Pakistan flags waved in five Indian districts

GAUHATI: Depressed from government actions people in Assam waved Pakistan’s flags in five districts.Thirty people have so far been killed in various clashes and official properties in a large number have been damaged.As usual, the Indian government, blaming Pakistani agencies for the violence, has ordered an immediate enquiry for this incident.This has also been reported that racial clashes have taken place in Assam due to which thousands of people became homeless.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week praised the recent efforts of the Pakistani Army in bolstering a US military offensive into the semi-autonomous North West Frontier Province. The US wants to target militants who attack its occupation forces in neighboring Afghanistan and then flee into Pakistan to regroup and organize. Pakistan has a new civilian government, having replaced the long-time US ally, former General Pervez Musharraf. It faces a challenge that its predecessors have often grappled with: how to deal with the tensions between fundamentalist tribal militias including the Taliban, the Pakistani military that tacitly supports such militias, and the US government that finances the Army? Here in the United States, it has become a central foreign policy issue: what to do about Pakistan, simultaneously an ally in the “war on terror,” and a source of anti-US fundamentalism?

The fall of the Dollar Empire

The US economy has grown largely on the back of speculative credit derivatives that have risen exponentially to $ 35 trillion, which is more than double the size of the entire US economy! This is an approaching iceberg, and all you’ve seen (in the sub-prime scandal) is the tip.

Should one consider the US crisis as an opportunity for booming economies like India and China to assume a more important role in the world’s markets?

They already have. The US is totally dependent on China’s goodwill. If the US were to ban all imports from China tomorrow morning the US economy would suffer a heart attack as it would have to import those same goods more expensively from elsewhere. In retaliation, the Chinese would sell their surplus Dollar mountain and precipitate a global economic depression. The emerging economies would be better able to withstand such an Armageddon scenario because they are accustomed to hardship, while decadent US consumers are already bankrupt despite an environment of extended global economic growth. The US would probably suffer riots, internal conflict and starvation for the first time in 80 years. Emerging economies are used to economic hardship and even war. The US is much more fragile than its leaders and economic pundits admit. There is a huge fundamental and conceptual difference between a) going from recession to depression (the USA), and b) going from 10 % + economic growth to a more reasonable 3 % economic growth (Russia, India, China, ….).

$700bn — five times Pakistan’s GDP

SHOCKWAVES from the global credit crisis spread this week, threatening industry and jobs worldwide and putting pressure on the US Congress to pass a $700 billion bailout of the financial sector.

But how much is $700 billion — what can it buy? Compared to the debt of the United States, which the Treasury has asked to increase to $11.315 trillion to fund the plan, it doesn’t seem much.Here are a few of the things that can be done with $700 billion:

— The United States has spent more than $800 billion on the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations since 2001.

— Just 12 Bill Gateses could foot the bailout bill. The Microsoft founder tops Forbes US rich list with a personal fortune estimated at $57 billion.

— Collectively, the 400 richest Americans have a net worth of $1.57 trillion, or roughly twice the value of the bailout.

— $700 billion is roughly equal to the GDP of Netherlands, or five times that of Pakistan.

— It is only $100 billion short of the combined GDP of all of Africa.

— It is only $78 billion more than the US defence budget.

— It would buy around 130 of the latest, biggest aircraft carriers, which cost $5.3 billion each.

— The plan could be funded with the market capitalisations of the world’s two largest oil companies, Exxon Mobil Corp and PetroChina, which stand at $403 billion and $325 billion respectively. There would even be $28 billion in change.

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USA 2008: The Great Depression

Food stamps are the symbol of poverty in the US. In the era of the credit crunch, a record 28 million Americans are now relying on them to survive – a sure sign the world’s richest country faces economic crisis.

We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families.
Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.

And the next monthly job numbers, to be released this Friday, are likely to show 50,000 more jobs were lost nationwide in March, and the unemployment rate is up to perhaps 5 per cent.

US cannot afford to see Pakistan fail but its options in Pakistan are diminishing rapidly.

