KS
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The enemy and Pakistan Army
- Thread starter Edevelop
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KS
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Well honestly all I can say is I dont know much about Zorastrianisman and since its founders also cant be pinpointed... wth...maybe its also old.
BTW then who is Zarathustara ? All along I ve been thinking he was the one who founded your religion.
vsdoc
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Zarathushtra was a poet, a reformer, a thinker, with divine powers, who Zoroastrians believe was the Prophet of Ahura Mazda.
Our faith does not start with him as a dateline, but as a continuum.
Older Persian theology was polytheistic, much as Hinduism continues to be today.
Then there a phase of Dualism as well.
Google for Mazdayasnism, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism.
hussain0216
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Its all heathen pagan rubbish
The Avestan language of Zarathustara is almost indistinguishable from Vedic Sanskrit, but markedly different from old Persian, which originated in South-Western Persia.
One data point about comparative dating of the Rig Veda and the Avesta comes from Varshagira Battle which apparently is mentioned in both the Rig Veda and the Avesta -
Also, the internal evidence of the Vedas indicates an East to West expansion - see Koenraad Elst: A great book about the Great Book
vsdoc
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All I can say with any surety is that they are sibling faiths, and that the people were very closely linked at one time before a split happened and two arms evolved separately.
There is always going to be intense debate about who came first.
Most of the world (Western and Persian) believes you came from us.
There is a huge lobby out of India that believes the opposite. And its not easy to disregard such when there are over a billion voices backing such a claim.
Regardless, I kind of get quite amazed at the similarities, and the more you read and search for something to bolster your own pet claim, the more fantastic connections one comes across.
There is always going to be intense debate about who came first.
Most of the world (Western and Persian) believes you came from us.
There is a huge lobby out of India that believes the opposite. And its not easy to disregard such when there are over a billion voices backing such a claim.
Regardless, I kind of get quite amazed at the similarities, and the more you read and search for something to bolster your own pet claim, the more fantastic connections one comes across.
vsdoc
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It is not for nothing that this part of the world is accepted as the cradle of human faith.
Regardless of how you look at the connection, or how far back one goes, it becomes clear that there is something about this region that has a connection that crosses the mortal and goes into the divine.
Maybe a portal that opens once every few thousand years.
Regardless of how you look at the connection, or how far back one goes, it becomes clear that there is something about this region that has a connection that crosses the mortal and goes into the divine.
Maybe a portal that opens once every few thousand years.
Asian.Century
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‘The Wrong Enemy,’ by Carlotta Gall
By PATRICK COCKBURNAPRIL 25, 2014
In December 2006, Carlotta Gall visited Quetta in Pakistan, close to the border with Afghanistan, to trace the families of Taliban suicide bombers. Her investigations were not welcome to the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the main intelligence arm of the Pakistan military, which was determined to hide its close relations with the Taliban. Plainclothes intelligence agents smashed open the door of her hotel room and seized her notebooks, computer and cellphone. She protested when one of the agents grabbed her handbag, and he promptly punched her twice in the face, knocking her down. The officer in charge accused her of trying to interview Taliban members, which he said was forbidden. She learned later that her rough treatment had been ordered by the head of the ISI press department to discourage her from reporting ISI-Taliban links.
It is these links that are the central subject of this highly informed book by Gall, who was Afghanistan bureau chief and correspondent for The New York Times between 2001 and 2011. The title of “The Wrong Enemy” is a quotation from Richard C. Holbrooke, the United States special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who said: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.” He was suggesting that America’s real opponent was the ISI and the Pakistan Army.
This is not a new thesis. For all the efforts of the ISI to hide Pakistani intervention in Afghanistan, some of it was too blatant and large-scale to be concealed. In November 2001, the sudden collapse of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan under the weight of American air attacks backed by local militiamen left thousands of Pakistanis trapped with the Taliban in the town of Kunduz. For about 15 days, one or two Pakistani flights a day rescued Pakistani military advisers, specialists, trainers and ISI members. Equally revealing about the ISI’s continuing connection to Al Qaeda was the discovery 10 years later that Osama bin Laden was a long-term resident of Abbottabad with a house close to the Kakul Military Academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. Gall makes clear the absurdity of imagining that nobody in the ISI, one of the most powerful and suspicious intelligence services in the world, knew he was there. She quotes Ejaz Shah, a former Pakistani domestic intelligence chief, as saying: “In a Pakistani village, they notice even a stray dog.”
