Tariq Ali in a seminal article has castigated Mr. Rashid and his nonsense. Those who the Gods want to destroy, they first make angry–or so goes one of the oldest Greek sayings, that depicts the raving mad rant of the Hoodbhoy’s Neocon clone called Ahmed Rashid. It was Mr. Rashid’s rant that has exacerbated the situation in Afghanistan, and led to the pushing over of the Indian mercenaries and insurgents into Pakistan. Mr. Rashid calls all this “conspiracy”. Parhaps he should read the latest news story in the Guardian which describes the deceit and lies that led to the war in Iraq. A quick browsing of the Times of India will also show him how the BJP used the Babri Masjid demolition to enhance its electoral win.
Despite the announcements by General Kiyani, Prime Minister Gilani, Interior Minsiter Rahman Malik, and Foreign Minister Mahmood Qureshi about Indian involvement in FATA and Balochistan—Mr. Ahmed Rashid describes all this as “conspiracy”. I suppose the entire government, people, media, army, ISI and press are involved in some conspiracy to propagate conspiracy theory—”awaz e khalq ko naqara khuda sumjho”. Mr. Rashid the great America lover, and believer in democracy, doesn’t really care what the people of Pakistan are saying. This epetome of “knowledge” who teaches at a third rate open admisison party university in Islamabad knows it all. Mr. Rashid castigates the “illiterate” talk show hosts who invite guests ‘with long beards”. This line from his article duly published by the paragon of veracity the BBC–was so funny that I still cannot hide my smile.
Ahmed Rashid is a two bit professor at an open admission 3rd rate university in Pakistan. He often writes what the Americans want to hear, or takes dictation from the Americans and writes what they tell him to. Right now the current theme is--Attack FATA. Rashid provides them with many a spurious argument to send more troops and wipe out the Pashtuns opposing the occupation. Within Afghanistan, Rashid’s principal backer and friend is Hamid Karzai who has now managed to antagonize even the tamest US liberals such as Peter Galbraith, recently sacked as a UN honcho in Kabul because he suggested that Karzai had rigged the elections. Rashid the journalist has no time for people who suggest that Karzai is a corrupt rogue, whose family is now the richest in the country, or that he manipulates US public opinion with the aid of PR companies, friends in Washington and, of course, Ahmed Rashid himself.
Many Pakistanis blame others for the country’s problems
Guest columnist Ahmed Rashid on how the real problems facing Pakistan are being sidelined by a surge of conspiracy theories
Switch on any of the dozens of satellite news channels now available in Pakistan.
You will be bombarded with talk show hosts who are mostly obsessed with demonising the elected government, trying to convince viewers of global conspiracies against Pakistan led by India and the United States or insisting that the recent campaign of suicide bomb blasts around the country is being orchestrated by foreigners rather than local militants.
Viewers may well ask where is the passionate debate about the real issues that people face – the crumbling economy, joblessness, the rising cost of living, crime and the lack of investment in health and education or settling the long-running insurgency in Balochistan province.
Mr. Rashid thinks that Hamid Mir, Mr. Abbasi, and Shahid Masood are illiterate, and General talat Masood, Hamid Gul and ohters have beards.
What utter garbage and nonsense. Mr. Rashid is an anomoly. He is a plant in Islamabad University which is now fast becoming a nest of spies led by Mr. Hoodbhoy and Mr. Rashid.
Both have to be challenged intellectually and exposed for this lies, deciet and Anti-Pakistan activities.
The principle obsession is when and how President Asif Ali Zardari will be replaced or sacked
Send your views on this column
The answer is nowhere.
One notable channel which also owns newspapers has taken it upon itself to topple the elected government and appears to hardly ever air democratic views.
Another insists that it will never air anything that is sympathetic to India, while all of them bring on pundits – often retired hardline diplomats, bureaucrats or retired Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officers who sport Taliban-style beards and give viewers loud, angry crash courses in anti-Westernism and anti-Indianism, thereby reinforcing views already held by many.