A panel of top Pakistan experts and former US officials, including Richard Armitage, the man who threatened to bomb Pakistan into the Stone Age and Rep. Lee Hamilton, who headed the 9/11 Commission, has prepared a detailed report which says the US cannot afford to see Pakistan fail but its options in Pakistan are diminishing rapidly.

"Pakistan may be the single greatest challenge facing the next American President...Washington needs to rethink its approach to Pakistan. If we genuinely believe that a stable, prosperous Pakistan is in our interest, we must be much smarter about how we work with Pakistan and what sort of assistance we provide," the report released by the Pakistan Policy Working Group says.The Group claims to be an independent, bipartisan group of American experts on USñPakistan relations and was formed in January 2008 to assess the state of these relations and to offer ideas to the next US President and his Administration on managing this critical partnership.

It says effecting smarter diplomacy in this environment laden with political unrest and palpable anti-Americanism, the US is facing tremendous diplomatic challenges. "Given the disappointments with Pakistan's elected government, some in the US may feel nostalgia for the days when President Musharraf wore his uniform and commanded a docile parliament. But just as the US was too slow in detecting the public disaffection with President Musharraf before the 2008 elections, it must not too quickly lose patience with Pakistan's elected leaders."

'India is no longer enemy no. 1 for Pakistan'

How much should India fear Pakistan, considering a recent BBC 23-nation survey found that Pakistan and Egypt were the only countries to take a relatively positive view of al-Qaida. The poll said that only 19% of Pakistani respondents had a negative view of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. Should this be reason enough for India to worry about the stability and intentions of its next-door neighbour? Pakistani experts don’t think so.

They say the survey actually shows Pakistanis as desperately keen to oppose the US rather than support al-Qaida. "I don’t think the public makes a distinction between opposing the United States and supporting the al-Qaida," says Ahmad Bilal Mehboob, executive director of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT). "Washington has been backing unpopular regimes in both Egypt and Pakistan, thus giving birth to anti-US feelings, besides imposing the war against terror," he adds.

Kamran Rahmat, Islamabad-based news editor of television channel Dawn News, points to an "overriding anti-America public sentiment" in Pakistan. There is some dispute over whether this anger is directed at the US as a whole or the Bush administration. Surprisingly, India seems to have gained from this turn of events as it is no longer seen as Pakistan’s Enemy Number One. Political analyst Ijaz Shafi Gilani says, "Undoubtedly, India was perceived as enemy number one by the Pakistani people for decades but that has changed over the last couple of years." He says that Pakistan’s rising hostility towards the US has tempered the anti-India feeling. A Gallup poll in Pakistan, conducted in 2007, showed greater support (compared to previous years) for trade with India, followed by support for relaxing bilateral visa arrangements.

There was less support for boosting bilateral cultural exchange. Similarly, a 2006 Gallup survey showed that half of the respondents favoured Pakistani actors working in the Indian entertainment industry, but 49% were against this and 1% said they were undecided or had no opinion. But anti-India feelings do persist. Tariq Rahman, a professor at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University, says many Pakistanis believe that Indian consulates along the Afghan border are stoking low-intensity conflict in Balochistan and indirectly funding the Taliban. However, he insists that this anti-India feeling is greater in the NWFP region and Punjab, not in Sindh or Karachi. Noted columnist Ayaz Amir says there is a feeling in some quarters that General Pervez Musharraf and his successor as president, Asif Zardari, have gone too far in their attempts to please the Indian leadership. He also believes that Islamabad has overstepped the mark in its repeated denunciations of terrorism.

Biden and Palin on Pakistan,Iran and Afghanistan

Biden: "John [McCain] continues to tell us that the central war in the front on terror is in Iraq. I promise you, if an attack comes in the homeland, it's going to come as our security services have said, it is going to come from Al Qaeda planning in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's where they live. That's where they are. That's where it will come from. And right now that resides in Pakistan. A stable government needs to be established. . . . Look, we have spent more money -- we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country."

