Indian Army Chief’s xenophobia

INDIA Army Chief’s statement about threat perception from Pakistan and war under the nuclear scenario is not only irresponsible but also xenophobic, unwise and provocative. Chief of the Army Staff General V.K Singh informed Indian media that around 25 infiltration attempts have been made by militants from across the Line of Control (LoC) in the last two months and 35-40 terrorists have been killed by the security forces during the same period. He said the number of infiltration attempts has gone up in the last two months but the Indian Army has been able to control it to a large extent. General Singh said to counter infiltration, the Army has evolved a strategy under which even if somebody manages to infiltrate Indian territory, “he gets killed later on.” “As far as infiltration is concerned, we have controlled it to a large extent... The war mongering Indian General maliciously revealed that the latest trends on training the youth across the border from India to Pakistan on a regular visa in the name of visiting their relatives where these Kashmiri youth get trained in handling arms and ammunitions (weapons and explosives) at selected camps within Pakistan conducted by Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT). To make his story plausible, he let on that these recruits are being given a weeks’ complete religious course on Islam and then inducted to undergo training modules in daura-e-aam. The “informed” General went on to suggest that the modus operandi is to look out for the educated youth from Kashmir for which there are many placement agencies across Kashmir. These agencies recruit the youth under various schemes & arrange passports to Gulf & Pakistan. The trainees undergo training in modules like 'daura-e-aam' and 'daura-e-khas,' in which the recruits are trained in making improvised explosives devices and carrying out sabotage. Then these recruits are shipped back to Gulf countries from where they travel back to India and resume their normal work and wait for orders from across the border. As evidence to support his preposterous claim, the General stated that the police apprehended one person from Budgam who had ostensibly gone across the border for meeting relatives and later extended it by another two weeks during which he underwent the 'daura-e-aam' (basic) training being organized by the LeT. During interrogation, the youth, whose identity has been kept under wraps, told the investigators that there were other youths who were using the same modus operandi to get the training facility. To support the evidence, a huge dump of arms and ammunition, supposedly recovered in Budgam was shown to the media with the implication that it was actually meant for such recruits.

The General’s insinuation is easily refutable, because the Kashmiri youth, who are spearheading the fresh uprising, have spurned the use of force. They come out into the streets of Srinagar and other major towns chanting the slogan of “Azadi” (freedom) and “Indian dogs go home.” They are not only unarmed, but they have stated in their blogs, MMS and SMS that they will resort to peaceful agitation. That is another story that since June this year, Indian Armed Forces in Occupied Kashmir have martyred more than 125 unarmed youth. The gory images of the slaughter of their brothers and sisters have been captured by the Kashmiri youth and transmitted globally to expose the bloody atrocities of the Indian State Terrorism. Touched to the quick, India is retorting by such false statements by its Army Chief, who is looking for excuses to undertake suppressive measures against unarmed protesters in Indian held Kashmir.

There is another even more macabre angle to such machination. India is alleging that hundreds of Indian Maoists are receiving arms training in Nepal’s Terai region from the Nepal Maoists’ People Liberation Army and Operatives of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT). Indian propagandists along with their strong lobbyists in the western media have invented stories regarding presence of Chinese troops in Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. The fact is that despite being propped up by the US as a counterweight to China, India is jealous of Pak-China affinity and therefore leaves no stone unturned to insinuate against these two friendly countries. Recent Chinese decision to build a new nuclear reactor in Pakistan and Beijing’s wish to construct a road linking western China with the port of Gawadar in north-western Pakistan is disturbing for India and challenging her role in South Asia. The Indian Army Chief has declared that China and Pakistan posed a major threat to India’s security.

