Tag: Pakistan

This morning, someone pseudonymously posted a link on Seth Dillingham’s site claiming that Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef — the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan — had been tortured to death during his confinement at the Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo, Cuba.

I’d never heard this claim, before, though apparently Seth had.

The story turns out to be false. The Balochistan Post — an anti-American Pakistan-based newspaper — originally published a story in late July 2002 claiming that relatives of Zaeef said he had been tortured to death while in the custody of the Americans. This story was picked up by quite a few Middle Eastern newspapers.

But on August 5, 2002, the Balochistan Post retracted its story and admitted that Zaeef was not only alive, but had sent a letter to his family through the International Red Cross. As Seth notes, the newspapers that pick up on the Zaeef-is-dead story never bothered to pick up on the later correction, so the story has been floating around the Internet that Zaeef was tortured to death while in U.S. custody.

The Balochistan Post story should have been taken with a huge grain of salt since the BP is an extremely anti-American, pro-Islamist newspaper that doesn’t hide its agenda at all. In its Zaeef-is-dead story, this is how the PB described Zaeef’s arrest (emphasis added), “Pakistani authorities later handed him over to their masters and they bundled him to Guantanamo prison facility in Cuba along with hundreds of other Afghan, Pakistan and Arab prisoners.” Yet, this story was reported without any critical comments or analysis on a number of left wing weblogs.

The New Republic‘s Franklin Foer wrote an article on a downright bizarre sidebar in the war on terrorism. In return for its support of the United States, Pakistan asked George W. Bush to lower textile tariffs and raise quotas that have long been directed at Pakistani exports. The White House has refused, allowing itself to be held hostage by the textile lobby in the United States.

As Foer recounts, House Republicans wanted to renew the Trade Promotion Authority without any help from Democrats. To achieve that, given its slim majority in the House, it had to offer the moon to Republican holdouts who are unfriendly to free trade.

One of those holdouts was North Carolina’s Robin Hayes whose district depends heavily on textiles for jobs. To obtain Hayes’ vote, the administration agreed to toe the line on Pakistani textile imports. Combined with other problems related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Foer reports that total textile imports from Pakistan have fallen by 40 percent costing as many as 48,000 jobs in Pakistan. And, as Foer puts it, “That’s 48,000 more Pakistanis with nothing to do but take to the streets, cheer on Osama bin Laden, and burn down the American flag.”

The final outrage? Almost all textile quotas will be phased out in 2005. Foer writes,

In other words, the textile lobby has spent millions of dollars and interfered with wartime foreign policy to prolong a protectionist regime that’s already slated for imminent extinction. Who are the grave robbers here?

Beyond the political machinations that led to this odd outcome, it is obscene that an administration which so publicly calls for free trade works behind the scenes to block free trade with one of the poorest countries of the world. Like previous Republican administrations, Bush is willing to talk the talk but not walk the walk on free trade, condemning many Pakistanis to poverty for no other reason that they are too competitive for the American textile industry.

Like the Democrats, Bush trusts the government, not the people.

Source:

Fabric Softener: The textile lobby v. the war on terrorism. Franklin Foer, The New Republic, March 4, 2002.

After the 9/11 attack, the United States government began openly and privately courting Pakistan for obvious strategic reasons. Accordingto an MSNBC report,

AfghanistanÂ’s neighbor, Pakistan, also has incentives to cooperate. For siding with the U.S. against the Taliban and bin Laden, Islamabad stands to get as much as $3 billion in debt relief, emergency aid for refugees and the removal of sanctions that were imposed when they tested nuclear weapons and staged a military coup. That would enable Pakistan to also get military aid, including spare parts for its F-16Â’s, Tow missiles and armed personnel carriers.

NBCÂ’s Mitchell reports that Saudi Arabia has also offered Pakistan free oil.

Before we climb into bed with Pakistan, however, lets remember that Pakistan shares many of the features that President George W. Bush so eloquently noted plague Afghanistan.

For example, a little over a month ago a Pakastani court sentenced Dr. Younis Shaikh to death for blasphemy. What did Shaikh say that was so horrific?

Shaik allegedly said that since the Prophet Mohammed didn’t receive his first spiritual revelation until he was 40, Shaikh argued that Mohammed wasn’t a Muslim during his younger years, and that moreover Mohammed’s parents weren’t Muslim since they died before he revealed his spiritual revelations.

As Human Rights Watch notes, a Pakistani Chrisitian, Ayub Masih, was sentenced to death for blasphemy as well. His crime? He spoke favorably of Salman Rushdie.

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Two years after General Zia-ul-Haq took power in Pakistan in 1977, Pakistan’s criminal code was modified with what are called the Hudood Ordinances. These encapsulate some of the anti-female attitudes that are so derided in Afghanistan.

In Pakistan, extra-marital sex is illegal and the age of majority for women is 16 or the onset of puberty, whichever comes first. In practice what this means is that if a 30-year-old man has sex with a 12-year-old girl, rather than prosecute that as statutory rape, Pakistani authorities will in fact go after the 12-year-old girl as well.

And unbelievably the girl cannot even testify in her own defense at such a trial. As a 1999 State Department report on Pakistan noted,

Likewise, the testimony of women, Muslim or non-Muslim, is not admissible in cases involving Hadd punishments. Thus, if a Muslim man rapes a Muslim woman in the presence of several women, he cannot be convicted under the Hudood ordinances because women cannot testify. Similarly, if a Muslim man rapes a woman in the presence of non-Muslim men and women, he cannot be convicted because women and non-Muslim men cannot testify.

And these folks are going to be our new allies?