Posts Tagged ‘Farhat Taj’

Editor's note: Departing from collective silence in Pakistan's mainstream media, Daily Times is the only outlet in English and Urdu media which has published at least two articles highlighting the 17 Feb 2012 Shia massacre in Parachinar in which 47 Shias Muslims were massacred; at least 12 of them were killed by live firing by Pakistan's [...]

We support the following petition for release of the doctor and request our readers to sign it. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/drop-treason-charges-against-shakeel-afridi/ Related :Dr. Shakeel Afridi is a benefactor, not a traitor      Dr Shakil Afridi —Farhat Taj A native of Khyber Agency in the Federally [...]

Related: Merge FATA into KP : ANP jirga Editor's note: We are cross-posting a five-series article titled "Voices from FATA and the panic" recently published in Daily Times. In this series Farhat Taj present a Pashtun nationalist perspective on issues of ethnic and provincial identity and the war on terror. In particular, she highlights the [...]

Related post: A month since Taliban executed 15 Pakistani soldiers, yet no outrage. Now watch the executions; perhaps… Editor's note: In the following article published in Daily Times, Farhat Taj highlights a case of selective morality and hypocrisy recently demonstrated by Pakistan army and its right-wing as well as "liberal" affiliates in [...]

Related article:  Imran Khan’s PTI joins banned terrorist groups in pro-army rally in Lahore Militant outfits known for close ties with the military establishment of Pakistan held the Difa-i-Pakistan Conference (Defence of Pakistan Conference) on December 18, 2011. They declared jihad as an obligation for Muslims and threatened the US, NATO [...]

If terror attacks in Pakistan is Pakhtun revenge, then the ANP must be involved in the attacks. Surely, ANP and non-ANP victims of terrorism share the same culture and social setup By now the notion that several of the terror attacks in Pakistan are the Pakhtuns’ revenge in response to Pakistan military operations and US drone attacks in [...]

With Thanks : BBC Urdu  We are pleased to post this excellent eye-opening interview by Farhat Taj where she exposes the Deep State and the false narratives of the likes of Imran Khan.   قبائلی لشکر لمبی جنگ کے لیے نہیں قبائلی لشکروں کے طالبان کے خلاف استعمال پر کئی [...]

Farha Taj's article in Daily Times today is a challenge to those who project Pashtuns = Taliban and those who project TTP-LeJ-SSP = Sunnis. The article shows that Pakistani Shias & Sunnis, Pakhtuns & non-Pakhtuns are a victim of the ISI-LeJ-TTP mafia. Here is a list of related posts: Sectarian and Talibanic dimensions of the Orakzai [...]

Source: Daily Times, October 8, 2011     Afghanistan and India have signed a wide-ranging strategic partnership agreement during the recent visit of Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai to India. The agreement expands trade relations between the two countries, affirms Afghanistan’s support for India’s bid for a permanent [...]

Related post: APC: Pakistan army-orchestrated response to USA – by Ayaz Amir Since the recent attack on the US embassy in Kabul by the Haqqani network Taliban, Pakistan came under immense US pressure, including veiled threats of attack, for its links with the Haqqani Taliban with bases in Pakistan. Pakistan’s military, which runs the [...]

  At least three of the ‘elite’ who contributed to the controversial report, ‘Pakistan, the United States and the End Game in Afghanistan: Perceptions of Pakistan’s Foreign Policy Elite’, by Jinnah Institute (JI) and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) have come out to defend it in the face of growing criticism: Humayun [...]

Related post: Pursuing Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan? A rebuttal to Sherry Rehman’s Jinnah Institute’s report The report is aimed at justifying the establishment’s long-standing Afghan policy, the strategic depth policy that has brought nothing but destruction to the Pakhtun and has created religious bigotry in [...]

Another bombshell will have to be endured by the national Taliban narrative with 'Taliban and anti-Taliban' by Farhat Taj (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011), a Research Fellow at Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research, University of Oslo, Norway, an MPhil in Gender and Development from the University of Bergen, Norway. The book [...]