The war-phobia struck Indian General considers China and Pakistan as two major irritants to India’s national security. Referring to China’s reported intrusion in Arunachal Pradesh, General Singh has stated that due to a border dispute with China, Beijing still remains a threat to India despite several Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) taken by the two sides to defuse tension and build a good bilateral relationship. The Indian Army chief further warned that India remains concerned over the security of its island territories much due to the proximity between Pakistan and China. General also reiterated that till the time the terrorist infrastructure remains intact on the other side, India has something to worry. He also referred to the threat posed by China, which was rising both economically and militarily. General Singh declared that the threat from China impacts the way he will task his army and the role that he will give to it so that it can do the task that the nation wants. He declared that despite having a stable border with China, he cannot take chances. He then dropped the bombshell that along with developing conventional war-fighting capability, India must enhance its nuclear weapons arsenal. General VK Singh’s remarks come close on the heels of Indian Defence Minister AK Antony stating that China was exhibiting ‘assertiveness’ in its military posturing in the region and asked the armed forces to remain vigilant to counter any threat.

It has become abundantly clear that the Indian Army Chief, is not only a delusional megalomaniac, but in the mould of Don-Quixote, is obsessed with inventing imaginary demons and enemies, for which he wants India to spend billions of dollars. Indian frenzy with building its armed forces, acquiring weapons of mass destruction and achieving a military might way beyond its genuine security concerns already knows no bounds. Indian madness of amassing arms and military hardware already borders on schizophrenic concerns. Now General VK Singh’s xenophobic statements are meant to provide a rationale for its war phobia by conjuring threats from China and Pakistan as well as justify its terrorist activities against both its neighbours it considers as threat. Moreover, India also needs to satisfy its impoverished masses that it is amassing weapons at the cost of their sustenance and livelihood and the detractors of its advanced nuclear program, for which it has found a willing abettor in USA. Saner Indian elements are questioning the wisdom of India’s mad pursuit of the nuclear weapons path in the garb of nuclear energy programs with the help of the US. VK Singh’s statements are crude attempt to silent its critics.

Iran loads fuel rods into 1st nuclear power plant

Iran began the process of loading 163 fuel rods into the reactor core of its first nuclear power plant on Tuesday, celebrating the achievement as proof that Tehran can outmaneuver international sanctions.

The plant, built with Russian help in the southern port city of Bushehr, is not among the aspects of Iran’s nuclear program that are of top concern to the international community and is not directly subject to sanctions. It has international approval and is supervised by the U.N.’s nuclear monitoring agency.

Nevertheless, Iran has touted its startup as an act of defiance in the face of the penalties and has held up the plant as evidence that it only has peaceful nuclear intentions. The United States and some of its allies believe Bushehr and Iran’s other civil nuclear work is providing cover for a secret weapons program under development.

“The great Iranian nation can manage the sanctions with its resistance, efforts and endeavors and this is its proof,” Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi told a news conference broadcast on state TV.

The U.N. Security Council has slapped four rounds of sanctions against Iran over a separate track of its nuclear program — its enrichment of uranium, which can be a gateway to developing atomic weapons.

Iran denies such an intention and says it only seeks to master the technology to produce fuel for a planned network of nuclear power facilities, starting with Bushehr

The US is fighting a blind man’s war on terror

Almost all the recent terror attacks on America have been carried out by people known to US intelligence.

Recently released WikiLeaks documents describing American involvement in Iraq detail suspected Iranian involvement in undermining government authority and supporting terrorism. The leaked intelligence assessments and reports reveal suspected Iranian training of terrorists and even mortar shipments. This comes on the heels of documents leaked in July that detail Pakistani involvement in support of the Taliban, through elements of its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Iranian meddling in Iraq and Pakistani involvement in undermining the US in Afghanistan are just two examples of the way in which America is turning a blind eye to the networks of terror, and fighting a reactive war on several fronts. Documents obtained by Fox News in October reportedly show that Anwar al-Awlaki, whose targeted killing the US has approved, was once a guest at the Pentagon. He is known today for his connections to Nidal Malik Hassan, perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre, Northwest Airlines 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.


