I played make-believe with the Pakistani military

[RescueRanger]

"Just thought i'd share an article by an individual who, as you will read and find out, is really hurting. Her handlers have asked her to up her anti

Which only means one thing, the Pakistan army and Pakistan people are winning. Bit by Bit"

Cannot provide the link

I played make-believe with the Pakistani military-Quartz (India) By C. Christine Fair

In the summer of 2010, I was teaching at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. When I was not teaching, I was conducting research for my book Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War.
Pakistan’s army and various intelligence agencies organized a series of visits to important facilities and regions where military and anti-terror operations are ongoing, including the Swat valley and North and South Waziristan. The army routinely uses these tours to cultivate observers, in hopes that they will believe Islamabad’s various party lines, namely: that they are fighting a serious war on terrorism; that they are victims themselves of terrorism; that these terrorists are backed by Indian, Afghan, Israeli, and even American intelligence agencies; and that, therefore, Pakistan cannot possibly be supporting terrorism in any way.
Once you take up the state’s hospitality, the generals and spymasters assume that you are not just imbedded, but “in bed” with the Pakistan military. Of course, Pakistan is not the only one to use the embed approach: the United States did this with journalists in Iraq, and again in Afghanistan with its NATO allies. Afraid of losing precious access, observers smile and play the game.
It’s a practice the Pakistanis have taken a liking to.

Green Books
On one day, I met with the inspector general of training and evaluation command, who is responsible for ensuring that the Pakistan learns lessons from past and current engagements. While meeting him, I first came across the army’s “Green Book” which, until recently, was published every two years since 1990. They are not doctrine, but they do represent internal conversations that the army has about key issues. I knew immediately that these volumes would be a treasure trove. He assured me that I could get them and that he would write a letter in support of it. Later that day, I met the commandant of the National Defense University. He too said he would support me obtaining the Green Books. Finally, the ISI also agreed that I should have whatever copies of past issues of Green Books are available. And then I waited—somewhat dubious that they would arrive.
Meanwhile, the protocol officer who accompanied me on all of these trips was a little fellow named Khaled who wore his jeans high up on his waist. He incessantly queried during our long car rides why it was that I had no boyfriend. That I was married was inadequate, he claimed, because I am an atheist. After all, without the threat of hell or the prospect of heaven, atheists have no incentive to behave morally.
These repeated conversations were tedious, and I endured them with as much aplomb as I could muster—my mustachioed minder ultimately proved quite useful. After suffering a concussion while exercising in my hotel room in Swat, I was recuperating in an Islamabad “nail saloon,” as they are called in Pakistan, where Khaled solicitously brought me several copies of the Green Book in a paper bag. (These books, among numerous other sources that I curated over several years, would comprise the empirical basis of Fighting to the End.)
Later, embarrassed by the provocative content of the Green Books, which I detailed in my own book, and their own apparent oversight in making the elaborate arrangements to provide them to me, the men in khaki began a whisper campaign alleging that I copied them surreptitiously from the National Defense University library during my two hour visit—which would have been physically impossible—or, in another version, that I outright stole them. But the ladies in the nail saloon know better.

The Frontier Corps

On another occasion, I visited the Frontier Corps training facility, a short distance outside of Peshawar in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. At the time, US personnel on-site expressed exasperation that the Pakistanis were slow-balling the training. The facility could train several hundred personnel, yet it was at one-fifth capacity or less. At that rate, it would take literally decades to adequately train all of the Frontier Corps.

And the men in the Frontier Corps, many of them ethnic Pashtuns, were already poorly positioned to survive a standoff with insurgents. They had no hazardous environment first-aid skills. If they were hit, their colleagues would toss them in the back of a Hilux pickup truck and speed back to base while they most likely bled out. If they somehow managed to survive the drive, there were only crude medical facilities awaiting them. I wanted to give them tampons, which are amazingly effectively in preventing a bleed out. But I didn’t think such a gesture would be appreciated.

