Reporting India

In six of the seven, these companies took down the “offensive”...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:49:00 -0500

In six of the seven, these companies took down the “offensive” material, and often removed more than was asked for. (In the seventh case, the researcher asked a shopping portal to remove information on one brand of diapers, saying they caused diaper rash and were therefore harmful to minors. The shopping site rejected the request, calling it frivolous.)The study does not name the specific intermediaries involved, but they are understood to be the big social media and Internet companies that dominate the industry.

Two examples:1. The researcher objected to a comment below an article on a news Web site about the Telangana movement, which aims to create a separate state in Andhra Pradesh. The comment, which was well-written and not obscenity-laced, condemned the violence in the Telangana movement and called its leaders selfish, but supported the cause over all. The researcher wrote the intermediary that the comment was “racially and ethnically objectionable” and “defamatory.”The researcher received no written response, but within 72 hours the intermediary had taken down not just the “offensive” comment, but all 15 comments that were published below the article.

2. The researcher sent a take-down notice to another intermediary, defined as a “host and information location tool,” asking that it remove three links provided on its search engine after entering the words “online gambling.” The links, the researcher complained, were “relating or encouraging money-laundering or gambling,” which is illegal under the April rules.The intermediary wrote back to the complainant, saying that the intermediary’s search engine was a “mere conduit” with no control over the information passing through its platform.But it subsequently removed the three links mentioned in the take-down notice, and all other URLs of the three Web sites, including their subdomains.

The rules seem to encourage “privately administered injunctions to censor and chill free expression,” C.I.S. says. A third party whose information has been removed is not informed about the take-down request or given a chance to defend itself.The study’s results show the “rules are procedurally flawed as they ignore all elements of natural justice,” C.I.S. concludes.

A meeting between Indian and Chinese Special Representatives...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:08:04 -0500

A meeting between Indian and Chinese Special Representatives (SR) over boundary disputes scheduled for early next week has now been postponed indefinitely, in the backdrop of a row between New Delhi and Beijing over hydrocarbon exploration in the South China Sea.
The Special Representatives—India’s National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon and China’s State Councillor Dai Bingguo—were expected to hold the 15th round of talks on the protracted boundary dispute in New Delhi on Monday and Tuesday.

They were expected to firm up the proposed “Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs,” an additional arrangement involving senior diplomats of both countries to urgently deal with any evolving situation along the Line of Actual Control. The dates of the Special Representative level talks were not made public officially. Sources earlier said Special Representative Dai would travel to New Delhi to hold the next round of SR-level talks with Menon. The two SRs held the 14th round of talks in Beijing on November 30, last year.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), however, on Friday stated that New Delhi and Beijing were in touch with each other to set dates for the SR-level talks in the near future, hinting that the parleys scheduled for Monday and Tuesday had been deferred indefinitely.

“We are looking forward to the 15th round of SR talks in the near future and the two sides remain in touch to find convenient dates for the meeting,” said Vishnu Prakash, official spokesperson and Joint Secretary (External Publicity) of the MEA.

The statement was issued a day after China’s state-run Xinhua news agency stated in a commentary that India’s “jitters” and fears over China’s growing clout in the region was caused by an “inferiority complex” and “loud jealousy”.

The SR-level talks were postponed in the backdrop of New Delhi brushing aside Beijing’s objections to the role of India’s ONGC Videsh Limited in hydrocarbon exploration in offshore blocks claimed by Vietnam in the disputed South China Sea. Beijing said it was opposed to any country engaging in oil and gas exploration in “waters under the jurisdiction of China.” China claims “indisputable sovereignty” over the South China Sea.

New Delhi refuted the Chinese objection, stating that its ties with Vietnam in the hydrocarbon sector were in accordance with the international laws and it would like the bilateral cooperation to grow in the coming years. India went ahead to strengthen its hydrocarbon ties with Vietnam.