What makes Gall’s book so convincing is the way in which her long experience of Afghanistan and Pakistan enables her to marshal the evidence for the Pakistan military being in control of the Taliban. Demonstrating a connection between the two is easy enough, but proof that the Taliban are essentially under orders from the ISI is more difficult, not least because Pakistani intelligence has operated through proxies and witnesses who are either too frightened to speak or are dead. The assault on Gall in 2006 was nothing compared with the punishment Pakistani journalists commonly receive for similar inquiries. “Saleem Shahzad, who wrote extensively about militancy and the ISI, was found dead in 2012 after being detained by intelligence agency personnel,” she says. “He was killed on the orders of Pakistan’s most senior generals.”
At times Gall may seem to labor the point about how Pakistan has masterminded the insurgency in Afghanistan since 2001, but it needs all the laboring it can get because Pakistan’s covert role was and is so central to developments there. It was never adequately realized in Washington that without confronting Pakistan, the American intervention in Afghanistan could not succeed. Gall writes that “for years American officials failed to recognize the huge investment in time, money and military effort that Pakistan had put into the Taliban from 1994 to 2001.” This changed for a couple of years after 9/11, but the Pakistani security and military establishment was still determined to dominate Afghanistan.
The United States never faced up to the fact that its most powerful ally in the region was also its most powerful enemy. As a result, it fought a war that it could never win in which Gall estimates between 50,000 and 70,000 Afghans have died, as well as 3,400 foreign soldiers, including 2,300 Americans. Between 2001 and 2013 Pakistan received more than $20 billion in aid from Washington, most of which went to the military.
The refusal of the Bush and Obama administrations to treat Pakistan as anything but a loyal ally in the war on terror seems as extraordinary in retrospect as it did at the time. Gall writes that “support for the relationship with Pakistan became a mantra” for American officials. They made only low-key demands for Pakistan to do something about cross-border infiltration. And only in 2007 did the United States begin keeping tabs on the links between the ISI and the Taliban; previously the C.I.A. had concentrated wholly on Al Qaeda. But by then religious schools in Pakistan were a common starting point for suicide bombers. When Gall asked the brother of a Pakistani bomber if he blamed the Taliban or the ISI for the bombings, he said: “All Taliban are ISI Taliban. It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the ISI.” A former Taliban commander, who had fled to Pakistan after being arrested in Afghanistan, said that ISI agents had threatened to send him to prison unless he returned to fight Americans.
Did American officials really underestimate Pakistani involvement or did they simply believe there was nothing much they could do about it?
Pakistan calculated correctly that as the American Army became bogged down in a guerrilla war in Iraq, it would be unable to conduct a second counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. In 2004 Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, considered the ablest Pakistani general by Western diplomats, became head of the ISI and three years later chief of army staff. Gall notes that it was during his tenure that “the Taliban received consistent protection and assistance from Pakistan, and came to threaten the entire U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan.”
A reason for Western ignorance or self-deception was that Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan was largely invisible or unprovable. By way of contrast, the failings of Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government were glaring and demonstrable. Corruption was pervasive, as shown by the gargantuan fraud at Kabul Bank and, at another level, by the deployment of nonexistent policemen whose pay was pocketed by their commanders. There was a vacuum of authority in Afghanistan that the Taliban were quick to fill.
The presence of a heavily armed foreign occupation army exacerbated the problem, and Gall gives vivid accounts of wedding parties torn apart by American airstrikes. Still, on the future of Afghanistan, she is (with reservations) unexpectedly optimistic. The Afghan government is not inevitably going to collapse as foreign troops depart, she says, because a majority of Afghans detest the Taliban, even if they are often too frightened to say so. All the same, she admits that the United States and its allies leave Afghanistan much as they found it, with “a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbors and extremist Islamists.”
THE WRONG ENEMY
America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014
By Carlotta Gall
Illustrated. 329 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.
By PATRICK COCKBURNAPRIL 25, 2014
In December 2006, Carlotta Gall visited Quetta in Pakistan, close to the border with Afghanistan, to trace the families of Taliban suicide bombers. Her investigations were not welcome to the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the main intelligence arm of the Pakistan military, which was determined to hide its close relations with the Taliban. Plainclothes intelligence agents smashed open the door of her hotel room and seized her notebooks, computer and cellphone. She protested when one of the agents grabbed her handbag, and he promptly punched her twice in the face, knocking her down. The officer in charge accused her of trying to interview Taliban members, which he said was forbidden. She learned later that her rough treatment had been ordered by the head of the ISI press department to discourage her from reporting ISI-Taliban links.
It is these links that are the central subject of this highly informed book by Gall, who was Afghanistan bureau chief and correspondent for The New York Times between 2001 and 2011. The title of “The Wrong Enemy” is a quotation from Richard C. Holbrooke, the United States special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who said: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.” He was suggesting that America’s real opponent was the ISI and the Pakistan Army.
