September 13^th 2003 in Asia Times on line.  

   

SPEAKING FREELY
Iraq is India’s war, not its battle
By Shubh Saumya

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

The parched, eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil
Laughs without mirth
This is the death of earth.

T S Eliot resonates in Mesopotamia, whose mighty rivers now flank the valley of the shadow of death. The cradle of our civilization has become America’s desert of despair.

America’s appetite for the post-war is fast ebbing. Losing one soldier about every day and a billion dollars a week is a heavy burden. The wealthiest, mightiest nation on earth now seeks others to pitch in. It has India on its mind, among other nations.

We must be in a looking glass world if Indians are being goaded, with a straight face, to send soldiers to die in place of Americans. General John Abizaid, Commander, US Central Command, even clarifies that he doesn’t want more US troops, merely foreign troops.

Unless he bizarrely thinks that less-equipped Indians can outdo their techno-lethal US counterparts, he is brazenly asking Indians to serve as cannon fodder.

Following recent explosions in Mumbai, some in America opined that a freshly bloodied India should now see why crushing terrorism is so vital. Indian soldiers should join American GIs to create a safer Iraq, therefore a safer world.

Many Indians agree. To them, defanging terrorism in Iraq is a global imperative. Also, a partnership with America and Indian footprints in West Asia are of great strategic value.  

   

They lobbied, unsuccessfully, to secure India’s diplomatic support for the war. Failing that, they want it to make amends by sending troops to Iraq. Some of us who joined them in support of the Iraq war consider this latter idea supreme folly. Let me explain.

As an Indian eyewitness to jihad’s temper tantrum in New York, this writer doubly understands the evil of terrorism. Nurtured by witchdoctors in mosques and dictators in palaces, terrorism’s evil rage is essentially apolitical. It’s only intent is destruction and death.

Terrorists even turn our “infidel” sense of fair play against us. Goebbelsian military dictators plead for “self-determination” across borders and suicide bombers talk up a futile “peace process” to play our naive, liberal instincts like violin strings.

Their real tune, alas, is mass murder and an imposed, self-interpreted Medievalism that amputates modernity and limbs. They seek murder, not political settlement.

This epiphany unifies the numerous battles on terror’s bloody borders and negates liberal cacophony about the so-called “root causes” of terrorist rage.

It also legitimizes the Iraq war. Like Pakistan and Palestine, Iraq professed moderation as camouflage for its extremist agenda. With Baghdad’s fall, the war was finally joined.  

   

   

   

Inexplicably India, herself a victim of hideous terror, hid behind the UN’s tattered skirt and was reticent in extending diplomatic support to the war led by America, its natural ally. It sought to defend the faux ideal of multilateral diplomacy no matter what the cost.

Now, presumably for a few pieces of silver denied them by this blunder, some Indians want to send troops to Iraq. In geo-political chess, India cannot bring itself to abandon diplomatic snobbery but, with the UN’s consent, will apparently sacrifice the blood of its pawn soldiers. Leonard Cohen was right. The wizard of the world has indeed overturned the order of the soul.

When these Indians and their American friends exhort it to send troops to Iraq, they betray an unforgivable assumption that India is not already fighting this war. An intellectually honest person can only retch in despair.

Iraq is not the only battlefield in this war. So also are Kashmir, Chechnya, Palestine, the Philippines and many others, each equally vital. Winning in Iraq at the expense of Kashmir, for example, would be winning nothing at all. Stalemate anywhere is stalemate everywhere.

America leads the Iraq battle with 150,000 soldiers in a nation of 25 million. India has an equal battle ongoing with 500,000 troops battling Pakistani terrorism against 10 million Kashmiris.

America lost 3,000 once in New York. India has lost 3,000 every year for a decade in the identical war.  

   

Instead of being distracted in Iraq, India can best support the war by winning its proximate battle in Kashmir. Troops designated for Iraq are better unleashed against terrorists who kill and maim Indians at home. Indian victims of terror expect nothing less.

Likewise, victory in near battles of Russian troops in Chechnya, Israelis in Palestine, etc will bolster this global war of the brave and the cause of the free. As for Iraq, it is primarily America’s battle and, given sufficient political will, eventual victory is not in doubt.