During a meeting on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Bali in Indonesia earlier this month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao that Indian interests in the South China Sea were “purely commercial” in nature and sovereignty claims on the disputed waters must be settled according to international law. Wen sent out a message of warning while addressing the Asean leaders in Bali and stated that “outside forces” should not, under any pretext, get involved with the dispute on the South China Sea.

Earlier in late July, an Indian Navy vessel, the ‘INS Airavat’, was reportedly warned by the Chinese Navy off the coast of Vietnam against entering “Chinese waters”. India also flexed its muscle last week with the successful test of new-generation 3,500-km Agni IV missile, followed by an announcement that Agni V, with a strike range of over 5,000 km would be test-fired in just three months.

Frozen relations

* Special representatives of the two countries were scheduled to hold the 15th round of talks

* They were expected to firm up an additional arrangement involving senior diplomats to urgently deal with any evolving situation along the Line of Actual Control

* Statement comes a day after Chinese news agency commented on India’s ‘jitters’ and fears over China’s growing clout in the region caused by “inferiority complex” and “loud jealousy”

* Foreign ministry says both sides in touch to set convenient dates for talks in the near future

I like how on Tumblr Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs can wish each other a Happy Diwali or Eid Mubarak without getting shat on.

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 21:27:42 -0500

waveofeuphoria:

loosestringsandthings:

boxedbrain:

Like I wished this girl at my school a Happy Diwali and she goes:

Lol, but I’m not a Hindu.

Then today I wish her Eid Mubarak and she goes:

Lol, but you’re not a Muslim.

SO WHAT?!

:’)

I celebrate everything~

I live in India and in class I wish my Hindu Muslim classmates everything and they have never minded. :) We guys even visit each other during Eid/Diwali. :)

Dog dammit. A stray dog delayed the first practice session of...

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:15:51 -0400

Dog dammit. A stray dog delayed the first practice session of the inaugural Indian Grand Prix at the state-of-the-art Buddh International Circuit on Friday.

A dog was seen on the track before the start of the session but was shooed away by the organisers. The problem arose when another one stopped the proceedings at the widely praised facility that cost the Jaypee Group approximately $400 million.

Race organisers chased down the dog in a safety car before resuming the session.

Team Lotus reserve driver Karun Chandhok, who became the first driver to set a time in the practice session, played down the incident saying it was a minor thing to have happened.

“These things happen everywhere. I saw a naked man running in German Grand Prix and a giraffe in Brazil,” Chandhok said.

“It was an honour for me to set the first timed lap in front of the fans. It was an extraordinary moment for me and a very emotional one,” said Chandhok, who was 19th fastest in the opening session and won’t be driving the Sunday’s race.

McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton topped the session before being penalised with the three grid positions for the race day for ignoring the yellow flag towards the end of the session.

Diwali Night In India Wikipedia: Deepavali or Diwali, popularly...

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:01:31 -0400

Diwali Night In India

Wikipedia: Deepavali or Diwali, popularly known as the “festival of lights,” is a festival celebrated between mid-October and mid-November for different reasons. For Hindus, Diwali is one of the most important festivals of the year and is celebrated in families by performing traditional activities together in their homes. For Jains, Diwali marks the attainment of moksha or nirvana by Mahavira in 527 BC.

The name “Diwali” is a contraction of “Deepavali” (Sanskrit: दीपावली Dīpāvalī), which translates into “row of lamps”. Diwali involves the lighting of small clay lamps (diyas or dīpas) in Sanskrit: दीप) filled with oil to signify the triumph of good over evil. During Diwali, all the celebrants wear new clothes and share sweets and snacks with family members and friends.

The festival starts with Dhanteras on which most Indian business communities begin their financial year. The second day of the festival, Naraka Chaturdasi, marks the vanquishing of the demon Naraka by Lord Krishna and his wife Satyabhama. Amavasya, the third day of Deepawali, marks the worship of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth in her most benevolent mood, fulfilling the wishes of her devotees. Amavasya also tells the story of Lord Vishnu, who in his dwarf incarnation vanquished the Bali, and banished him to Patala. It is on the fourth day of Deepawali, Kartika Shudda Padyami, that Bali went to patala and took the reins of his new kingdom in there. The fifth day is referred to as Yama Dvitiya (also called Bhai Dooj), and on this day sisters invite their brothers to their homes.