Toward that end he was also appointed a Muslim chaplain at George Washington University.

Awlaki had contacts with various terrorists and terror financing organizations from 1999, for which the FBI investigated him. However, just after 9/11 the Pentagon invited him to a luncheon as part of an “informal outreach program” designed to contact “leading members of the Muslim community.”

The meeting was arranged by a Pentagon employee who had attended one of his speeches.

In a March 2010 tape he released from a hiding place in Yemen, Awlaki said, “To the Muslims in America, I have this to say: How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters? I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding upon every other able Muslim.”

THE STORY about how oblivious the Pentagon was to Awlaki’s Islamism is not nearly as alarming as the recently released information regarding David (Daoud) Headley. Born to a Pakistani diplomat employed by Voice of America and an American mother in 1960, he was raised in Pakistan after his parents divorced.

He attended an elite boarding school, but returned to the US in 1977 and began working at his mother’s bar. He married an American woman. He was arrested for drug trafficking in 1988 and, in exchange for a lighter sentence became a Drug Enforcement Agency informant.

As an informant, he began making trips to Pakistan, where he cultivated contacts with the Islamic terrorist organization Lashkar e-Taiba. The US claims it discharged him as an agent in 2001. In 2005, after marrying another American woman, he was detained due to a domestic violence complaint. At this time his wife told authorities of his Islamist connections.

Headley returned to Pakistan, this time with a young Moroccan wife named Faiza Outalha. He had made contact with Pakistan’s ISI and an agent, Major Iqbal, who was also a liaison with Lashkar e-Taiba. Headley became involved with the terror plot to attack Mumbai in India, and he and his wife are alleged to have carried out scouting missions in India, with him disguised as a wealthy playboy.

In 2007 Outalha barged her way into the US Embassy in Islamabad with information that her husband had become a terrorist. She met twice with an assistant regional security officer. She claims the Americans told her to “get lost.”

A US administration official claims that “the texture of the meeting was that her husband was involved with bad people, and they were planning jihad... But she gave no details about who was involved, or what they planned to target.” On November 26, 2008 terrorists murdered almost 200 people in Mumbai – the partial fruits, it appears, of Headley’s labor. Furthermore, he was accused in a US court in 2009 of plotting attacks against a Danish newspaper and synagogue. India believes he was deeply involved in the conspiracy against Mumbai.

However, Headley has cooperated the US investigators in hopes of a lighter sentence, and has not been turned over to the Indian authorities.

If the Headley and Awlaki affairs aren’t cause for concern, one should recall that almost all the recent terror attacks on America have been carried out by people known to US intelligence. The FBI intercepted 18 e-mails between Nidal Hassan and Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009, and yet nothing was done to prevent his November 5 shooting spree at Fort Hood that resulted in 13 deaths.

Abdulmutallab was also on US intelligence radar, and yet he boarded a flight to Detroit on Christmas 2009 without red flags being raised. Shahzad travelled back and forth to Pakistan in 2009 and 2010, and yet this caused no alarm at US intelligence. The failings are clear.

What is more shocking is the fact that so many high-profile terrorists were so close to the US government. Headley was an informant, Awlaki came to the Pentagon as a guest. But the pattern of intelligence failure (Shahzad), intelligence gathered but not used (Abdulmutallab and Hassan) and terrorists consciously overlooked (Awlaki and Headley) is only part of the larger pattern on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US has its head in the sand regarding Pakistani and Iranian collaboration with those killing Americans.

The decision to remain blind runs up and down the line, from the halls of power that shape policy toward the US’s “ally” Pakistan, down to the lowest analysts and assistant regional security officers in Islamabad, who turned away Outalha. This isn’t failure, this is systematic shortsightedness. America is in a complete state of denial.

Until the US realizes that the front line on terror is in Pakistan and Iran, in Yemen and among numerous people in the world who are in touch with men like Awlaki, it will always be reacting to attacks, always one step behind.