Palin: "As for who termed that central war on terror being in Iraq, it was Gen. [David H.] Petraeus and Al Qaeda, both leaders there, and it's probably the only thing that they're ever going to agree on, but that it was a central war on terror is in Iraq. You don't have to believe me or John McCain on that. I would believe Petraeus and that leader of Al Qaeda. An armed -- nuclear-armed especially -- Iran is so extremely dangerous to consider. . . . Our nuclear weaponry here in the U.S. is used as a deterrent. And that's a safe, stable way to use nuclear weaponry."

Pakistan's Mysterious New Spy Master

As Pakistan copes with a spate of terrorist violence and political unrest, Bush administration officials worry that they know too little about the man who was just appointed to lead the Muslim nation's sprawling spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. Last week, Islamabad disclosed that ISI's new chief will be Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Pakistan's former director of military operations and a protégé of Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, the country's top commander. Kiyani, who once headed ISI and took training courses in the U.S., is admired and trusted by American defense and intelligence officials. But they don't know much about Pasha beyond his close ties to Kiyani and that he ran operations against militants who turned tribal regions along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan into a terrorist safe haven.

Washington relies heavily on ISI for intel on militants. Historically, says a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who also asked for anonymity, 80 percent of credible U.S. intel about terrorists in Pakistan originated with ISI.

Pakistan's army chief named a general considered a hawk in the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban to head the country's powerful spy agency, asserting his control at a time of U.S. concern that rogue operatives are aiding Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shujaa Pasha oversaw military offensives against militants in the lawless border regions with Afghanistan in his most recent job as director general of military operations. His appointment as head of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, the country's main spy agency, was part of a broader shake-up of army top brass announced late Monday by military chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

The moves were seen as a bid by the reform-minded general to revive the prestige of Pakistan's armed forces and assert control over the spy agency following the downfall of ex-President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in August. A month earlier, the Pakistani government reportedly tried to bring the ISI under the control of the civilian Interior Ministry but quickly reversed the decision after military dissent.

Pakistan is close to defaulting ?

Pakistan's crisis of net foreign reserves deepens

Pakistan's foreign reserve crisis deepened further Saturday as the central bank said it had lost around 700 million dollars in just a week. The State Bank of Pakistan's net foreign reserves fell to around 8.1 billion dollars against 8.8 billion, the bank said in a statement on Saturday.
The trend of declining reserves sent the Pakistani rupee down to 78.50 against the US dollar, compared with 78.30 on Tuesday.

The markets were closed from Wednesday to Friday due to Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Fitr.
Out of the 8.1 billion dollars around 4.68 billion dollars are the central bank's own reserves while the rest are deposits of private financial institutions.

"This is one of the biggest declines in just one week," said trader Malik Bostan, president of Forex Association of Pakistan.

Last week the Asian Development Bank approved a tranche of 500 million dollars to Pakistan for balance of payments support but it hasn't arrived yet.
The plunge in reserves from over 16 billion dollars just nine months ago brought the country's ratings to negative among the leading credit rating agencies such as Moody and Standard & Poor.
Both agencies expect Pakistan is close to defaulting on its commitments of external loan repayments.

A 15-nation grouping called "Friends of Pakistan" is scheduled to meet Tuesday in Dubai to discuss the country's 15-billion-dollar bail-out request.

Make Eid Not War.

Shape of the moon clouds Muslim holiday

A tentative crescent moon rose on Monday night, marking the end of the Ramadan month of fasting for Muslims around the world. Or did it?

Muslims in the Middle East are divided over the true phase of the moon. As a result, several countries recognised different dates for the festival of Eid al-Fitr, one of the two most important Muslim holidays, which marks the end of Ramadan.

In Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states as well as Jordan, the holiday began on Tuesday. Egypt, Syria, Iran and Algeria marked the start of the holiday.

Distinct methodologies for determining the start of the lunar month account for the differences but some now perceive an increasing political aspect to some of the calculations.
Saudi Arabia’s conservative Wahhabi scholars, in accordance with their traditions and literal interpretation of Islam, determine the start of the lunar month based on observations of the first crescent with the naked eye. In other countries, Muslim scholars aim to reconcile astronomical calculations with direct observations to determine the holidays.