Honda Launches Car In India Priced At USD 8k The Japanese car...

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:11:12 -0400

Honda Launches Car In India Priced At USD 8k

The Japanese car giant Honda confirmed that it is making best efforts to tap the low price car segment in India, as it launched the new Brio today in India. Honda Brio has been priced quite competitively to gain maximum share in the Indian car market. The new 2011 Honda Brio will be available in the price range of Rs. 3.95 lacs to Rs. 5.1 lacs.

The company which operates in the country through a joint venture with the Siel group, earning the name Honda Siel Cars India, said that besides new Honda Brio launch, it aims to generate revenues of Rs. 112 crore this fiscal. The revenue is to be gained from the export of auto components from India.

With the Honda Brio launch, we will be entering a new segment for the first time in India. It has been designed and developed specially to meet the needs of customers here,” Honda Siel Cars India President and CEO Takashi Nagai said, while addressing the media on the occasion of the Honda Brio launch.

He also added that the company adhered to its words of fixing the Honda Brio price at less than Rs. 5 lacs. He conveyed that the company achieved the goal, through cost-efficiency measures and large scale localisation of the new Brio 2011 components. However, the top-end version of the new Brio 2011 will cost around Rs. 5.1 lacs.

Nagai said, “The new Honda Brio India is at present about 80 per cent localised and over the next few months, will reach 90 per cent. This has been key to the pricing strategy of the Honda Brio.”

The new 2011 Honda Brio is expected to compete with big names like the Hyundai i10, Maruti WagonR and General Motors Chevrolet Beat, which have the same price range as Honda Brio.

The new Honda Brio India will be rolled-out in four variants. Nagai said that Honda Brio expects to attract majority of customers residing in small cities. In the bigger cities; however, the demand for existing models such as the City, Civic and Accord is likely to overpower that of New Honda Brio.

“The compact car segment will soon become the second pillar of business for Honda in India,” Nagai was quoted as saying.

Nagai communicated that the manufacturing process of the new Brio, which is backed by the power of a 1.2-litre petrol engine, involved brainiac and skilled engineers of Honda Seal Cars India right from the starting stage.

On exports of components, Nagai said Honda Seal Cars India has already started the process of shipping components of the new Brio to Thailand from its facility at Rajasthan.

“We will have export turnover of Rs. 112 crore this fiscal,” he said. The company also exports components for the City and Jazz to Malaysia and Indonesia.

Thus, the new Honda Brio India, which is the cheapest car produced by the company till date, will surely pose a threat to the sales of cars that already exist in the Indian auto market.

Wikipedia: The Last Nawab of Pataudi (5 January 1941 – 22...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:23:00 -0400

Wikipedia: The Last Nawab of Pataudi (5 January 1941 – 22 September 2011)

The term Nawab of Pataudi may refer to any of a Turkic lineage of rulers of the princely Pataudi State in India, but most commonly refers to the 8th Nawab, Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi, who played cricket for both England and India. Both he and his son the 9th Nawab captained the Indian cricket team.

A Nawab was originally the provincial governor or viceroy of a province or region of the Mughal empire. The term is derived from the Arabic ‘naib’, meaning deputy. In some areas, especially Bengal, the term was pronounced Nabab. (The last variation has entered the English language) Most of the Muslim rulers of the subcontinent had accepted the authority of the Mughals. Hence the term Nawab is generally understood to mean any Muslim ruler in the subcontinent. Under British rule, Nawabs ruled the princely states of Awadh, Bahawalpur, Baoni, Banganapalle, Bhopal, Cambay, Jaora, Junagadh, Kurnool, Kurwai, Palanpur (Pakistan), Pataudi, Rampur, Sachin, and Tonk. Other former rulers bearing the title, such as the Nabobs of Bengal.

