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I played make-believe with the Pakistani military

Is it more honest to "paint PA as a bunch of dedicated soldiers who are disciplined enough to be sent to war with little understanding of the military hierarchy's original motives" since that would be true for just about every Army worth its salt in the world?
Probably, but the point is that she's taking specific exercises and analyzing them in isolation and providing a demeaning context in order to provide her audience with an overall view of the Pakistan Army that is demeaning and vilifies it. It's what I pointed out before as well - snippets of facts woven together in a way that supports her predetermined views.

For example, she uses descriptions of Pakistani soldiers 'rappelling down hills that are not representative of FATA' as a means of depicting the Pakistani Army as 'bumbling and poorly trained' - Most soldiers deployed in FATA combat operations are not going to be rappelling down hills and mountains as part of an active assault while under hostile fire. Resorting to such tactics would imply an extremely inaccessible terrorist hideout or a hideout where traditional tracks/roads were being monitored and for whatever reason said hideout needed to be attacked with an element of surprise. You wouldn't be using regular troops in such a scenario anyway - It's a general exercise to cover the basics of rappelling.

Next she describes soldiers going through a house/room breaching exercise, "OMG, they threw grenades into the house/room before storming through the doors! How could they be sure no civilians were present!".

What 'specialized training' does your average soldier deployed in combat need to determine if a house is occupied with hostiles? Knock, knock, who's there? Hey, we've been taking heavy small arms fire from that group of houses over there - should we inquire if it's OK for us to visit and have a cup of tea and find out why they are trying to kill us?"

What the soldiers need to train for are room breaching tactics, not 'knock knock who's there' - soldiers would be ordered to resort to such a response only because the structure posed a threat, either an active one identified during combat or identified via intelligence reports.
 
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The author is a known liar and a cheat. She's been caught multiple times of making events up, I wouldn't take her words seriously.
 
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I would be interested in knowing what motives do you attribute this desire of hers to distort events and facts. What could she possibly gain from doing so?
I don't know. There are other Western critics of Pakistan, but almost none 'lose it' quite like Fair does when offering 'analysis' on Pakistan.

The level of hostility she displays would be understandable coming from certain Indian commentators (or certain Pakistani commentators talking about India), because it's representative of the 'brainwashed from childhood to hate the other' mindset we see sometimes from Indians and Pakistanis. If not that then she's getting paid to do it.
 
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She was amongst the first western journalists who clearly wrote about indian involvement in Balochistan and was widely appreciated.

According to her, she became a pakmil critic when she witnessed some bombings in Afghanistan and started questioning Pakistan's motive. According to her she was threatened with rape and blacklisted.

She is not the only author who has become fiercely anti pakmil.
 
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Is it more honest to "paint PA as a bunch of dedicated soldiers who are disciplined enough to be sent to war with little understanding of the military hierarchy's original motives" since that would be true for just about every Army worth its salt in the world?

For most cases this would be true because of the entirely different worlds that officers and enlisted men inhabit in conventional military but in Pakistan where even the GOC lives in a caravan in the Ops Area, I think that the troops have more fluid communication with their superior and thus possess a better understanding of the hierarchy's motives.

I would be interested in knowing what motives do you attribute this desire of hers to distort events and facts. What could she possibly gain from doing so?

Money, you'll be surprised at what a bag of dollars will get you. Pardon me but this might sound very pessimistic, the world is up for sale, people included, what you can afford, you buy and that is particularly true for the USA where lobby culture and the amount of influence journalists command has made it a hub for 'buying' suitable words for yourself and ill for your enemy. There is no stigma attached to it, for them its just good business and they will fellate the buyer while they write a wonderful article on their nation's role in geopolitics if need be.
 
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She is a pathological lair. One thing is for sure, she is never setting foot in Pakistan again.


I didn't read all this BS.. I stopped reading till she literally bitxhed about FC being Pashtun hence Pak not training them .. Because Pashtuns want to join india and Afghanistan... And how taliban were better trained than FC.... A complete U-turn... Than she moans about how ISI used FC to train taliban ? And how the PAK mil doesn't want to equip FC?


I mean Make up your Fukin mind beetch...

P.S: Interestingly at thT time General Tariq Khan was leading army operations .. Who himself is a Pashtun...


Her bitchin knows no bound.

You can easily place her in Anti- Pakistan and Army bashing group of intellectuals; saw some of her videos and surprised to know her Urdu language skills...I don't know when she switched sides but I cannot account a single instance where she was pro Pakistan or at least showed logical unbiased reasoning of the ground realities.


Since when the fuks did Commander translate the same in Urdu Aswell as Pashtu ? Amir vs Sipah salar?