But some commentators now believe the process may be as much about political allegiance as any religious observance. Saudi Arabia, as the birthplace of Islam and the location of its two holiest mosques, has always commanded a position of respect, but even so many Muslim countries have traditionally followed the sightings as determined by their own religious scholars.

Now, however, in several countries, the decision of which methodology to adopt has gained a sectarian or political edge. In Iraq, Sunni communities celebrated Eid on Tuesday, while Shia marked it yesterday – following the Iranian lead.

Countries with close Saudi links followed the ruling of the Mufti in accordance with their traditions. Gulf states, except Oman, often follow Saudi Arabia’s decision. This year, Jordanian religious officials indicated they did not see the crescent at all yet would follow the Saudi ruling in deference to “Islamic unity”.

Many ordinary Muslims express frustration with the different start day, saying it defies the spirit of the holidays when Muslims are supposed to celebrate worldwide. “I wish to see the day when all Muslim nations celebrate the Eid on the same day,” wrote Mohamed Abdelrahman, a contributor to a Saudi website.


Eid-ul-Fitr being celebrated today
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Eid moon ‘drama’ ends at 10.45pm

The moon of Shawal 1, 1429 has been sighted in the country, so Eid-ul-Fitr will be celebrated today 1 st October (Wednesday) with traditional zeal and fervour, Ruet-i-Hilal committee (Central Moon Sighting Committee) announced here on late Tuesday.

A suspenseful controversy hit Shawwal-moon sighting and kept the entire nation on tenterhooks for hours before the central Ruet-i-Hilal committee announced on Tuesday that Eid would be celebrated across the country on Wednesday 1st October.Political considerations seemed to have forced the committee’s hand when the NWFP government declared with uncalled-for haste that the elusive crescent had been sighted in the province and the festival would be celebrated on Wednesday.As unconfirmed reports about Eid swirled around the central Ruet-i-Hilal committee, which remained in session hours after the sunset, chairman Mufti Munibur Rehman appeared for a third time on television at around 10.45pm and announced that incontrovertible evidence about the Shawwal moon had been received – not from the Frontier but from Badin in lower Sindh – and accordingly Eid would be celebrated on Wednesday.

He explained that the delay in the announcement of the “Eid moon” had been caused by the painstaking analysis of evidence received from the length and breadth of the country.However, sources told Dawn that the committee had spent “quite some time weighing the option of ignoring NWFP moon-sighting reports”. But the option was ultimately rejected as divisive and politically injudicious.Religious scholars insist that an Islamic month begins with the actual sighting of the moon.

Those who sight the Shawwal moon first, celebrate Eid ahead of those who do not.If the central Ruet-i-Hilal committee had not made the announcement it eventually did, three Eids would have been celebrated in Pakistan: one on Tuesday by those who follow Saudi Arabia in the celebration of the festival, second on Wednesday by those in the NWFP who sighted the moon on Tuesday and third on Thursday by those who act upon guidelines of the central Ruet-i-Hilal committee.The final announcement of the Ruet-i-Hilal committee waspreceded by a flurry of activity in the NWFP which saw senior minister Bashir Ahmed Bilour, of the Awami National Party, first making an unscheduled visit to the provincial office of the committee and then making a public statement that reports had been received from district coordination officers about the sighting of the Shawwal moon.

Agencies add: In India, Eid will be celebrated in India on Thursday, according to an announcement made by Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the Imam of Delhi Jama Masjid.Meanwhile, Eid was celebrated on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania and the Gaza Strip and other Palestinian areas.

Sunni’s in Iraq also celebrated the Eid on Tuesday, while the Shias will celebrate the festival on Wednesday.Egypt and Tunisia will celebrate Eid on Wednesday.

Eid was also celebrated on Tuesday by Muslims in most countries of Eastern Europe. Muslims in several parts of Philippines also celebrated the Eid, but President Gloria Arroyo announced that the festival would begin on Wednesday. Indonesia and Singapore have also announced that Wednesday would the first day of Eid.