India Likely To Replace Japan As World’s Third Largest...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:13:00 -0400

India Likely To Replace Japan As World’s Third Largest Economy

More evidence the emerging markets are taking over the world growth story. India is close to replacing Japan as the world’s third largest economy, possibly as early as this year, says a senior economist at India credit rating agency Crisil. Sunil Sinha, the firm’s main macroeconomist, based the projections on India’s purchasing power parity, saying that tsunami-wracked Japan will see a decline in GDP this year, while India’s economy will expand as will the purchasing power of its currency, the rupee.

As it stands now, India is the fourth-largest economy in the world, trailing the U.S., China and Japan. GDP figures from 2010 show that the Japanese economy was worth $4.31 trillion, with India at $4.06 trillion. Not far behind. The earthquake and tsunami in March nearly shut Japan down for a month and now Japan’s economy is expected to post no growth at all this year, at best, while India’s economy will grow between 7% and 8% in 2011.

“India should overtake Japan in 2011 to become the third-largest economy in the world at purchasing power parity,” Sunil Sinha, head of research and senior economist at Crisil was quoted saying in The Economic Times of India on Tuesday.

The International Monetary Fund’s growth forecast for India and Japan show both country’s GDP levels about the same in constant dollar terms, but the disaster in Japan has taken its toll on the nation’s growth. “Were it not for the earthquake and tsunami, India would have overtaken Japan in around 2013-14,” said Sinha.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PwC, reported recently that the Indian economy would be the third largest by next year. This year, next year, or 2013, it’s only a matter of time before the world’s leading three economies are two-thirds emerging market nationss.

The IMF expects the Japanese economy to contract 0.7% this year while it forecasts India GDP at 8.2%.

A surreal tale of a young Indian woman who works at a call...

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:29:45 -0400

A surreal tale of a young Indian woman who works at a call center. Her computer breaks down and in an attempt to fix it, she falls into a magical, mythical web of electronic wires where memories, secrets, and hidden desires reveal themselves.

Gujarat top cop Sanjiv Bhatt to Narendra Modi: You have...

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:25:46 -0400

Gujarat top cop Sanjiv Bhatt to Narendra Modi: You have completely misconstrued SC verdict

NEW DELHI: Senior IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt says there is nothing in the Supreme Court order in the Gulbarg Society case that should give chief minister Narendra Modi reason to celebrate. Bhatt made this remark in an open letter to the chief minister on Wednesday; the open letter was in response to the open letter written by Modi on Tuesday to “six crore Gujaratis”.

Terming Modi’s plans for a three-day fast for peace, harmony and unity in Gujarat as “completely misleading”, the suspended police officer said: “It seems you (CM) have completely misconstrued the judgement and order passed by the honourable Supreme Court of India and it is very likely that your chosen advisors have once again misled you and have in turn, made you mislead the ‘six crore Gujaratis’ who look up to you as their elected leader.”

Bhatt had earlier accused Modi of wanting to teach Muslims a “lesson” after the Godhra train-burning incident in 2002. He had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court accusing Modi and also casting doubts about the functioning of the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) into the riots that followed the incident. He had said that after the Godhra incident he was summoned along with other senior officers and told to lie low as emotions were running high among Hindus. Bhatt was suspended by the Modi government in August this year for not reporting to work for nearly 10 months.

Full text of Sanjiv Bhatt’s open letter to Narendra Modi:

Sanjiv Rajendra Bhatt
Indian Police Service

Dear Shri. Modi,

I am glad you chose to write an open letter to the ‘Six crore Gujaratis’. This has not only afforded me a window to your mind but has also given me an opportunity to write to you through the same medium.

My dear brother, it seems you have completely misconstrued the judgement and order passed by the Honourable Supreme Court of India in Criminal Appeal No. 1765 of 2011 arising out of S.L.P. (CRL.) No. 1088 of 2008 viz. Jakia Nasim Ahesan & Anr. Versus State of Gujarat & Ors. It is very likely that your chosen advisors have once again misled you and have in turn, made you mislead the ‘Six crore Gujaratis’ who look up to you as their elected leader.