More misleading information — I —Farhat Taj Mr Haider’s most misleading information about the Ali Khels is that the Pakistani state supported their resistance to the Taliban. The fact is that the state abandoned the Ali Khels by design so as to punish them for their anti-Talibanism Mr Ejaz Haider responded to my article ‘Misleading [...]

Editor’s Note: We are prefacing the following note with some observations by Farhat Taj, a Pashtun activist who has exposed the mendacity of the Pro-Taliban narrative of the Deep State. Thanks to her work and others like Dr. Taqi, AIRRA, Bacha Khan Foundation, friends from Pakhtunkhwa Peace Forum and fellow bloggers like Imran Khan of [...]

Related Post : A survey of Drone Attacks in Pakistan .What do the people of FATA think? by Farhat Taj With thanks :BBC The following article suggests that contrary to what the military establishment and their proxies would like us to believe, Waziris want a continuation of drone attacks against the Punjabi/Afghan/Arab terrorists; it [...]

Both Shia and Sunni IDPs have many complaints against the parliamentarians elected from Kurram. They say that elected representatives from Swat did a great deal to alleviate the sufferings of the Swati IDPs whereas the Kurram parliamentarians have done nothing to help the Kurram IDPs Kurram is a mixed Shia and Sunni agency in FATA. Since 2007, [...]

The IDPs say that both the Taliban and the Pakistan Army have bombed their empty houses in Orakzai. The authorities are now handing them tents so that they go back and erect tents on the sites of their bombed out homes Recently, the Pakistani media reported that security forces have cleared 90 percent of Orakzai Agency in the Federally [...]

It has been almost ten months now. The political agent (PA) of Khyber in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has subjected 13 students from the Government Degree College, Jamrud, Khyber Agency to acute mental torture. The students’ representative, Masoud Shah and some Koki Khel tribesmen shared with me the prolonged ordeal of the [...]

Drone attacks -- a survey Source: The News, March 05, 2009 The Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a think tank of researchers and political activists from the NWFP and FATA, conducts research, surveys and collect statistics on various issues concerning the Taliban and Al-Qaeda terrorism and human security there. AIRRA [...]

What is wrong with the ANP? — Farhat Taj The ANP fell on its knees during the signing of the Swat peace deal with the terrorists. ANP circles have anonymously claimed that suicide bombers were sent to the top leaders to force them to sign the peace deal. If they refused, they would have been killed on the spot It has been quite a few days [...]

A potentially dangerous development is afoot in Orakzai and no one in Pakistan seems to care. The military authorities and the Orakzai political agent (PA) have ordered the internally displaced persons (IDP) from the Lower Orakzai to go back to their region. The authorities claim that their areas have been ‘cleared’ of the Taliban. Many [...]

The doctrine of strategic depth means Pakistan is not a safe haven for Pakhtuns opposing Taliban or Talibanization either with arms or musical instruments. The ordeal of the late Kamal Mahsud, a well-known singer from Waziristan, and his family is a case in point. Mahsud went on singing despite threats passed by Taliban. He was ordered [...]

It might be worthwhile to read two differing perspectives on the FCR and the FATA reform in order to come to an informed conclusion on a complicated issue that the government is likely to be dealing with in the near future. The various opinions on reforming governance in FATA can be divided into two broad groups - the first group favours very [...]

The Pakistan army simply does not have the tradition to punish its rank and file, unless the aggrieved party is also from within the army Recently, Pakistan Air Force fighter planes bombed Sra Vella area in the Tirah Valley of Khyber Agency, killing over 70 innocent civilians from the Kuki Khel tribe of the area and injuring dozens more. The [...]

The Pakistan Army is conducting an operation in Bara, Khyber Agency. Thousands of people of Bara have become IDPs due to the operation. Despite the operation, the Mangal Bagh group is active and kidnapping people for ransom as usual Various jihadi outfits based in FATA generate revenues through kidnapping for ransom. One of them is Bara-based [...]