If instead Washington goes soft in its responsibility to Iraq, its awesome power will be tarnished forever. Terrorists will portray American retreat, in the guise of internationalizing the Iraqi occupation, as a replay of Somalia and Lebanon. That would be catastrophic for the world.

Should India be an enabler of Washington’s strategic mind cramp that could lead us all down (in Eliot’s imagery) “rat’s alley where the dead men lost their bones” for no good reason at all?

Iraq may be India’s war, but is not its battle. Its troops are best deployed in the battle against Pakistani terrorism in Kashmir. Let India first win its slice of the global “war on terror”.

Shubh Saumya is a New York-based management consultant from India.  

   

   

   

Washington Post  

   

The Washington Post, another newspaper read with some care by the policymakers in the US capital was less enthusiastic about surrendering a great deal of authority to the UN and to the countries such as France and Germany that had not accepted America’s call to arms against Iraq. “Excessive concessions for the demand of those countries for UN control in Iraq could make a bad situation worse. It would be wrong, for example, to slow or reverse the assumption of authority by the Iraqi governing council or the speedy recruitment of Iraqi police and security force.”

The newspaper also advised the Bush administration not to beat a hasty retreat from Iraq. “The arrival of fresh foreign troops cannot become an excuse for US withdrawal – the forces now in Iraq will be needed for as long as there is a military threat from Iraqi guerrillas and terrorists. . . A new UN mandate might make the challenge more manageable, and success more likely – and yet this country must still prepare for a difficult, expensive and prolonged effort.”  

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

Vietnam demons still haunt US Army”™

Andrea Shalal- Esa

Washington, September 16: The US Military suffered an ”˜”˜institutional nervous breakdown”™”™ during the Vietnam War, vowing never again to get mired in a long-term fight against local insurgents, and that may have played a role in the failure to predict guerrilla attacks against US troops in Iraq, according to a US think tank.   Andrew Krepinevich, an Army veteran who heads the independent think tank, Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said on Monday the US could score a major victory if it succeeded in stabilising Afghanistan and Iraq, but there would be a high price to pay if it failed.   ”˜”˜If they fail, adversaries in the Islamic world will likely be encouraged to persist in their efforts to eliminate US influence, while Washington could find it increasingly difficult to act forcefully abroad to protect areas of vital interest,”™”™ he wrote.   ”˜”˜The US military must reorient itself from its emphasis on conventional warfare and create a significant capability for conducting stability operations,” Krepinevich said, adding post-conflict operations in Iraq were more challenging than the war itself. ””Reuters

   

   

   

Islam”™s Other Victims: India
By Serge Trifkovic
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 18, 2002  

Adapted from  The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam by Dr. Serge Trifkovic.  

The fundamental leftist and anti-American claim about our ongoing conflict with political Islam is this: whatever has happened or does happen, it”™s our fault. We provoked them into it by being dirty Yankee imperialists and by unkindly refusing to allow them to destroy Israel. But two things make crystal clear that this is not so:  

1. The political arm of Islam has been waging terroristic holy war on the rest of the world for centuries.  

2. It has waged this war against civilizations that have nothing to do with the West, let alone America.  

This is why the case of Moslem aggression against India proves so much. Let”™s look at the historical record.  

India prior to the Moslem invasions was one of the world”™s great civilizations. Tenth century Hindustan matched its contemporaries in the East and the West in the realms of philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Indian mathematicians discovered the number zero (not to mention other things, like algebra, that were later transmitted to a Moslem world which mistaken has received credit for them.) Medieval India, before the Moslem invasion, was a richly imaginative culture, one of the half-dozen most advanced civilizations of all time. Its sculptures were vigorous and sensual, its architecture ornate and spellbinding. And these were indigenous achievements and not, as in the case of many of the more celebrated high-points of Moslem culture, relics of pre-Moslem civilizations that Moslems had overrun.  