In another article I read she claimed she visited "kangu"... BC kangu doesn't even exist its Hangu.
 
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Lies after lies after lies - it's pretty obvious this woman has a diseased mind wracked with an irrational hatred of Pakistanis and Pakistan, or perhaps it's just that she gets payed a lot by the Indians to churn out distorted rant after rant after rant ... Even where the author somehow manages to make a statement that is factually accurate, it's made in a context that undermines the statement, recasts it in a negative light and often ties into some concocted 'ethnic persecution by the Punjabi elite' conspiracy theory.

"They are not doctrine, but they do represent internal conversations that the army has about key issues. "

Correct, they are not doctrine, they are precisely as described, though the context that Fair said the above (as indicated by her various other articles and book) is not as innocuous as it seems here. The green book is comprised of essays written by PA officers and represent their personal opinions. Now, unless the PA required a majority of officers, if not every officer, to write an essay to be published in the green book, the green book can't be considered representative of the PA's thinking. There are other ways to determine whether the content of the essays in the green book represent broader thought in the PA - Who (and why) determines which essays get published? What rank and positions did the authors of the published essays rise to? etc.

"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."

The refusal to allow greater number of US trainers had more to do with a lack of trust in the US's intentions, given the fact that the US had negotiated a discriminatory waiver for India at the NSG and publicly refused to recognize the validity of Pakistani concerns about Baloch and TTP terrorists being trained and harbored in Afghanistan (a fact that was made clear in leaked US diplomatic cables that detailed conversations between Karzai and high level US officials on these issues). A larger US military footprint was also troublesome from the the perspective of a public backlash against the Pakistani military.

"And the men in the Frontier Corps, many of them ethnic Pashtuns, were already poorly positioned to survive a standoff with insurgents. "

The Frontier Corps has always been funded outside of the Army, usually as part of the interior ministry's budget, and it's is completely true that they have historically been a poorly trained and equipped force, primarily because they have historically been need for little more than tribal policing and as border guards. The TTP onslaught exposed these weaknesses but training and equipping the FC, when the regular Army itself was struggling to adapt to this new threat, went on the back-burner.

That said, Christine Unfair's goal in this FC narrative is to somehow distort resource and governance limitations into some kind of a 'evil Punjabi Army plot against the Pashtun', and she contradicts herself all over the place, as shown in the following excerpts:

"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)...
...For one, the Frontier Corps had been long used by Pakistan’s army and the ISI to train militants for operations in Afghanistan."


So which one is it, that the FC was in fact well trained by the ISI and in turn used to train the Taliban or that it was a poorly trained organization, deliberately left unequipped and untrained by the ISI because of the Pashtun demographic. Nothing exposes a liar and fraud more than when they trip all over themselves making contradictory assertions to somehow make everything fit into their xenophobic narrative, driven by an irrational (or paid) hatred of the subject.

"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."

But wait, wasn't this the same 'Pashtun Frontier Corps' that Christine Unfair earlier accused the ISI of using to train the Taliban? Why was the ISI OK with training, and equipping with weapons, tens of thousands of Pashtun if they didn't want to train the Pashtun ... OK, this woman's circular nonsense is mind-numbing, and I think I've made my point on the whole 'Pashtun Frontier Corp' training issue.

On the subject of Pashtunistan, the author threw that in there to muddy the waters and provide a false context of 'ethnic persecution', and then herself admitted that 'most Pashtun are loyal citizens' (an excellent example of what I pointed out in the beginning - this template of mixing factual statements in a distorted context to convince the reader that the outlier/fringe views are the most important takeaway). Yes, the Pashtun are overwhelmingly loyal citizens, and 98% of the Pashtun who voted in the NWFP referendum chose Pakistan, and overwhelming number even accounting for the Bacha Khan boycott. The Pashtun have also historically been a higher proportion of the Army (officers and soldiers) than their size as a proportion of the total population. So obviously the military at least has not had any of the xenophobia that the author attributes to the 'Pakistani Elite' (code for Punjabi), though it's probably because the irrational prejudice and hatred for Pakistan and Pakistanis that has blinded the author makes her view everything as some kind of 'xenophobic conspiracy'.

TBC

:) nicely summed up

Agno did you notice at one point she says she was mad at Pentagon for this training to Pakistani FC and was trying hard to convince them it was a waste of time and money while at another point she laments that many personnel could have been benefited but Pak army wants to keep the numbers of corpsmen trained low.