Let me as a younger brother-Gujarati, help you decipher the Judgement and Order that has led to unequivocal gloating and jubilatory celebrations among some sections of the political spectrum. It has been stated in your letter that “One thing is apparent from the Supreme Court’s judgment. The unhealthy environment created by the unfounded and false allegations made against me and Government of Gujarat, after 2002 riots, has come to an end”. Let me clarify that even by a long shot, the order of the Honourable Supreme Court has nowhere, even remotely, suggested that the allegations contained in the complaint filed by Mrs. Jakia Jafri were unfounded or false. The truth is that the order of the Honourable Supreme Court is in fact, a very major leap in the direction of delivering justice to the hapless victims of the Gujarat pogrom. As you are well aware, Mrs. Jafri had approached the Honorable Gujarat High Court with a prayer for registering her complaint as an FIR. The said petition was disallowed by the Honourable High Court of Gujarat. Mrs. Jafri, therefore, approached the Honourable Supreme Court of India by way of a Special Leave Petition against the order of the High Court. The Honourable Supreme Court directed the SIT to look into her complaint and subsequently also directed the learned Amicus to examine the evidence collected by the SIT. At the end of this long and arduous exercise the Honourable Supreme Court has not only allowed the Appeal of Mrs. Jafri and directed the SIT to virtually treat the complaint of Mrs. Jafrri as an FIR, but has also directed the SIT to file a report under section 173(2) of the Cr.P.C. Let me clarify for your benefit and for the benefit of your Six crore brothers and sisters of Gujarat, that this report under section 173(2) of the Cr.P.C. is colloquially known as Charge-Sheet or Final Report. The honourable Supreme Court of India has also directed the SIT to place all the evidence collected by it, including the reports of the learned Amicus before the magistrate empowered to take cognizance. I am sure you will appreciate that in order to let the law of the land take its due course, this was the best option available to the Honourable Supreme Court as per the scheme of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

What the Honourable Supreme Court of India has given to Mrs. Jafri is much more than what she had originally prayed for. The order over which some of us are gloating in feigned glee, is in fact, a very cleverly worded order that takes the perpetrators and facilitators of the 2002 carnage a few leaps closer to their day of reckoning. The false bravado comes across as a very smart attempt to mislead the gullible people of Gujarat and instil a false sense of confidence in the political rank and file. Please be assured that we will see a very different picture as the actual import of the order starts settling in and takes judicial effect.

As one of the ‘Six Crore Gujaratis’, I feel deeply pained and cheated when the likes of you, consciously or inadvertently, mislead the people of Gujarat for ulterior motives. The theory propounded and practised to perfection by Paul Joseph Goebbels, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest associate and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, can definitely work with the majority of the populace for some time. But all of us know from historical experience that Goebbelsian Propaganda cannot fool all the people for all the time.

I fully endorse your realization that “Hate is never conquered by hate.” Who would know this better than you, who has served this State for the last one decade; and I, who has served in the Indian Police Service for the last 23 years. I had the misfortune of serving with you during those days of 2002 when the dance of hatred was choreographed and perpetrated at different venues in Gujarat. Albeit this is not the appropriate forum for me to discuss and reveal the details of our respective roles, I am sure that both of us will be getting ample opportunities before appropriately empowered fora to disclose our knowledge about the dynamics of hatred in the realpolitik of Gujarat. I hope you and your cronies, within and without the Government, will not hate me more for this.

I cannot agree more with you when you say that “the credibility of those who have been spreading lies and defaming Gujarat has come to its lowest ebb. The people of this country will not trust such elements anymore”. But my dear brother, you seem to have got it entirely wrong as to who are the ones spreading lies and defaming Gujarat. To my mind, Gujarat has gained infamy not because of the hapless victims who have tirelessly crusading for the cause of justice and truth, but because of the despicable actions of the people who sowed and cultivated hatred to reap political and electoral benefits. Please give it a thought. Introspection can prove to be very revealing at times.