Moslem invaders began entering India in the early 8^th century, on the orders of Hajjaj, the governor of what is now Iraq. (Sound familiar?) Starting in 712 the raiders, commanded by Muhammad Qasim, demolished temples, shattered sculptures, plundered palaces, killed vast numbers of men ”” it took three whole days to slaughter the inhabitants of the city of Debal ”” and carried off their women and children to slavery, some of it sexual. After the initial wave of violence, however, Qasim tried to establish law and order in the newly-conquered lands, and to that end he even allowed a degree of religious tolerance. but upon hearing of such humane practices, his superior Hajjaj, objected:  

“It appears from your letter that all the rules made by you for the comfort and convenience of your men are strictly in accordance with religious law. But the way of granting pardon prescribed by the law is different from the one adopted by you, for you go on giving pardon to everybody, high or low, without any discretion between a friend and a foe. The great God says in the Koran [47.4]: “0 True believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.” The above command of the Great God is a great command and must be respected and followed. You should not be so fond of showing mercy, as to nullify the virtue of the act. Henceforth grant pardon to no one of the enemy and spare none of them, or else all will consider you a weak-minded man.”  

In a subsequent communication, Hajjaj reiterated that all able-bodied men were to be killed, and that their underage sons and daughters were to be imprisoned and retained as hostages. Qasim obeyed, and on his arrival at the town of Brahminabad massacred between 6,000 and 16,000 men.  

The significance of these events lies not just in the horrible numbers involved, but in the fact that the perpetrators of these massacres were not military thugs disobeying the ethical teachings of their religion, as the European crusaders in the Holy Land were, but were actually doing precisely what their religion taught. (And one may note that Christianity has grown up and no longer preaches crusades. Islam has not. As has been well-documented, jihad has been preached from the official centers of Islam, not just the lunatic fringe.)  

Qasim”™s early exploits were continued in the early eleventh century, when Mahmud of Ghazni, “passed through India like a whirlwind, destroying, pillaging, and massacring,” zealously following the Koranic injunction to kill idolaters, whom he had vowed to chastise every year of his life.  

In the course of seventeen invasions, in the words of Alberuni, the scholar brought by Mahmud to India,  

“Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion toward all Moslems.”  

Does one wonder why? To this day, the citizens of Bombay and New Delhi, Calcutta and Bangalore, live in fear of a politically-unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan that unlike India (but like every other Moslem country) has not managed to maintain democracy since independence.  

Mathura, holy city of the god Krishna, was the next victim:  

“In the middle of the city there was a temple larger and finer than the rest, which can neither be described nor painted.” The Sultan [Mahmud] was of the opinion that 200 years would have been required to build it. The idols included “five of red gold, each five yards high,” with eyes formed of priceless jewels. “The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naphtha and fire, and leveled with the ground.”  

In the aftermath of the invasion, in the ancient cities of Varanasi, Mathura, Ujjain, Maheshwar, Jwalamukhi, and Dwarka, not one temple survived whole and intact. This is the equivalent of an army marching into Paris and Rome, Florence and Oxford, and razing their architectural treasures to the ground. It is an act beyond nihilism; it is outright negativism, a hatred of what is cultured and civilized.  

In his book The Story of Civilization, famous historian Will Durant lamented the results of what he termed “probably the bloodiest story in history.” He called it “a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.”  

Moslem invaders “broke and burned everything beautiful they came across in Hindustan,” displaying, as an Indian commentator put it, the resentment of the less developed warriors who felt intimidated in the encounter with “a more refined culture.” The Moslem Sultans built mosques at the sites of torn down temples, and many Hindus were sold into slavery. As far as they were concerned, Hindus were kafirs, heathens, par excellence. They, and to a lesser extent the peaceful Buddhists, were, unlike Christians and Jews, not “of the book” but at the receiving end of Muhammad”™s injunction against pagans: “Kill those who join other gods with God wherever you may find them.” (Not that being “of the book” has much helped Jewish and Christian victims of other Moslem aggressions, but that”™s another article.)  

The mountainous northwestern approaches to India are to this day called the Hindu Kush, “the Slaughter of the Hindu,” a reminder of the days when Hindu slaves from Indian subcontinent died in harsh Afghan mountains while being transported to Moslem courts of Central Asia. The slaughter in Somnath, the site of a celebrated Hindu temple, where 50,000 Hindus were slain on Mahmud”™s orders, set the tone for centuries.  