So if it was waste of money , her tax-payer money then why she is offended at if they want the number of corpsmen trained low

I didn't read all this BS.. I stopped reading till she literally bitxhed about FC being Pashtun hence Pak not training them .. Because Pashtuns want to join india and Afghanistan... And how taliban were better trained than FC.... A complete U-turn... Than she moans about how ISI used FC to train taliban ? And how the PAK mil doesn't want to equip FC?


I mean Make up your Fukin mind beetch...

P.S: Interestingly at thT time General Tariq Khan was leading army operations .. Who himself is a Pashtun...


Her bitchin knows no bound.




Since when the fuks did Commander translate the same in Urdu Aswell as Pashtu ? Amir vs Sipah salar?


In another article I read she claimed she visited "kangu"... BC kangu doesn't even exist its Hangu.

:)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) i was so enraged but then looking at her ignorance and confused sentences in this one piece of write up I dint consider it worth replying even
 
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She is just pro-herself... Sometimes back she used to be pro-Pakistan and then too 180* turn. She may very well be lying here as well.
 
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I don't know. There are other Western critics of Pakistan, but almost none 'lose it' quite like Fair does when offering 'analysis' on Pakistan.

The level of hostility she displays would be understandable coming from certain Indian commentators (or certain Pakistani commentators talking about India), because it's representative of the 'brainwashed from childhood to hate the other' mindset we see sometimes from Indians and Pakistanis. If not that then she's getting paid to do it.

Money, you'll be surprised at what a bag of dollars will get you. Pardon me but this might sound very pessimistic, the world is up for sale, people included, what you can afford, you buy and that is particularly true for the USA where lobby culture and the amount of influence journalists command has made it a hub for 'buying' suitable words for yourself and ill for your enemy. There is no stigma attached to it, for them its just good business and they will fellate the buyer while they write a wonderful article on their nation's role in geopolitics if need be.

Dr. Fair is a faculty member at a US university, and her sources of funding are a matter of public record, as are her tax returns. So the contention that somehow she is being paid by some particular lobby to say what she says is not supported by any evidence. Similarly, as an academician, she expresses her views honestly (more on that below), since she has to argue her case fairly if it is to be given any credence by her audience.

Probably, but the point is that she's taking specific exercises and analyzing them in isolation and providing a demeaning context in order to provide her audience with an overall view of the Pakistan Army that is demeaning and vilifies it. It's what I pointed out before as well - snippets of facts woven together in a way that supports her predetermined views.

For example, .....................

Here is the problem: what leads you to believe that the context provided by Dr. Fair is "demeaning"? Could it be due to your own bias that you have been conditioned to expect the Pakistan Army to always be painted in a favorable and suitably adulatory light all the time, and therefore what many others would regard as a balanced view seems demeaning to you?

For most cases this would be true because of the entirely different worlds that officers and enlisted men inhabit in conventional military but in Pakistan where even the GOC lives in a caravan in the Ops Area, I think that the troops have more fluid communication with their superior and thus possess a better understanding of the hierarchy's motives.

Good communication with a GOC in the field of operations is great, and helps the soldiers follow their orders effectively, but it does not give them any better understanding of what the strategic planning and motives are prevailing back in the GHQ. Again, this holds true for just about every Army out there.
 
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Give a tour to Asma Jahangeer and see what she says ( sarcasm )

Why are non technical persons given that level of info. There're three levels of info:

i. Visit and briefing for common journalists.

ii. Step by step tectic briefing for ex men turned journalists.

iii. Detailed briefing for military observers.


I think she is first degree customer given second degree treatment.
 
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Lies after lies after lies - it's pretty obvious this woman has a diseased mind wracked with an irrational hatred of Pakistanis and Pakistan, or perhaps it's just that she gets payed a lot by the Indians to churn out distorted rant after rant after rant ... Even where the author somehow manages to make a statement that is factually accurate, it's made in a context that undermines the statement, recasts it in a negative light and often ties into some concocted 'ethnic persecution by the Punjabi elite' conspiracy theory.

"They are not doctrine, but they do represent internal conversations that the army has about key issues. "

Correct, they are not doctrine, they are precisely as described, though the context that Fair said the above (as indicated by her various other articles and book) is not as innocuous as it seems here. The green book is comprised of essays written by PA officers and represent their personal opinions. Now, unless the PA required a majority of officers, if not every officer, to write an essay to be published in the green book, the green book can't be considered representative of the PA's thinking. There are other ways to determine whether the content of the essays in the green book represent broader thought in the PA - Who (and why) determines which essays get published? What rank and positions did the authors of the published essays rise to? etc.

"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."