This is not a new thesis. For all the efforts of the ISI to hide Pakistani intervention in Afghanistan, some of it was too blatant and large-scale to be concealed. In November 2001, the sudden collapse of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan under the weight of American air attacks backed by local militiamen left thousands of Pakistanis trapped with the Taliban in the town of Kunduz. For about 15 days, one or two Pakistani flights a day rescued Pakistani military advisers, specialists, trainers and ISI members. Equally revealing about the ISI’s continuing connection to Al Qaeda was the discovery 10 years later that Osama bin Laden was a long-term resident of Abbottabad with a house close to the Kakul Military Academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. Gall makes clear the absurdity of imagining that nobody in the ISI, one of the most powerful and suspicious intelligence services in the world, knew he was there. She quotes Ejaz Shah, a former Pakistani domestic intelligence chief, as saying: “In a Pakistani village, they notice even a stray dog.”
What makes Gall’s book so convincing is the way in which her long experience of Afghanistan and Pakistan enables her to marshal the evidence for the Pakistan military being in control of the Taliban. Demonstrating a connection between the two is easy enough, but proof that the Taliban are essentially under orders from the ISI is more difficult, not least because Pakistani intelligence has operated through proxies and witnesses who are either too frightened to speak or are dead. The assault on Gall in 2006 was nothing compared with the punishment Pakistani journalists commonly receive for similar inquiries. “Saleem Shahzad, who wrote extensively about militancy and the ISI, was found dead in 2012 after being detained by intelligence agency personnel,” she says. “He was killed on the orders of Pakistan’s most senior generals.”
At times Gall may seem to labor the point about how Pakistan has masterminded the insurgency in Afghanistan since 2001, but it needs all the laboring it can get because Pakistan’s covert role was and is so central to developments there. It was never adequately realized in Washington that without confronting Pakistan, the American intervention in Afghanistan could not succeed. Gall writes that “for years American officials failed to recognize the huge investment in time, money and military effort that Pakistan had put into the Taliban from 1994 to 2001.” This changed for a couple of years after 9/11, but the Pakistani security and military establishment was still determined to dominate Afghanistan.
The United States never faced up to the fact that its most powerful ally in the region was also its most powerful enemy. As a result, it fought a war that it could never win in which Gall estimates between 50,000 and 70,000 Afghans have died, as well as 3,400 foreign soldiers, including 2,300 Americans. Between 2001 and 2013 Pakistan received more than $20 billion in aid from Washington, most of which went to the military.
The refusal of the Bush and Obama administrations to treat Pakistan as anything but a loyal ally in the war on terror seems as extraordinary in retrospect as it did at the time. Gall writes that “support for the relationship with Pakistan became a mantra” for American officials. They made only low-key demands for Pakistan to do something about cross-border infiltration. And only in 2007 did the United States begin keeping tabs on the links between the ISI and the Taliban; previously the C.I.A. had concentrated wholly on Al Qaeda. But by then religious schools in Pakistan were a common starting point for suicide bombers. When Gall asked the brother of a Pakistani bomber if he blamed the Taliban or the ISI for the bombings, he said: “All Taliban are ISI Taliban. It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the ISI.” A former Taliban commander, who had fled to Pakistan after being arrested in Afghanistan, said that ISI agents had threatened to send him to prison unless he returned to fight Americans.
Did American officials really underestimate Pakistani involvement or did they simply believe there was nothing much they could do about it?
Pakistan calculated correctly that as the American Army became bogged down in a guerrilla war in Iraq, it would be unable to conduct a second counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. In 2004 Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, considered the ablest Pakistani general by Western diplomats, became head of the ISI and three years later chief of army staff. Gall notes that it was during his tenure that “the Taliban received consistent protection and assistance from Pakistan, and came to threaten the entire U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan.”
A reason for Western ignorance or self-deception was that Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan was largely invisible or unprovable. By way of contrast, the failings of Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government were glaring and demonstrable. Corruption was pervasive, as shown by the gargantuan fraud at Kabul Bank and, at another level, by the deployment of nonexistent policemen whose pay was pocketed by their commanders. There was a vacuum of authority in Afghanistan that the Taliban were quick to fill.
The presence of a heavily armed foreign occupation army exacerbated the problem, and Gall gives vivid accounts of wedding parties torn apart by American airstrikes. Still, on the future of Afghanistan, she is (with reservations) unexpectedly optimistic. The Afghan government is not inevitably going to collapse as foreign troops depart, she says, because a majority of Afghans detest the Taliban, even if they are often too frightened to say so. All the same, she admits that the United States and its allies leave Afghanistan much as they found it, with “a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbors and extremist Islamists.”
THE WRONG ENEMY
America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014
By Carlotta Gall
Illustrated. 329 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.
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