Did Ahmed Rashid lead the Americans down the primrose path and sell them down the river. Let us take a view from London. leftist Pakistani Britisher certainly thinks that Ahmed Rashid the journalist sold the Americans marshy swampland in Florida when he was pushing them to keep sending more troops to Afghainstan while keeping Mr. Karzai, as the puppet “Mayor of Kabul”.
The main people who consult Rashid, apart from Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books, are US policy-makers in favor of a continuous occupation of Afghanistan. Rashid provides them with many a spurious argument to send more troops and wipe out the Pashtuns opposing the occupation. Within Afghanistan, Rashid’s principal backer and friend is Hamid Karzai who has now managed to antagonize even the tamest US liberals such as Peter Galbraith, recently sacked as a UN honcho in Kabul because he suggested that Karzai had rigged the elections. Rashid the journalist has no time for people who suggest that Karzai is a corrupt rogue, whose family is now the richest in the country, or that he manipulates US public opinion with the aid of PR companies, friends in Washington and, of course, Ahmed Rashid himself. Tariq Ali. Counterpunch. Karzai’s Scribe Ahmed Rashid’s War By TARIQ ALI
Collapse of confidence
Pakistan is going through a multi-dimensional series of crises and a collapse of public confidence in the state.
Suicide bombers strike almost daily and the economic meltdown just seems to get worse.
But this is rarely apparent in the media, bar a handful of liberal commentators who try and give a more balanced and intellectual understanding by pulling all the problems together.
Afghan Surge fiasco: Ahmed Rashid’s bad advice 
The media debate ‘misses real Pakistani life’
The explosion in TV channels in Urdu, English and regional languages has bought to the fore large numbers of largely untrained, semi-educated and unworldly TV talk show hosts and journalists who deem it necessary to win viewership at a time of an acute advertising crunch, by being more outrageous and sensational than the next channel.
On any given issue the public barely learns anything new nor is it presented with all sides of the argument.
Every talk show host seems to have his own agenda and their guests reflect that agenda rather than offer alternative policies.
Recently one senior retired army officer claimed that Hakimullah Mehsud – the leader of the Pakistani Taliban which is fighting the army in South Waziristan and has killed hundreds in daily suicide bombings in the past five weeks – has been whisked to safety in a US helicopter to the American-run Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.
In other words the Pakistani Taliban are American stooges, even as the same pundits admit that US-fired drone missiles are targeting the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan.
These are just the kind of blatantly contradictory and nut-case conspiracy theories that get enormous traction on TV channels and in the media – especially when voiced by such senior former officials.
The explosion in civil society and pro-democracy movements that bought the former military regime of President Pervez Musharraf to its knees over two years has become divided, dissipated and confused about its aims and intentions.
Troops and militants are fighting in South Waziristan
Even when such activists do appear on TV their voices are drowned out by the conspiracy theorists who insist that every one of Pakistan’s ills are there because of interference by the US, India, Israel and Afghanistan.
The army has not helped by constantly insisting that the vicious Pakistani Taliban campaign to topple the state and install an Islamic emirate is not a local campaign waged by the dozens of extremist groups, some of whom were trained by the military in the 1990s, but the result of foreign conspiracies.
While the Whitehouse debates focused on COIN, nation building, surges and the arcane notion of hot to get OBL, the US military were busy reading the works of of Ahmed Rashid the brother of a former Pakistani military Chief of Staff and think tanks. Its as if the Obama Administration was too busy with Healthcare and the Economic melthdown and missed the two major earthquakes, the economic mess, and defeat in Afghanistan. We can’t defeat the Taliban: British Army Chief in Afghanistan. The country has now accepted to the new reality in West Asia. the issue was not OBL, but how quickly to get out of Afghanistan. Talibal is Indefatigable: UK Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith
Apparently the British who had led the charge of Lightbrigade were not in an economic condition to spend $500 per year on Iraq. . British tried to take up White Man’s burden in Afghanistan. It suffered badly in Kabul and could not hold it. NATO Lessons: 1880 UK defeat at Maiwand-Afghanistan. Today ISAF is making the same mistakes as the British did more than a century ago. Is NATO committing suicide in Afghanistan? The UK refused to transfer the troops to Afghanistan and many of the Europeans in Afghanistan either refused to take an active role in the war or simply wanted to bring their boys home
Ahmed Rashid’s bad advice about Pakistan
Afghanistan: Did Ahmed Rashid sell the American down the river?