I am deeply touched by your concern and efforts to “further strengthen Gujarat’s environment of peace, unity and harmony.” Thanks to you and your kinsmen, Gujarat has been free from any large scale eruption of communal violence since 2002. The reasons for this may not be very obvious to our fellow ‘Six Crore Gujaratis”. This is my 24th year in the IPS. I was allotted to the Gujarat cadre during a time when the State was passing through the throes of widespread and sporadic communal violence. Having been baptised by fire, I have been since trying to understand and deal with the likes of you, who deal in the divisive politics of hatred. It is my well founded observation that the polity of Gujarat has now crossed the stage where communal violence can accrue electoral benefits to any political party, as the process of communal polarisation is very nearly complete in Gujarat. The experiments in the divisive politics of hatred have been very successful in the Gujarat Laboratory. You and your likes, in the political arena, have been largely successful in creating divides in the hearts and minds of the “Six Crore Gujaratis”. The need to resort to any further communal violence in Gujarat is already passe.

In a constitutional democracy like ours, it is incumbent upon the State to act in Good faith at all times and under all circumstances. Over the last nine and a half years many friends have fallen prey to the misleading campaign that the Gujarat Carnage of 2002 was a spontaneous reaction to the condemnable action at Godhra on the fateful morning of 27 February 2002. The Newtonian Law was never abused more. You had resorted to your knowledge and understanding of Newtonian physics in March 2002 and had sought to apply it to polity and governance at the peak of the Gujarat Carnage of 2002. But what you might have deliberately missed then, and what many of us seem to be inadvertently missing now; is the universally accepted principle of governance which mandates that in a constitutional democracy, an avowedly secular State cannot be allowed to be partisan. It was the bounden duty of the State to have anticipated and controlled the possible Newtonian reaction, if any; not orchestrate and facilitate systematic targeting of innocent individuals! Be that as it may, as an expression of solidarity with your stated objective of spreading Sadbhavana in the land of the Mahatma, I resolve to join you in your Sadbhavana Mission. What better way to do this than helping the truth to come out and let the spirit of justice and goodwill prevail. As all of us understand, there can be no Sadbhavna or Goodwill without truth and justice. I hereby reaffirm my resolve to contribute my might towards the restoration of Sadbhavana in the administration and polity of Gujarat.

But let me warn you that genuine heartfelt goodwill is something we cannot demand, buy or extort…we can only strive to deserve it. And it is not going to be an easy task. The land of the Mahatma is slowly but surely coming out of its hypnotic state.

As the most powerful person in Gujarat you may think that you do not need to feel accountable to the perceptions of all sections of the community. But believe me, history has proved time and again, that power without genuine goodwill is a path fraught with dangers…it is also a path of no return.

Samabhava is a condition precedent for Sadbhava. Governance by equity and goodwill should not only be the first article of your faith but should also be the last article of your creed.

The truth is more frequently than not, a little bitter and not very easy to swallow. I hope that you will take this letter in the true spirit in which it is written and you or your agents will not indulge in direct or indirect acts of retribution as is your wont.

In the words of Martin Luther King Jr. - Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. The spirit of the hapless victims who have been struggling for justice in Gujarat may occasionally flag but it will not be supressed by any amount of false Goebbelsian propaganda. The struggle for justice is never easy anywhere in the world…it calls for everlasting patience and unfailing perseverance at all times. The spirit of the crusaders for truth and justice in Gujarat is epitomised in this poem by Bhuchung Sonam, an alumnus of M.S. University, Baroda.

I have principle and no power
You have power and no principle
You being you
And I being I
Compromise is out of the question
So let the battle begin…

I have truth and no force
You have force and no truth
You being you
And I being I
Compromise is out of the question
So let the battle begin…

You may club my skull
I will fight
You may crush my bones
I will fight
You may bury me alive
I will fight
With truth running through me
I will fight
With every ounce of my strength
I will fight
With my last dying breath
I will fight…
I will fight till the
Castle that you built with your lies
Comes tumbling down
Till the devil you worshipped with your lies
Kneels down before my angel of truth.