The gentle Buddhists were the next to be subjected to mass slaughter in 1193, when Muhammad Khilji also burned their famous library. By the end of the 12^th century, following the Moslem conquest of their stronghold in Bihar, they were no longer a significant presence in India. The survivors retreated into Nepal and Tibet, or escaped to the south of the Subcontinent. The remnants of their culture lingered on even as far west as Turkestan. Left to the tender mercies of Moslem conquerors and their heirs they were systematically destroyed, sometimes””as was the case with the four giant statues of Buddha in Afghanistan in March 2001””up to the present day.  

That cultivated disposition and developed sensibility can go hand in hand with bigotry and cruelty is evidenced by the example of Firuz Shah, who became the ruler of northern India in 1351. This educated yet tyrannical Moslem ruler of northern India once surprised a village where a Hindu religious festival was celebrated, and ordered all present to be slain. He proudly related that, upon completing the slaughter, he destroyed the temples and in their place built mosques.  

The Mogul emperor Akbar is remembered as tolerant, at least by the standards of Moslems in India: only one major massacre was recorded during his long reign (1542-1605), when he ordered that about 30,000 captured Rajput Hindus be slain on February 24, 1568, after the battle for Chitod. But Akbar”™s acceptance of other religions and toleration of their public worship, his abolition of poll-tax on non-Moslems, and his interest in other faiths were not a reflection of his Moslem spirit of tolerance. Quite the contrary, they indicated a propensity for free-thinking in the realm of religion that finally led him to complete apostasy. Its high points were the formal declaration of his own infallibility in all matters of religious doctrine, his promulgation of a new creed, and his adoption of Hindu and Zoroastrian festivals and practices. This is a pattern one sees again and again in Moslem history, down to the present day: whenever one finds a reasonable, enlightened, tolerant Moslem, upon closer examination this turns out to be someone who started out as a Moslem but then progressively wandered away from the orthodox faith. That is to say: the best Moslems are generally the least Moslem (a pattern which does not seem to be the case with other religions.)  

Things were back to normal under Shah Jahan (1593-1666), the fifth Mogul Emperor and a grandson of Akbar the Great. Most Westerners remember him as the builder of the Taj Mahal and have no idea that he was a cruel warmonger who initiated forty-eight military campaigns against non-Moslems in less than thirty years. Taking his cue from his Ottoman co-religionists, on coming to the throne in 1628 he killed all his male relations except one who escaped to Persia. Shah Jahan had 5,000 concubines in his harem, but nevertheless indulged in incestuous sex with his daughters Chamani and Jahanara. During his reign in Benares alone 76 Hindu temples were destroyed, as well as Christian churches at Agra and Lahore. At the end of the siege of Hugh, a Portuguese enclave near Calcutta, that lasted three months, he had ten thousand inhabitants “blown up with powder, drowned in water or burnt by fire.” Four thousand were taken captive to Agra where they were offered Islam or death. Most refused and were killed, except for the younger women, who went into harems.  

These massacres perpetrated by Moslems in India are unparalleled in history. In sheer numbers, they are bigger than the Jewish Holocaust, the Soviet Terror, the Japanese massacres of the Chinese during WWII, Mao”™s devastations of the Chinese peasantry, the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, or any of the other famous crimes against humanity of the 20^th Century. But sadly, they are almost unknown outside India.  

There are several reasons for this. In the days when they ruled India, the British, pursuing a policy of divide-and-rule, whitewashed the record of the Moslems so that they could set them up as a counterbalance to the more numerous Hindus. During the struggle for independence, Gandhi and Nehru downplayed historic Moslem atrocities so that they could pretend a facade of Hindu-Moslem unity against the British. (Naturally, this façade dissolved immediately after independence and several million people were killed in the religious violence attendant on splitting British India into India and Pakistan.) After independence, Marxist Indian writers, blinkered by ideology, suppressed the truth about the Moslem record because it did not fit into the Marxist theory of history. Nowadays, the Indian equivalent of political correctness downplays Moslem misdeeds because Moslems are an “oppressed minority” in majority-Hindu India. And Indian leftist intellectuals always blame India first and hate their own Hindu civilization, just their equivalents at Berkeley blame America and the West.  