What’s more, despite the incessant claims that Pashtuns are born shooters, corpsmen are, in fact, hopelessly reliant on ineffectual “spray-and-pray” techniques. Consequently, their foes were better trained and equipped than they were. Ironically, many of these “miscreants,” as the men shooting at them were called, had been trained by Pakistan’s own military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). This American-provided training aimed to help the corpsmen improve upon their shooting skills to better combat their adversaries. The Americans even provided highly specialized sniper training to those who proved themselves capable. Few were selected for the program and fewer yet graduated. Those who managed to graduate garnered an incredibly useful skill and a US model sniper rifle. Yet, it seemed, that the Pakistan army was working to keep the numbers of corpsmen trained low.

Some time earlier, I had vigorous arguments about this program with staff overseeing it in the Pentagon. I warned them that this program would go nowhere for several reasons. For one, the Frontier Corps had been long used by Pakistan’s army and the ISI to train militants for operations in Afghanistan. The men in Rawalpindi, where the army is headquartered, would be loath to give the Americans any kind of insight into organization.

Second, Pashtuns in Pakistan have long nursed episodic dreams of being merged with co-ethnics in Afghanistan into some kind of a greater Pashtunistan. During the subcontinental independence movement, some Pashtuns did not even want to join Pakistan; rather, they wanted to join India. While most Pashtuns are loyal citizens, Pakistan’s elites in and out of uniform have eyed Pashtuns with suspicion—not people to throw equipment and effective military training at. US special forces were ousted in early 2011, when Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor, shot and killed two alleged ISI contractors in Lahore. Since US special operators were running this program, it was the first to go. The ones who suffered from this policy were the Frontier Corpsmen, who continue to confront an enemy better positioned to battle them—now with even less training and few snipers.

Waziristan

On another occasion, I traveled to North and South Waziristan with the army and two other journalists. We were informed that they began evacuating the valley in 2009 in preparation for Operation Rah-e-Nijat, which was true. The logic, according to our briefer, was that anyone remaining in the area would be intent on fighting, and thus the Pakistani forces did not need to concern themselves with “collateral damage.”

Of course, it should be noted that the militants who wanted to fight another day just “squirted out,” in military parlance, with the civilians. And as soon as residents returned, the fighters would return with them, and the gains would be lost. In South Waziristan, we were shown the redoubts of the terrorists and the litter they left behind. We were told that Indian medicines were discovered as well as other supposedly telltale signs of Indian support to the Pakistani Taliban. Despite repeated requests for evidence over two months, Pakistani military personnel never provided it to me.

This wasn’t the only story that didn’t add up. We were told the Pakistanis essentially razed the area, but there was entirely too much infrastructure remaining for that to be the case. If they had genuinely hammered the place with F-16s and other combat aircraft, there should have been nothing. Instead, most of the buildings were still standing, albeit a bit worse for the wear. And the craters supposedly left by bombers were oddly placed, as if by design. It all seemed as if this was a well put-together war diorama for us—the war tourists.
The next series of plausible fictions were relayed when we visited a facility that the army claimed was used by commander Qari Hussain, the master trainer of Pakistani suicide bombers. I noticed various inscriptions that proclaimed the presence of numerous other commanders but none for commander Qari. I speak Urdu, and when I asked my handler to clarify he looked at me with puzzlement and queried, “Madam! You read Pashto?“ The word “commander” is the same in Pashto as Urdu, as he knew full well. He made no effort to provide proof of this important claim, and led us to the next exhibit.

We were led to a room where, according to our handlers, young boys were indoctrinated to blow themselves up. We saw various pictures of women engaging in domestic acts, like cleaning clothes and washing dishes in the river. The women’s eyes were scratched out. I asked my be-khakied tour guide why these women were painted on the walls in this way. He responded with the confidence that comes from repeating a canard over and over, that these were depictions of the houris, or celestial virgins, who would be waiting for the young bombers upon successful completion of their missions. But because the terrorists are staunch Muslims, the women could have no eyes. I rhetorically queried my guide, “Why they would paint them with eyes only to scratch them out? This makes no sense.” He had no response, as I suspected.