Economic crisis
Such statements by the military hardly do justice to the hundreds of young soldiers who are laying down their lives to fight the Taliban extremists.
Nor has the elected government of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) tried to alter the balance, as it is mired in ineffective governance and widespread corruption while failing to tackle the economic recession, that is admittedly partly beyond its control.
Moreover the PPP has no talking pundits, sympathetic talk show hosts or a half decent media management campaign that can attempt to refute the lies and innuendo that much of the media is now spewing out.
At present the principle obsession is when and how President Asif Ali Zardari will be replaced or sacked, although there is no apparent constitutional course available to get rid of him except for a military coup, which is unlikely.
The campaign waged by some politicians and parts of the media – with underlying pressure from the army – is all about trying to build public opinion to make Mr Zardari’s tenure untenable.
Pakistan is caught in a spiral of violence
Nobody discusses the failure of the education system that is now turning out hundreds of suicide bombers, rather than doctors and engineers.
Or the collapsing and corrupt national health system that forces the poorest to seek expensive private medical treatment, or the explosion in crime or suicides by failed farmers and workers who have lost their jobs.
Pakistan cannot tackle its real problems unless the country’s leaders – military and civilian – first admit that much of the present crisis is a result of long-standing mistakes, the lack of democracy, the failure to strengthen civic institutions and the lack of investment in public services like education, even as there continues to be a massive investment in nuclear weapons and the military.
Pakistan’s crisis must be first acknowledged by officialdom and the media before solutions can be found.
The alternative is a continuation of the present paralysis where people are left confused, demoralised and angry.
Ahmed Rashid is the author of the best-selling book Taliban and, most recently, of Descent into Chaos: How the war against Islamic extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Here is Tariq Ali refuting Mr. Rashid’s claptrap.
Rachman writes:
“Personally, I have been having cold feet myself and wondering whether the West should pull out of a losing battle in Afghanistan. But Rashid paints a hair-raising picture of what would happen if the US stepped away. He foresees a renewed civil war in Afghanistan, with the Afghan Taliban backed by the Pakistani army, battling it out with the forces of Karzai and the Northern Alliance, backed by Iran. Taking a step further back, the Chinese would be standing in the Afghan-Pakistani- Talib corner, while the Indians backed the other side. The Pakistanis meanwhile would find themselves suffering from the Taliban blowback, caused by the very Afghan war they were sponsoring. It doesn’t sound great. But how long is Nato prepared to stay in the ring?”
I’m glad that Rachman has been getting cold feet. He’s not alone. The picture Rashid paints is deliberately alarmist and based largely on fantasy; throwing in China is crude but designed to appeal to the revanchists in the Pentagon. Rashid does need help. How can the West cure poor Ahmed’s depression? He would recover rapidly if the US remained permanently in Afghanistan and took over Pakistan as well but that would require half-a-million US troops and the killing of a million or more Af-Paks. It’s a heavy price to pay for making Rashid feel better. A simpler route might be to get Zardari to give him a big job, failing which, he could move to the UN since Galbraith’s job is vacant. I remember Rashid in the old days being extremely sceptical when, after attending a conference in the Soviet Union in 1985, I told him that Gorbachev was going to pull out all Russian troops within a few years. He found that, too, difficult to believe and was, no doubt, equally depressed.
Some of us have been arguing for many years that more troops and more Afghan deaths is totally counter-productive. An exit strategy that involves Iran, Russia and China as well as Pakistan and a national coalition in Afghanistan is the only medium-term solution. Washington has been negotiating privately with the Pashtun resistance and the neo-Taliban have made it clear that once a NATO withdrawal began they would work with other groups and participate in a national government.