The refusal to allow greater number of US trainers had more to do with a lack of trust in the US's intentions, given the fact that the US had negotiated a discriminatory waiver for India at the NSG and publicly refused to recognize the validity of Pakistani concerns about Baloch and TTP terrorists being trained and harbored in Afghanistan (a fact that was made clear in leaked US diplomatic cables that detailed conversations between Karzai and high level US officials on these issues). A larger US military footprint was also troublesome from the the perspective of a public backlash against the Pakistani military.

"And the men in the Frontier Corps, many of them ethnic Pashtuns, were already poorly positioned to survive a standoff with insurgents. "

The Frontier Corps has always been funded outside of the Army, usually as part of the interior ministry's budget, and it's is completely true that they have historically been a poorly trained and equipped force, primarily because they have historically been need for little more than tribal policing and as border guards. The TTP onslaught exposed these weaknesses but training and equipping the FC, when the regular Army itself was struggling to adapt to this new threat, went on the back-burner.

That said, Christine Unfair's goal in this FC narrative is to somehow distort resource and governance limitations into some kind of a 'evil Punjabi Army plot against the Pashtun', and she contradicts herself all over the place, as shown in the following excerpts:

"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)...
...For one, the Frontier Corps had been long used by Pakistan’s army and the ISI to train militants for operations in Afghanistan."


So which one is it, that the FC was in fact well trained by the ISI and in turn used to train the Taliban or that it was a poorly trained organization, deliberately left unequipped and untrained by the ISI because of the Pashtun demographic. Nothing exposes a liar and fraud more than when they trip all over themselves making contradictory assertions to somehow make everything fit into their xenophobic narrative, driven by an irrational (or paid) hatred of the subject.

"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."

But wait, wasn't this the same 'Pashtun Frontier Corps' that Christine Unfair earlier accused the ISI of using to train the Taliban? Why was the ISI OK with training, and equipping with weapons, tens of thousands of Pashtun if they didn't want to train the Pashtun ... OK, this woman's circular nonsense is mind-numbing, and I think I've made my point on the whole 'Pashtun Frontier Corp' training issue.

On the subject of Pashtunistan, the author threw that in there to muddy the waters and provide a false context of 'ethnic persecution', and then herself admitted that 'most Pashtun are loyal citizens' (an excellent example of what I pointed out in the beginning - this template of mixing factual statements in a distorted context to convince the reader that the outlier/fringe views are the most important takeaway). Yes, the Pashtun are overwhelmingly loyal citizens, and 98% of the Pashtun who voted in the NWFP referendum chose Pakistan, and overwhelming number even accounting for the Bacha Khan boycott. The Pashtun have also historically been a higher proportion of the Army (officers and soldiers) than their size as a proportion of the total population. So obviously the military at least has not had any of the xenophobia that the author attributes to the 'Pakistani Elite' (code for Punjabi), though it's probably because the irrational prejudice and hatred for Pakistan and Pakistanis that has blinded the author makes her view everything as some kind of 'xenophobic conspiracy'.

TBC

Saw a video of her after the Peshawar attack where she was being interviewed by a 'journalist' on her views on the whole situation and she held the view that the PA and Pakistani nation is shedding crocodile tears and don't really care about the incident and nothing will change because there had been attacks on schools earlier and what change did that bring about.

Conveniently, she chose not to mention that never before were school children intentionally massacred in such a brazen manner and the earlier school attacks were on empty schools in attempts to blow them up. To her, blowing up an empty school and killing more than 140 innocent children are the same thing.
 
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Dr. Fair is a faculty member at a US university, and her sources of funding are a matter of public record, as are her tax returns. So the contention that somehow she is being paid by some particular lobby to say what she says is not supported by any evidence. Similarly, as an academician, she expresses her views honestly (more on that below), since she has to argue her case fairly if it is to be given any credence by her audience.



Here is the problem: what leads you to believe that the context provided by Dr. Fair is "demeaning"? Could it be due to your own bias that you have been conditioned to expect the Pakistan Army to always be painted in a favorable and suitably adulatory light all the time, and therefore what many others would regard as a balanced view seems demeaning to you?



Good communication with a GOC in the field of operations is great, and helps the soldiers follow their orders effectively, but it does not give them any better understanding of what the strategic planning and motives are prevailing back in the GHQ. Again, this holds true for just about every Army out there.


if a faculty member in a US university changes his/her stance 180 degrees, the most logical explanation is "funding" for the research.

you say it is matter of public record. I say it ain't so.

yes, you can find about big name funds like endowments etc. but for a history professor even 50,000 a year extra funds are huge. And they are not "public records" i.e. you cannot simply google for it.

This thread is about an extremely prejudicial piece.

A good academic would have done a modeling of behavior say of Pak army, then compared to multiple alternatives from the region and beyond.