With increasing annoyance, I exclaimed “Who would want their celestial virgins cleaning their clothes and doing their laundry? Is it their mothers they want in heaven, or vixens?” Clearly these women were not painted on these walls to lure the young men to the gates of paradise. Other paintings suggested a more plausible explanation: this partially bombed out building had probably been a guesthouse.


Mangla
The final establishment I visited was the anti-terrorism training center at Mangla. All Pakistan military personnel undergo training at this facility before being deployed to tribal areas for military operations.
There, I came to appreciate one thing in particular: Pakistani military personnel who had not been deployed used the word “miscreant” for the killers that were savaging their country. After being deployed to the tribal areas and having been shot at by these proxies-gone wild, soldiers and officers no longer called them “miscreants.” They were “terrorists.”
First in a series of demonstrations, they showed me how they clear a room in a house in which militants were hiding without killing any present civilians. Having explained the objective, the men demonstrated their learning: one man approached the door and tossed in several grenades whereupon the rest of his unit entered the house. I asked just how this would prevent civilian casualties. My guide explained that they had already discerned that no civilians were in the house. Anything is possible with imagination, I suppose.
Next, the soldiers demonstrated how they would use a rope to climb a hill. During my orientation, I was told that Mangla “has a terrain that is absolutely like Waziristan.” I pointed out that was observably untrue. Waziristan is unforgivingly mountainous, but apparently because Mangla has a few hills, it was close enough.
One by one, they grabbed hold of the rope and, placing one hand above the other, they hauled themselves up the hill. I think I could’ve climbed that hill in a pair of flip flops, sans rope. I was puzzled, to say the least.
I asked my guide the obvious question of who would put the ropes in place in Waziristan. He declared “Madam! That is a good question. Presumably someone would land atop the mountain in a helicopter and emplace the rope.” I then asked why wouldn’t they just put everyone on the helicopter and deposit them on the hill, thus dispensing with the rope drama altogether. He was not amused.

My guide was relieved when we reached the final ride at the carnival: the Improvised Explosive Device Learning Center (IEDLC). For us both, the end was near. We were both frazzled and irritated: me at being lied to like a child, and him at being cornered about lying to me like a child. As we walked into the IEDLC library, there were tables placed along the walls of the room. The tables displayed items that are typically used in the manufacture of an IED used by insurgents. They included pressure cookers, parkas, among other quotidian household items. But an item at the far left of the first table caught my eye: a black, strapless brassiere. This was the smallest black bra I had ever seen. Anywhere. I had seen trainer bras that would accommodate more décolletage than this “made in China,” 32AAA number. You could not fit any significant amount of C-4 (military grade explosives) into it, and you certainly couldn’t cram in ball bearings, bolts, nails, or other sundries that become the deadly shrapnel. The pull cords to detonate the device were placed where playful tassels would be, if a stripper could somehow fit into this thing. I was livid at this final insult to common sense, as well as my wallet. After all, this dog and pony show too had been paid for by my tax dollars.

Really, I felt terribly for the men in Pakistan’s uniform, whether they were Pakistan’s regular forces or the Frontier Corps. Mostly these men, and many of their commanding officers, had no understanding that the people doing their best to kill them were the legitimate and illegitimate offspring of the purported strategic thinkers in the army and ISI. Even within the ISI itself, some were doing their best to eliminate those militants who began targeting the state, while others within the same organization were creating, aiding and abetting other terrorists and insurgents.

But I was exhausted, and frustrated at being repeatedly lied to. I couldn’t help but ask how such a preposterous “brassier-born IED“ could wreak even the slightest damage—by which time my game-show host had too grown exhausted with me. Without an appreciation of irony or humor, he exclaimed in exasperation, “Madam! Maybe it was a booby trap?”

Indeed. Maybe it was.

She is a liar that much we all know.