Unlike Germany, which has apologized to its Jewish and Eastern European victims, and Japan, which has at least behaved itself since WWII, and even America, which has gone into paroxysms of guilt over what it did to the infinitely smaller numbers of Red Indians, the Moslem aggressors against India and their successors have not even stopped trying to finish the job they started. To this day, militant Islam sees India as “unfinished business” and it remains high on the agenda of oil-rich Moslem countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are spending millions every year trying to convert Hindus to Islam.  

One may take some small satisfaction in the fact that they find it rather slow going.  

Serge Trifkovic received his PhD from the University of Southampton in England and pursued postdoctoral research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His past journalistic outlets have included the BBC World Service, the Voice of America, CNN International, MSNBC, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Times of London, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is foreign affairs editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. This article was adapted for Front Page Magazine by Robert Locke.  

   

Playing with fire

DAWN   Internet Edition Monday Oct 15^th 2001

By Khalid Hasan

On any given day, you may go through the pages of any Urdu newspaper published in Pakistan and it is unlikely you will come across many voices of moderation. The hysteria that you see in the streets today has been nurtured by what you read in print here. The language is belligerent and the appeal is directed at our most primeval instincts.

A good deal of the intellectual and ideological confusion that grips the nation today is largely the work of these holy warriors who see themselves as crusaders in print. They thunder forth as the defenders of a faith, which they claim, is under challenge from the infidels, not realizing that the course they advocate leads to the abyss. Their understanding of Islam is superficial and sentimental.

If there are any balanced and liberal voices in the Urdu press, they are few and far between. One such is that of the former left-wing student leader Raja Anwar who writes for an Islamabad daily, a lone advocate of what increasingly looks like a lost cause. Just before the US military action got underway in Afghanistan, he wrote a piece that deserves a wider readership.

The reaction he received was “extreme”, physical threats included. The truth is that if we are to be saved from the zealots who are urging that Pakistan go down the tubes with the Taliban, we need to turn away from these siren voices and take stock of our situation. What follows is a somewhat shortened version in translation of what Anwar wrote.

“In 1991, after invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein challenged America. Our Punjabi intellectuals, lost in the wilderness of the past, immediately conferred the title of Salahuddin Ayyubi on him. Our intellectually paralytic media lost no time in coming with the ‘research’ finding that Saddam was born in the same village as the great Islamic warrior. In the days that followed, our newspaper columns turned into battlefields where new Crusades were fought. The result of that war was the utter destruction of Iraq and the permanent military presence of American troops in Arab lands.

“Whosoever attacked the World Trade Centre on the morning of September 11 not only turned thousands of living human beings into ashes but threw a noose around every Islamic country, including Pakistan, that will only get tighter with every attempt to move in the other direction. Only after the dust has settled, will we know what we lost on that fateful morning. One thing however is clear. The worst victims of this event are the nations of Islam. That notwithstanding, some Punjabi intellectuals, with no interest whatsoever in facts, are raring to go like frenzied bulls.

“They are not even aware that our country is already in the greatest jeopardy. They are busy dressing up Islam in an attire that has no relationship to history or Islamic teachings. A friend in London has sent me an ‘Edict’ from someone named Bilal which says that all countries that were once ruled by Muslims continue to belong to them. It is, therefore, our birthright not only to occupy those lands but also to enslave their inhabitants.

“In other words, this gentleman, safely ensconced in London, has transferred the overlordship of all lands once ruled by Arabs, Berbers, Ottomans and Tartars to the gallants of Punjab. I suppose it is also now incumbent upon us to reconquer parts of the Balkans and Russia. It will also be our duty to reclaim all areas in old Cathay right up to the “dust of Kashgar”. As for Spain, victory is at hand.

“As I write, twenty to twenty-five thousand Punjabi eagles of the ‘shaheen’ variety are waiting to gain political asylum in Spain, having already taken care to burn their boats. The day this advance guard gets hold of the right papers, Spain will be ours. However, the reconquest of India may pose certain difficulties as the last time it was taken by a Muslim was when Babar defeated Ibrahim Lodhi, also a Muslim. So who will take it this time? Babar’s descendents or Lodhi’s?