Only then we say it is "research",

Otherwise it is simply an OpEd and many a times OpEds are $hit buckets.

Hope this explains her writings.


No matter what though, OP was written in 2010. 5 years today is like 100 years of the past.

Things are changing so rapidly.

peace

Saw a video of her after the Peshawar attack where she was being interviewed by an 'Indian journalist' on her views on the whole situation and she held the view that the PA and Pakistani nation is shedding crocodile tears and don't really care about the incident and nothing won't change because there had been attacks on schools earlier and what change did that bring about.

Conveniently, she chose not to mention that never before were school children intentionally massacred in such a brazen manner and the earlier school attacks were on empty schools in attempts to blow them up. To her, blowing up an empty school and killing more than 140 innocent children was the same thing.

Link?
 
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if a faculty member in a US university changes his/her stance 180 degrees, the most logical explanation is "funding" for the research.

you say it is matter of public record. I say it ain't so.

yes, you can find about big name funds like endowments etc. but for a history professor even 50,000 a year extra funds are huge. And they are not "public records" i.e. you cannot simply google for it.

This thread is about an extremely prejudicial piece.

A good academic would have done a modeling of behavior say of Pak army, then compared to multiple alternatives from the region and beyond.

Only then we say it is "research",

Otherwise it is simply an OpEd and many a times OpEds are $hit buckets.

Hope this explains her writings.


No matter what though, OP was written in 2010. 5 years today is like 100 years of the past.

Things are changing so rapidly.

peace



Link?

Here:

Watch it and you'll see how obscure her view of Pakistan is. What I mentioned is just the tip of the iceberg. She made the attack out to be girls v boys schools, civilians v army schools, Muslims v Non- Muslims casualties. She didn't even have the decency to condemn the attack even once or had any sympathies for the fallen.

Her narrative throughout is anti Pakistan. She doesn't even give Pak the benefit of doubt, whoever is against Pak is the side she's on, be it India or Afghanistan. This one 'analysis' is enough to discredit anything she's ever said.

Correction: The journalist wasn't Indian, correction made in the original post as well .
 
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if a faculty member in a US university changes his/her stance 180 degrees, the most logical explanation is "funding" for the research.

you say it is matter of public record. I say it ain't so.

yes, you can find about big name funds like endowments etc. but for a history professor even 50,000 a year extra funds are huge. And they are not "public records" i.e. you cannot simply google for it.

This thread is about an extremely prejudicial piece.

A good academic would have done a modeling of behavior say of Pak army, then compared to multiple alternatives from the region and beyond.

Only then we say it is "research",

Otherwise it is simply an OpEd and many a times OpEds are $hit buckets.

Hope this explains her writings.


No matter what though, OP was written in 2010. 5 years today is like 100 years of the past.

Things are changing so rapidly.

peace.........

Let me put it this way. If anyone disagrees with her work, the best way is to counter it with work of comparable quality that presents the opposing point of view. Calling her a liar or paid agent will not not do anything to the veracity of her work and its influence. Her work on the Army may not be very flattering, but it is fairly robust by academic standards. Please note that I am not agreeing with what she says, but I can still respect the quality of her work academically.
 
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Here:

Watch it and you'll see how obscure her view of Pakistan is. What i mentioned is just the tip of the iceberg. She made the attack out to be girls v boys schools, civilians v army schools, Muslims v Non- Muslims casualties. She didn't even have the decency to condemn the attack even once, she had no sympathies for the fallen. This one 'analysis' is enough to discredit anything she's ever said.

Correction: The journalist wasn't Indian, correction made in the original post as well .


----- youtube.com/watch?v=-ah7oj5CmPo

Watched the video. Thanks.

Here are my comments:

1. If for a moment you take away the conspiracy oriented tone, she has made good points.
2. She says Pakistani English media may be telling one thing, but Urdu media is misleading us when it comes Taliban.
--- She is right
3. She says Pakistani nation is not serious about eliminating Taliban
--- She is right


So in essence, we should not dismiss her just because we do not like her tone.

We must be serious about tackling our problems and not simply blame them on India. So far I believe our masses want to eliminate major issues. So far I see that we are supporting army on grass roots level.

However most of our so called leaders are non-serious.

IK, Zardari, Altaf, and Mullahs are openly hostile against any efforts to cleanse our society. They are creating instability that will clearly hinder nay derail Gen. Rahil's efforts to bring normalcy to the country.

There are conspiracy theories against sitting gov of NS that he too does behind the scene things like "encouraging" Zardari to make anti-Army statements.

Our media is willing to do its black role of spreading anarchy in the country.

So if you view all this, how could we ever blame Dr. Fair for her assessment.

How?
 
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