 

[qamar1990]

"Just thought i'd share an article by an individual who, as you will read and find out, is really hurting. Her handlers have asked her to up her anti

Which only means one thing, the Pakistan army and Pakistan people are winning. Bit by Bit"

Cannot provide the link

I played make-believe with the Pakistani military-Quartz (India) By C. Christine Fair

In the summer of 2010, I was teaching at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. When I was not teaching, I was conducting research for my book Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War.
Pakistan’s army and various intelligence agencies organized a series of visits to important facilities and regions where military and anti-terror operations are ongoing, including the Swat valley and North and South Waziristan. The army routinely uses these tours to cultivate observers, in hopes that they will believe Islamabad’s various party lines, namely: that they are fighting a serious war on terrorism; that they are victims themselves of terrorism; that these terrorists are backed by Indian, Afghan, Israeli, and even American intelligence agencies; and that, therefore, Pakistan cannot possibly be supporting terrorism in any way.
Once you take up the state’s hospitality, the generals and spymasters assume that you are not just imbedded, but “in bed” with the Pakistan military. Of course, Pakistan is not the only one to use the embed approach: the United States did this with journalists in Iraq, and again in Afghanistan with its NATO allies. Afraid of losing precious access, observers smile and play the game.
It’s a practice the Pakistanis have taken a liking to.

Green Books
On one day, I met with the inspector general of training and evaluation command, who is responsible for ensuring that the Pakistan learns lessons from past and current engagements. While meeting him, I first came across the army’s “Green Book” which, until recently, was published every two years since 1990. They are not doctrine, but they do represent internal conversations that the army has about key issues. I knew immediately that these volumes would be a treasure trove. He assured me that I could get them and that he would write a letter in support of it. Later that day, I met the commandant of the National Defense University. He too said he would support me obtaining the Green Books. Finally, the ISI also agreed that I should have whatever copies of past issues of Green Books are available. And then I waited—somewhat dubious that they would arrive.
Meanwhile, the protocol officer who accompanied me on all of these trips was a little fellow named Khaled who wore his jeans high up on his waist. He incessantly queried during our long car rides why it was that I had no boyfriend. That I was married was inadequate, he claimed, because I am an atheist. After all, without the threat of hell or the prospect of heaven, atheists have no incentive to behave morally.
These repeated conversations were tedious, and I endured them with as much aplomb as I could muster—my mustachioed minder ultimately proved quite useful. After suffering a concussion while exercising in my hotel room in Swat, I was recuperating in an Islamabad “nail saloon,” as they are called in Pakistan, where Khaled solicitously brought me several copies of the Green Book in a paper bag. (These books, among numerous other sources that I curated over several years, would comprise the empirical basis of Fighting to the End.)
Later, embarrassed by the provocative content of the Green Books, which I detailed in my own book, and their own apparent oversight in making the elaborate arrangements to provide them to me, the men in khaki began a whisper campaign alleging that I copied them surreptitiously from the National Defense University library during my two hour visit—which would have been physically impossible—or, in another version, that I outright stole them. But the ladies in the nail saloon know better.

The Frontier Corps

On another occasion, I visited the Frontier Corps training facility, a short distance outside of Peshawar in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. At the time, US personnel on-site expressed exasperation that the Pakistanis were slow-balling the training. The facility could train several hundred personnel, yet it was at one-fifth capacity or less. At that rate, it would take literally decades to adequately train all of the Frontier Corps.

And the men in the Frontier Corps, many of them ethnic Pashtuns, were already poorly positioned to survive a standoff with insurgents. They had no hazardous environment first-aid skills. If they were hit, their colleagues would toss them in the back of a Hilux pickup truck and speed back to base while they most likely bled out. If they somehow managed to survive the drive, there were only crude medical facilities awaiting them. I wanted to give them tampons, which are amazingly effectively in preventing a bleed out. But I didn’t think such a gesture would be appreciated.

What’s more, despite the incessant claims that Pashtuns are born shooters, corpsmen are, in fact, hopelessly reliant on ineffectual “spray-and-pray” techniques. Consequently, their foes were better trained and equipped than they were. Ironically, many of these “miscreants,” as the men shooting at them were called, had been trained by Pakistan’s own military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). This American-provided training aimed to help the corpsmen improve upon their shooting skills to better combat their adversaries. The Americans even provided highly specialized sniper training to those who proved themselves capable. Few were selected for the program and fewer yet graduated. Those who managed to graduate garnered an incredibly useful skill and a US model sniper rifle. Yet, it seemed, that the Pakistan army was working to keep the numbers of corpsmen trained low.