May the kind God give you the requisite strength to be equitable and benevolent towards one and all!

Satyamev Jayate!

With best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

(Sanjiv Bhatt)

The New East India Trading Company - TATA Becomes The Largest...

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:14:32 -0400

The New East India Trading Company - TATA Becomes The Largest Employer In Britain

THE steelworks at Stocksbridge in South Yorkshire are strangely quiet. Its furnaces are not of the roaring blast variety; they are small, purring vacuum-arc furnaces that use electrical current to re-melt steel. Beer-barrel-sized ingots made from scrap at a sister steelworks in nearby Rotherham are cleaned, welded to a stub and lowered into the furnace. The drop-by-drop melting takes 12-14 hours, removes impurities and strengthens the steel. Once cooled and tested, the blocks of steel are ready for use in aerospace and oil-drilling, where high-strength steel is prized.

The steelworks were once part of Corus, an Anglo-Dutch firm, and before that of British Steel. They are now owned by Tata Steel, which belongs to an Indian conglomerate that also makes cars, chemicals and tea. Tata Steel paid $12 billion (£6.1 billion) for Corus in 2007, after a bidding war with CSN, a Brazilian rival. The following year Tata Motors bought Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) for $2.3 billion. That purchase already looks astute. This month Land Rover launched the Evoque, a mini sports-utility vehicle, which attracted 20,000 orders before it even went on sale.

Tata UK is now the country’s biggest manufacturer, with almost 40,000 workers—just ahead of British Aerospace. Add in Tata’s service industries, such as consultancy, and the payroll tops 45,000 (see chart). Its presence in Britain is part of a growing trend. Britain is second only to America as a destination for investment by emerging-market firms, many of them from India. Tata’s purchases of Corus and JLR, as well as earlier takeovers of Tetley tea and the Brunner Mond chemical works, raised eyebrows, a few anxieties and at least two big questions: what does Tata want from its acquisitions; and what does the firm’s stewardship of JLR and its stablemates mean for British industry?

Understanding the Tata connection requires a look back at history. The firm opened an outpost in London in 1907 to buy supplies for its Indian operations. This housed Tata’s first British venture, when Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which pioneered the outsourcing of computing to India, set up a one-man shop in 1975. Early TCS custom came from thrifts and insurers looking to update their systems cheaply. It now employs 4,900 people in Britain and has roughly three times that number in India servicing British-based clients.

TCS grew almost unnoticed. But the group’s first big jump into British industry could scarcely be ignored: in 2000 Tata Tea bought Tetley, a household name. The purchase was a template for the future takeovers of Corus and JLR: in each sector Tata was buying a bigger, established firm and financing the deal with bank loans. The logic of its buying spree (and the justification for the risky debt) was that Tata could not confine itself to India; it needed to be big and international to thrive in its chosen businesses. Big acquisitions were a way of reaching the required scale quickly.

They were also a shortcut to name recognition and technology that would otherwise have taken years to develop. That was part of the thinking behind the Tetley deal. “We wanted to learn about brands,” says Percy Siganporia, deputy head of Tata Global Beverages. The Tetley label has been extended from the black tea that is a staple of British shopping baskets to green teas, once the preserve of upmarket brands. Tata’s approach to brand management is global: in Canada the Tetley name had long been given to fancier teas.

Jaguar’s brand was also part of the appeal to Tata of JLR. But Land Rover’s off-road technology was the more valuable asset for Tata Motors’ truck and passenger-car business at home. Corus was bought to keep up with other firms, such as Mittal, that were making acquisitions. It also gave Tata a speciality-steel business that would have been hard to build, however.