“Who will explain to Bilal that Islam brought a message of peace, justice and equality for mankind that springs forth from the Quran? How does our being Muslim also oblige us to swear allegiance to the history of Berbers, Khiljis, Mongols, Turks, Uzbeks, Ghaznavis and Tajiks? They fought their wars mostly against each other. How have they become Islam’s wars? And how do the areas that kept changing hands among them become our patrimony?

“The history of Muslim countries proves that Islam was damaged less by Jews, Christians and Hindus than by inter-Muslim wars for power and pelf. Is there a count available of the Iranians who lost their lives during Reza Shah’s White Revolution of 1952 and Ayatollah Khomenei’s Islamic Revolution of 1979? From Abdel Karim Kassem to Saddam Hussein, every Iraqi ruler murdered hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Sunnis and Shias. They were all Muslims. More than one million innocent Muslims lost their lives in the Iran-Iraq war while we continued to parade around with Saddam and Khomeni’s pictures, raising slogans.

“In 1966, Suharto took the presidential palace over the fallen bodies of 250,000 Indonesian Muslims, a number far higher than those who died fighting for the country’s freedom. The number of Palestinians killed by King Hussain in September 1970 was higher than the number of those who have been killed by Israelis.

“Muslims killed in Pakistan at the hands of our Muslim police, or in terrorist attacks in Karachi or during sectarian bloodbaths elsewhere is much higher than the number of those killed in 1971 in East Pakistan. Afghanistan has been a virtual battlefield over the last twenty years. Afghan leaders who keep declaring each another outside Islam’s pale are guilty of the destruction of millions of Muslim lives.

“In 1982, Hafiz Al-Asad killed 10,000 Sunni men, women and children. Not satisfied with that, he levelled their city of Hama to the ground. And yet all his life, he kept calling for war against Israel.

“More Muslims have died in Algeria in the last decade than fell in the revolutionary war against France. Muslims massacred on the altar of power in Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine and Kashmir outnumber those who died there fighting for their freedom.

“We are Pakistanis. The day this earth which we find under our feet today is no longer there, no Muslim country will offer us refuge. If you do not believe this, all you have to do is to visit any Arab country and you will find that despite our being Muslims, no Arab country grants us citizenship or equal rights. In no Arab country can we construct a home or even open a barbershop, though we may have resided there for thirty years.

“There are more than fifty Muslim countries in the world. They all have their own armies, their own cultures, their own problems and their own resources. Some are rich; others are poor like us. Our great burden is our debt. Is there a Muslim country that is willing to help us with this load? If the answer is no, then please for God’s sake, do not make this country the last refuge of every fugitive from law. Do not make it an experimental laboratory for Mullahism. Do not turn it into a battling ground of sectarianism.

“Someone should ask these Hamid Guls, Nasim Begs and Qazi Hussain Ahmeds just one question. Where is to be found the ‘Ummah’ that you are so keen to lead?

“Or is it only to be found in Punjab where so deep is religious hatred today that Shia and Sunni cannot live under the same roof and Wahabis and Baralevis cannot pray in the same mosque.

“The Gujjars, Jats, Arains and Rajputs no longer want to live in the same village. Or will we find that Ummah in the desert of Sindh where every fourth or fifth Mohajir, Sindhi, Pathan and Punjabi is out to cut the next man’s throat? Or is that Ummah to be found in the Frontier and Balochistan where loyalties stop at tribal territorial limits?

Who is going to unite the Ummah that despite its belief in one God, one Prophet (peace by upon him) and one Book is divided into 72 sects?”For God’s sake, have mercy on this land and its people. Instead of placing guns in its children’s hands, arm them with science and technology.

Instead of slashing one another’s throat, unburden the nation of its crippling debt. Instead of dreaming dreams of the conquest of Russia, Spain and Kashgar, show us a way which will make this Pakistan of ours strong and prosperous. There are fires burning all around us today. How long will we keep our head buried in the sands of the past so as not to face reality? Those who are playing with fire to attain power, may end up being consumed by it. And they may take the country with them.”