Some time earlier, I had vigorous arguments about this program with staff overseeing it in the Pentagon. I warned them that this program would go nowhere for several reasons. For one, the Frontier Corps had been long used by Pakistan’s army and the ISI to train militants for operations in Afghanistan. The men in Rawalpindi, where the army is headquartered, would be loath to give the Americans any kind of insight into organization.

Second, Pashtuns in Pakistan have long nursed episodic dreams of being merged with co-ethnics in Afghanistan into some kind of a greater Pashtunistan. During the subcontinental independence movement, some Pashtuns did not even want to join Pakistan; rather, they wanted to join India. While most Pashtuns are loyal citizens, Pakistan’s elites in and out of uniform have eyed Pashtuns with suspicion—not people to throw equipment and effective military training at. US special forces were ousted in early 2011, when Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor, shot and killed two alleged ISI contractors in Lahore. Since US special operators were running this program, it was the first to go. The ones who suffered from this policy were the Frontier Corpsmen, who continue to confront an enemy better positioned to battle them—now with even less training and few snipers.

Waziristan

On another occasion, I traveled to North and South Waziristan with the army and two other journalists. We were informed that they began evacuating the valley in 2009 in preparation for Operation Rah-e-Nijat, which was true. The logic, according to our briefer, was that anyone remaining in the area would be intent on fighting, and thus the Pakistani forces did not need to concern themselves with “collateral damage.”

Of course, it should be noted that the militants who wanted to fight another day just “squirted out,” in military parlance, with the civilians. And as soon as residents returned, the fighters would return with them, and the gains would be lost. In South Waziristan, we were shown the redoubts of the terrorists and the litter they left behind. We were told that Indian medicines were discovered as well as other supposedly telltale signs of Indian support to the Pakistani Taliban. Despite repeated requests for evidence over two months, Pakistani military personnel never provided it to me.

This wasn’t the only story that didn’t add up. We were told the Pakistanis essentially razed the area, but there was entirely too much infrastructure remaining for that to be the case. If they had genuinely hammered the place with F-16s and other combat aircraft, there should have been nothing. Instead, most of the buildings were still standing, albeit a bit worse for the wear. And the craters supposedly left by bombers were oddly placed, as if by design. It all seemed as if this was a well put-together war diorama for us—the war tourists.
The next series of plausible fictions were relayed when we visited a facility that the army claimed was used by commander Qari Hussain, the master trainer of Pakistani suicide bombers. I noticed various inscriptions that proclaimed the presence of numerous other commanders but none for commander Qari. I speak Urdu, and when I asked my handler to clarify he looked at me with puzzlement and queried, “Madam! You read Pashto?“ The word “commander” is the same in Pashto as Urdu, as he knew full well. He made no effort to provide proof of this important claim, and led us to the next exhibit.

We were led to a room where, according to our handlers, young boys were indoctrinated to blow themselves up. We saw various pictures of women engaging in domestic acts, like cleaning clothes and washing dishes in the river. The women’s eyes were scratched out. I asked my be-khakied tour guide why these women were painted on the walls in this way. He responded with the confidence that comes from repeating a canard over and over, that these were depictions of the houris, or celestial virgins, who would be waiting for the young bombers upon successful completion of their missions. But because the terrorists are staunch Muslims, the women could have no eyes. I rhetorically queried my guide, “Why they would paint them with eyes only to scratch them out? This makes no sense.” He had no response, as I suspected.

With increasing annoyance, I exclaimed “Who would want their celestial virgins cleaning their clothes and doing their laundry? Is it their mothers they want in heaven, or vixens?” Clearly these women were not painted on these walls to lure the young men to the gates of paradise. Other paintings suggested a more plausible explanation: this partially bombed out building had probably been a guesthouse.


