Remember
Rezwan of the 3rd World View, a good friend and one of the pioneers of blogging in Bangladesh, is the moving force behind the Bangladesh Genocide Archive project. Last week, on the occasion of the 37th anniversary of Bangladesh’s Victory Day, he dedicates the project “to the hundreds and thousands of people who have died [...]
Between boot and Book
Today’s dose of good writing comes from India Today’s S Prasannarajan (linkthanks PD):
India may be its most immediate victim, but the inherent bestiality of Pakistan should not be a worry for India alone. Our victimhood is accentuated by our accumulated mistakes of pussyfooting on—or even romancing— the General and our diplomatic triangulations. [...]
It’s about spinning anyway
Okay, your extra strong dose of irony supplements comes from Pakistan’s The News daily. Their new columnist, a certain Abdul Qadeer Khan, delivers Urdu couplets, self-justification, Musharraf-vilification, Bhutto-sycophancy and a couple of nuggets about Pakistan’s nuclear and missile deals with China and North Korea. But the what touches the heart is advice [...]
A generally ineffective way to cleanse the political system
Bangladesh is to have general elections on December 18th, almost two years after the army seized power amid a political crisis. According to The Economist:
The front-runners in the race to succeed a period of muddled rule by soldiers, spooks and technocrats are the heads of two feuding [...]
Putting the ISI in its place
For a few tense hours between late night on Saturday and the wee hours of Sunday morning, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was “under the administrative, financial and operational control of the Interior Division”. That’s about as long as the civilians that presumably run the government can even pretend to [...]
Saving those who have crossed over
Khaled Ahmed puts it very well:
Today an army built to face India is being asked to retrieve territory lost to the terrorists. Trying to reclaim lost terrain is like invading your own people, but the additional handicap imposed on the army is that it is being sent in without political [...]
Regarding the precedents of international intervention that were set in the 1990s
You write that despite the precedents set in the 1990s, “the concept of humanitarian intervention has lost momentum”, mainly due to the US invasion of Iraq.
Likewise, the title of your op-ed, “The end of intervention” suggests that the 90s were a sort of golden [...]
And why the option of airdropping relief supplies to Burma’s disaster victims should not be dismissed
The numbers the Burmese junta killed while suppressing pro-democracy protests last year fade in comparison to the numbers they’ve killed in the last two weeks.
India’s state-run Meteorological Department said it had alerted Burma two days before the cyclone struck. The [...]
And military advisors too
The six containers full of small arms that China shipped to Zimbabwe are somewhere off the coast of Africa. Durban in South Africa, the original transit port, didn’t work out. Someone tipped off Noseweek, an appropriately named South African magazine, about the contents of the cargo on the Chinese ship An Yue [...]
The terrorists did not even attempt big attacks
In the run-up to the elections, there were some major terrorist attacks—including suicide bombings—targeting the Pakistan People’s Party and the Awami National Party.
On the day of the elections there were none. Not that the attacks were foiled. They were not even attempted. (There was only the ‘usual’ [...]
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