"The people of Hazara have the right to demand a separate province in their area, but they have no right to dictate a name of their choice on the overwhelming majority of the Pakhtun", writes Farhat Taj (more...)

The IDPs request the government to open vocational centres in the camp for training in employable skills like carpentry, masonry, welding, electrical wiring, plumbing, etc. The IDPs also request for vocational centres for income generation and skill development purposes for the women IDPs, like embroidery and tailoring There are about 4,000 [...]

The IDPs from Mohmand must not be forced to leave the camp. Let us not forget that the people of Mohmand Agency, like people from elsewhere in FATA, are paying the torturous price for the military establishment’s policy of strategic depth in Afghanistan About 2,000 registered and 1,000 unregistered Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from [...]

Basically, the jirga is saying that it does not trust the military establishment, which is leading the dialogue with the US. The military establishment will follow the policy of strategic depth in Afghanistan, which is the key cause of the sufferings of Pakhtuns on both sides of the Durand Line Days before the Pak-US strategic dialogue in [...]

The Supreme Commander of both Indian and Pakistan forces Sir Claude Auchinleck followed Mounbatten's policy and advised the C in C of Pakistan Army to openly defy orders of the Pakistan Governor General In his article ‘The 1947-48 Kashmir War’ (Daily Times, March 16, 2010), Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed has insinuated that there is overwhelming [...]

For me, ‘tribal’ is not synonymous with Pukhtun. All Pukhtuns are not tribals, even when most tribals are Pukhtuns. Within tribals, the awareness about badal or retaliation upon which Pukhtunwali is based keeps them under control in such situations, but not in other situations It happens, though seldom, that the central argument in an op-ed [...]

The Pakhtun culture is reflected in Ghaffar Khan’s non-violent movement, in the mysticism of Rahman Baba’s poetry and in the romanticism of Ghani Khan’s poetry. This is a society that produced hundreds of anti-Taliban lashkar leaders all over Pakhtunkhwa who were target killed because they insisted that Talibanisation is the antithesis of [...]

Kamal Mehsud’s story is just one of the hundreds of stories of horror in Waziristan. The other stories are much more brutal and sinister in terms of the intelligence agencies’ collusion with the Taliban Kamal Mehsud was the most famous singer of Waziristan. He died in January 2010 in a fire that broke out in his house when his family was [...]

Anger against the Pakistan Army and the Taliban is intense and getting more intense with every passing day and so is disappointment with the government of Pakistan I am compiling a list of the tribal leaders of FATA who have been victims of target killings from 2003 onwards. This is still a work in progress and my estimate is that the names in [...]

A police officer and bystanders remove an injured victim of a suicide car bomb in Peshawar. Photograph: A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images The public perceive the police as as much an innocent casualty as the innocent civilians in the state’s pursuit of strategic goals in Afghanistan. They see an ethnic discrimination behind the lack of equipment, and [...]

Caravans and howling of stray animals — Farhat Taj The media in Pakistan is constantly promoting a one-sided view of Dr Aafia’s case. Nobody is expecting 100 percent objectivity from the media. But still one is surprised how some of the most important issues in this case have never been touched upon by the Pakistani media Pakistani [...]

FATA continues to be used and abused as a strategic space by the security establishment of Pakistan in violent pursuit of strategic depth in Afghanistan. In short, strategic depth means Pakistan must have a pro-Pakistan government in Afghanistan by any and all means. People of FATA have suffered more than people in any other part of Pakistan due [...]

In terms of the drone attacks, the US must not make any distinction between al Qaeda and the Taliban. They both have internalised a global ideology that is anti-civilisation and anti-human There is news coming up in the media that al Qaeda in Waziristan may run away to Yemen in the face of growing drone attacks. The people of Waziristan have [...]

Dangerous abyss of perception The Pakistan Army is engaged in ‘friendly fire’ with the jihadi gangs in which the civilians, poor soldiers of the security forces, especially FC soldiers, policemen and foot soldiers of the Taliban are killed. This, according to the Pakhtun perception, is in line with the scheme of things of the [...]