Taliban, they can do it in one month, but they don’t want to do that,” said the hamlet’s education director, Jawaz Khan.

… But we are nowhere near that right now. Gen. Kayani certainly has no such thing in mind according to people who have met him.

By AHMED QURAISHI

Monday, 15 February 2010.

WWW.PAKNATIONALISTS.COM

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—”This was my first interaction with the soldier who commands the seventh largest military force on the face of the planet.”

With this catchy line, Dr. Farrukh Saleem began his brief and fascinating account of a meeting with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

On Feb. 10, 2010, Gen. Kayani met a group of Pakistani commentators and security analysts. The briefing was the third since the military began asserting Pakistan’s legitimate security and strategic interests in Afghanistan and the region.

On January 28 and 29, Gen. Kayani told NATO commanders in Brussels that Pakistan’s legitimate security interests will have to be respected.

Earlier, he told Adm. Mike Mullen, Gen. David Petraeus, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal that instead of worrying about appeasing India, Washington better start paying attention to Pakistan.

This is a major development in the eight-year US-led war in Afghanistan.

At one point, Mr. Saleem makes an interesting observation about Gen. Kayani’s cool demeanor.

“Yes, he has the capacity for abstract thought, cold rationality and coarse creativity – all in one,” he says. “And yet he inhales reconstituted tobacco. Yes, he uses a filter and a cigarette holder. Yes, he never takes deep puffs and, yes, he only consumes half a cigarette at a time.”

At another point, Mr. Saleem makes an interesting use of pun. Talking about the general’s smoking habits, he says the following: ‘He knows that some of the things that he is doing are wrong, but still won’t give them up.’

Probably it’s a polite reference to the conspiracy theories that fill the US and British media, or the Am-Brit media, about Pakistan, its military and its intelligence agencies. So some skepticism is natural.

But the best part of his column in The News International was this concluding paragraph:

“I can tell you that I came back both proud but with a painful realisation; proud knowing that our legions are being led by strategic minds and sad to have discovered the much too visible an intellectual gap between our top political brains in Islamabad and our strategic minds at work in Rawalpindi. And what does he think about our politicians? When it’s breezy, hit it easy.

Could it be that the army rules not through the barrel of a gun but because of their intellectual superiority? Could it be that the army rules because our politicians have failed to institutionalize politics? Could it be that the army rules because our political parties do not transcend individual human intentions? Could it be that the army rules because it has structures, mechanisms of social order along with strategic thinking?”

In essence, Mr. Saleem hit at the core reason why the Pakistani military intervenes every time politicians lead the nation to a dead end.

Most importantly, the above reasoning answers even a more important question: Why the military mounts successful interventions and why the politicians can’t muster the moral authority to resist them.

Pakistani politicians remain a chaotic, undisciplined and shortsighted bunch. Their parties are messy and loose groupings of special interests in their crudest form. Almost all of them have lifetime leaders who never give way to fresh blood. And they are not public institutions but private, family-owned affairs.

Since the return to democracy in Pakistan in February 2008, hardly any of the parties in government or opposition devoted any high-level party meetings to education, health, culture and sports. None of them has plans in place for running the country. Worse, none has any vision.

The best place in Islamabad these days to see this mess in action is the National Defense University. Since 2002, the NDU has been holding the annual National Security Workshop. This is a unique 6-week course. It brings together politicians, military officers, businessmen, lawyers, social activists and journalists. The group is taken through a virtual tour into the corridors of strategic decision making in Pakistan. The course ends with a weeklong exercise that sees the class divided into a Pakistani government and a shadow government, complete with their own secretariat and staff. On the last day, the two governments frame and deliver a policy plan to deal with a hypothetical strategic crisis confronting Pakistan. The plan has domestic, military and foreign policy components. Often, senior commanders from Pakistani military’s General Headquarters attend the last day’s presentations.

NDU officials, both civilian and military, have one observation that has been constant during the past eight years of national security workshops: Military officers, businessmen, social activists and journalists often show the best performance. Politicians come last. Most can’t even draft a single-page policy brief, or work with a PowerPoint presentation.

In essence, middle class Pakistanis – military officers, businessmen, social activists and journalists – fair better than the politicians, mostly a feudal landowning elite.

This gets blurry sometimes, but you get the general idea.

And middle class Pakistanis can’t make it to political parties, let alone to the federal and regional parliaments and governments.

Elections might change this, but certainly not in the foreseeable future. And Pakistan may not have the luxury of time.

If the national deadlock continues with mounting domestic instability due to massive corruption and mismanagement by our politicians, the military may have to contend with one last intervention. It would be the last because if the military failed this time to help set Pakistan on the right track, it could be a free fall after that because Pakistanis are getting increasingly restless with the existing decay. Social turmoil simmers just beneath the surface.

If it comes to a military-led intervention, both military officers and politicians will have to stay out of actual power. The army chief may not become a chief executive. The military might have to look into a new concept called the ‘Smart Coup’, where the military can bring capable Pakistanis to power with a firm executable plan of reform over five years, or more, fully backed by the military.  There may not be time to put the plan to vote. It will have to be implemented.

This would be the absolute last option. But we are nowhere near that right now. Gen. Kayani certainly has no such thing in mind according to people who have met him. He wants democracy to work for the time being and he has proven this by resisting several opportunities to intervene over the past two years.

Pakistan is full of resources and opportunities, but it lacks good leadership and clean management. Even the bare minimum of these two commodities is not available in today’s Pakistan.

Books on political science and theory in Washington and London can’t help with this. Pakistanis will have to do what’s best for their homeland.