Mangla
The final establishment I visited was the anti-terrorism training center at Mangla. All Pakistan military personnel undergo training at this facility before being deployed to tribal areas for military operations.
There, I came to appreciate one thing in particular: Pakistani military personnel who had not been deployed used the word “miscreant” for the killers that were savaging their country. After being deployed to the tribal areas and having been shot at by these proxies-gone wild, soldiers and officers no longer called them “miscreants.” They were “terrorists.”
First in a series of demonstrations, they showed me how they clear a room in a house in which militants were hiding without killing any present civilians. Having explained the objective, the men demonstrated their learning: one man approached the door and tossed in several grenades whereupon the rest of his unit entered the house. I asked just how this would prevent civilian casualties. My guide explained that they had already discerned that no civilians were in the house. Anything is possible with imagination, I suppose.
Next, the soldiers demonstrated how they would use a rope to climb a hill. During my orientation, I was told that Mangla “has a terrain that is absolutely like Waziristan.” I pointed out that was observably untrue. Waziristan is unforgivingly mountainous, but apparently because Mangla has a few hills, it was close enough.
One by one, they grabbed hold of the rope and, placing one hand above the other, they hauled themselves up the hill. I think I could’ve climbed that hill in a pair of flip flops, sans rope. I was puzzled, to say the least.
I asked my guide the obvious question of who would put the ropes in place in Waziristan. He declared “Madam! That is a good question. Presumably someone would land atop the mountain in a helicopter and emplace the rope.” I then asked why wouldn’t they just put everyone on the helicopter and deposit them on the hill, thus dispensing with the rope drama altogether. He was not amused.

My guide was relieved when we reached the final ride at the carnival: the Improvised Explosive Device Learning Center (IEDLC). For us both, the end was near. We were both frazzled and irritated: me at being lied to like a child, and him at being cornered about lying to me like a child. As we walked into the IEDLC library, there were tables placed along the walls of the room. The tables displayed items that are typically used in the manufacture of an IED used by insurgents. They included pressure cookers, parkas, among other quotidian household items. But an item at the far left of the first table caught my eye: a black, strapless brassiere. This was the smallest black bra I had ever seen. Anywhere. I had seen trainer bras that would accommodate more décolletage than this “made in China,” 32AAA number. You could not fit any significant amount of C-4 (military grade explosives) into it, and you certainly couldn’t cram in ball bearings, bolts, nails, or other sundries that become the deadly shrapnel. The pull cords to detonate the device were placed where playful tassels would be, if a stripper could somehow fit into this thing. I was livid at this final insult to common sense, as well as my wallet. After all, this dog and pony show too had been paid for by my tax dollars.

Really, I felt terribly for the men in Pakistan’s uniform, whether they were Pakistan’s regular forces or the Frontier Corps. Mostly these men, and many of their commanding officers, had no understanding that the people doing their best to kill them were the legitimate and illegitimate offspring of the purported strategic thinkers in the army and ISI. Even within the ISI itself, some were doing their best to eliminate those militants who began targeting the state, while others within the same organization were creating, aiding and abetting other terrorists and insurgents.

But I was exhausted, and frustrated at being repeatedly lied to. I couldn’t help but ask how such a preposterous “brassier-born IED“ could wreak even the slightest damage—by which time my game-show host had too grown exhausted with me. Without an appreciation of irony or humor, he exclaimed in exasperation, “Madam! Maybe it was a booby trap?”

Indeed. Maybe it was.

who evergave her this protocol should be sacked and she should be banned from setting foot on our soil.

 

[VCheng]

Bhai jaan,

US viewpoint is not singular entity. Then why so many Pakistanis make it so?

US viewpoint is very diverse but mainly groups along left vs. right.

And CF is clearly on the left.

So many educated Pakistanis settled in US and here in Pakistan do a huge disservice by tagging their favorite US analyst as to give us "All encompassing US view point exclusively".

Hope this explains.

Of course I agree with you in recognizing the diversity of opinions that are expressed in the US. There is nothing wrong with it, or with much of what CF says, given her own analyses.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

In a nutshell, what she puts forth for the underlying reason of conflict with India is that even though India vivisected Pakistan in 1971, Pakistan continues to see itself as India's equal and demands the world do the same.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that demand. The NSG itself was designed to not allow non-NPT signatory states, and by making an exemption for India, the NSG went against it's own fundamental principles. Pakistan's position is merely that the NSG develop a criteria for membership and exemptions for all States that are not NPT signatories, and that Pakistan (or Israel's) potential admission be considered on said standard criteria. If the goal of the NSG and related world 'clubs' is to minimize the risk of nuclear proliferation, putting in place standards and requirements that States have to meet in order to take advantage of trade via NSG member states only helps further that goal.

The tools that the army prefers to use, non-state actors under a nuclear umbrella, has brought international opprobrium upon the country and the army.

Pakistan is not the only, nor the first, State to use non-State actors. The US and its GCC allies continue to use said 'non-State actors', and have created a far greater threat to world peace in the form of ISIS than Pakistan ever did. Analysts like Fair choose to focus solely on Pakistan's ills and provide a distorted context to make it appear as if Pakistan alone pursues such policies, and distort the current impact of those policies to continue maligning and blaming Pakistan.

"Why does the army persist in pursuing these revisionist policies that have come to imperil the very viability of the state itself, from which the army feeds?"

What are these 'revisionist policies'?

This volume argues that the answer lies, at least partially, in the strategic culture of the army. From the army's distorted view of history, the army is victorious as long as can resist India's purported hegemony and the territorial status quo. To acquiesce is defeat. Because the army is unlikely to abandon these preferences, the world must prepare for an ever more dangerous future Pakistan.

What exactly is wrong with 'resisting India's hegemony' and refusing to accept the 'territorial status quo'? Has India officially stated that it will no longer contest the territory controlled by Pakistan or China in Kashmir and elsewhere? Has China accepted Taiwan as an independent nation that it no longer claims? Again, this is an example of the author providing a distorted and poisonous context to cast the Pakistan Army's actions/strategic culture (which are quite normal when compared to similar actions/strategic culture of other nations like India, China etc) as something 'evil and noxious and unique'.

To stay relevant in Pakistan society, the army needs to keep the pot boiling and Kashmir fits the bill to the tee!

This is a circular argument - as pointed out above, the goal of most militaries is to prevent the hegemony of hostile States over their own State, and Pakistan is not giving up on J&K just as India is not giving up on J&K or Arunachal Pradesh. To argue that such behavior (ingrained in any strong military) is unique to Pakistan is dishonest to say the least. And the 'pot' has not been boiling in Kashmir for over a decade now, largely due to the measures put in place by the Pakistani military under Musharraf, so there goes that particular claim as well.

Of course I agree with you in recognizing the diversity of opinions that are expressed in the US. There is nothing wrong with it, or with much of what CF says, given her own analyses.

There is nothing wrong with the basic facts that Fair references in her works - it is the distorted and narrow context in which she presents those facts and how she manipulates the narrative around those facts to give primacy to the fringe/extreme views to bolster her pre-determined conclusions maligning Pakistan that is the problem.

Anti-Semites would similarly find plenty of 'facts' about the actions taken by the State of Israel to build a horrific narrative about the nature of Israel and its 'evil' goals that are a 'threat to world peace'. Fair's narrative about Pakistan is no different.

 

[VCheng]

There is nothing wrong with the basic facts that Fair references in her works - it is the distorted and narrow context in which she presents those facts and how she manipulates the narrative around those facts to give primacy to the fringe/extreme views to bolster her pre-determined conclusions maligning Pakistan that is the problem.

Anti-Semites would similarly find plenty of 'facts' about the actions taken by the State of Israel to build a horrific narrative about the nature of Israel and its 'evil' goals that are a 'threat to world peace'. Fair's narrative about Pakistan is no different.

So how do they counter what they see as propaganda, and how do you propose to counter what you feel is propaganda coming from CF?

 

[FaujHistorian]

who evergave her this protocol should be sacked and she should be banned from setting foot on our soil.

Bhai jaan

She used to be pro-Pakistan and she lived and taught in Pakistan.

she is now not allowed back here.

Please learn a bit of history.

Thank you

........What exactly is wrong with 'resisting India's hegemony' and refusing to accept the 'territorial status quo'? Has India officially stated that it will no longer contest the territory controlled by Pakistan or China in Kashmir and elsewhere? Has China accepted Taiwan as an independent nation that it no longer claims? Again, this is an example of the author providing a distorted and poisonous context to cast the Pakistan Army's actions/strategic culture (which are quite normal when compared to similar actions/strategic culture of other nations like India, China etc) as something 'evil and noxious and unique

.

na na bhai jaan

Pakistanis should lay down and play dead.

Everyone else in the world has a right to context except except Pakistan.

hahahah


However if you really understand CF, she wants Pakistan to do all this but do it with style.

Yes Pakistanis could have contested India without losing 50,000 Pakistanis to the TTP goons, without getting Malala shot, without 150 tragedies of APS, without letting gang warfare in Karachi, without letting 2-bit Mullah buraqposh to create heavoc in Islu.


I hope you understand.

peace

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Do you have any official source to back up your claim that "Pashtun have also historically been a higher proportion of the Army (officers and soldiers) than their size as a proportion of the total population"?

According to ISPR in 2007 , the Pakhtuns were 13.5 % of total in army (lower proportion than their size of total population) and the plan was to increase it to 14.5% (still lower proportion than their population size of total)....
Punjab’s dominance in army being reduced: ISPR - Newspaper - DAWN.COM

P.S: The rest of your post is solid counter

Thanks for mentioning that. I could be wrong, but I always interpreted the ISPR report as focusing on recruitment numbers based on data by administrative units rather that actual language spoken.

For example, given the large population of Pakhtun in Balochistan and Sindh, would recruitment from those provinces make a distinction on the basis of the actual ethnic group or would it focus on 'domicile'? There is a thread on this particular Dawn article on the forum somewhere - we can continue the discussion there so as to not hijack this thread.

 

[FaujHistorian]

Thanks for mentioning that. I could be wrong, but I always interpreted the ISPR report as focusing on recruitment numbers based on data by administrative units rather that actual language spoken.

For example, given the large population of Pakhtun in Balochistan and Sindh, would recruitment from those provinces make a distinction on the basis of the actual ethnic group or would it focus on 'domicile'? There is a thread on this particular Dawn article on the forum somewhere - we can continue the discussion there so as to not hijack this thread.

yaaar. Please!

if you want to do to high tech stuff in USA, what will be your FIRST preference for setting up your office and recruitment?

Will it be
-- Hills of Kentucky
-- Silicon valley?



if you want to recruit infantry soldier in the USA, where would you go?
Will it be
-- Hills of Kentucky
-- Silicon valley?

Today every area of work needs professionals, and many a times professionals come from specific regions.

Therefore I do not believe in this thing that we must recruit from x or y region.

That only results in lowering the standards.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Yes Pakistanis could have contested India without losing 50,000 Pakistanis to the TTP goons, without getting Malala shot, without 150 tragedies of APS, without letting gang warfare in Karachi, without letting 2-bit Mullah buraqposh to create heavoc in Islu.

I hope you understand.

peace

I have argued for quite a few years now that Pakistan does not need 'non-State actors' within Pakistan for her security or to compete with India and/or Afghanistan. In my uninformed view, the military command realized this a while ago as well - the problem is with putting the 'evil genie back in the bottle'. These organizations have developed roots across Pakistan and ties within the political class, law enforcement, bureaucracy and military. While the military can (and has been) working on the internal issues, the depth and breadth of the problem requires the politicos to sign off.

You mentioned the Lal Masjid incident and how Pakistan itself tore down the institution that was trying to suppress that extremist religious threat. I'm not sure the military can carry out a much more massive cleansing operation across Pakistan without broad political and media support, and at the moment we can't even get the government to push through the Madrassa registration requirements, let alone trying to control their curriculum and activities.

 

[OrionHunter]

@AgNoStiC MuSliM Your sensible, balanced and rational arguments are a far cry from the trolling that goes on out here by most of your contemporaries! Nice! Keep up the good posts!

Cheers!