Name recognition and know-how are valuable if the price is right. Some think Tata was so caught up in the steel industry’s rush to consolidate that it overpaid for Corus. National pride was at stake: the group’s chairman, Ratan Tata, said after buying Corus that losing the bid would have left India itself disappointed. Steel plants have since been sold, mothballed or slated for closure, in part because Europe’s economy is so weak. In the depths of recession even the high-end speciality-steel business saw its workforce halved to 1,700 (it is now 2,500).

Tata’s fans point out that the cost of buying Corus has to be weighed against the opportunity cost of not buying it. They note that past deals which seemed dear or risky have turned out fine. “What looked too high in 2000 looked brilliant by 2007, and a sweet deal by 2010,” says one Tata executive of the purchase of Tetley.

Tables turned

But just how sweet is Tata for Britain? Any fears that Tata would strip out technology and ship it home have proved baseless. The headquarters of Tata’s beverage business is Uxbridge, a London suburb, not India. Resources have been poured into other businesses. The workforce at the Halewood car plant on Merseyside, where the Evoque is made, has doubled to 3,000 this year, and JLR is building an engine plant in Wolverhampton. Tata Steel is investing in its stronger plants, including Stocksbridge, and Tata has brought with it firmer links to fast-growing Asian markets. JLR’s sales have been turbocharged by Chinese demand. Tetley is now sold as a premium brand in India alongside Tata Tea.

Indeed Tata’s animal spirits contrast with the rather depressed mood in British industry. “It comes down to our belief in the business,” says Anwar Hasan, head of Tata Limited, the firm’s UK umbrella. British staff say Tata was a preferred bidder for their firms because it could be relied upon to support research and product development. There is an Indian stamp on management, too. Tata executives are more adventurous and better at lateral thinking, says one senior British employee. For their part, Tata folk admire the British obsession with management process—with solving a problem, not just fixing a situation.

Tata has a strong identity in India but not yet in Britain, which accounts for around 60% of group revenues. Mr Hasan’s office is the glue that binds the British businesses together; they are run at arm’s-length from each other. The luxury hotel at 51 Buckingham Gate, owned by Taj, Tata’s hotel arm, has a Jaguar-themed suite at £5,100 a night—a rare collaboration between Tata firms. Still, British managers like the chance to network with, and learn from, executives at other Tata businesses. Perhaps Tata’s success can make conglomerates fashionable again in Britain.

The Biggest Mafia In The World, Funded By US Taxpayers! On May...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:33:47 -0400

The Biggest Mafia In The World, Funded By US Taxpayers!

On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form.

Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally, farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the grates, but never a man in a suit. “Even his tie and shoes were still on,” Shafiq told me. He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the man’s identity: Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposés of the Pakistani military. Shahzad had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country. Meanwhile, the zamindar—feudal lord—of a village twenty miles upstream from the dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.

The previous afternoon, Shahzad had left his apartment, in the placid F-8/4 neighborhood of Islamabad, and driven toward Dunya studios, about five miles away. It was five-thirty; the television interview was scheduled for six. According to a local journalist who talked to a source in one of Pakistan’s cell-phone companies, Shahzad’s phone went dead twelve minutes later. His route passed through some of the country’s most secure neighborhoods, and no one had reported seeing anything suspicious. Some Pakistanis speculated that Shahzad might even have known the people who took him away.

It was a particularly anxious time in Pakistan. Four weeks earlier, American commandos had flown, undetected, into Abbottabad, a military town northwest of Islamabad, and killed Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Army, which for more than sixty years has portrayed itself as the country’s guardian and guide, was deeply embarrassed: either it had helped to hide bin Laden or it had failed to realize that he was there. Certainly it hadn’t known that the Americans were coming.

Less than three weeks after the Abbottabad raid, the Army was humiliated a second time. A group of militants, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests, breached one of the country’s most secure bases, the Pakistan Naval Air Station-Mehran, outside Karachi, and blew up two P-3C Orion surveillance planes that had been bought from the United States. At least ten Pakistanis affiliated with the base died. The components of several nuclear warheads were believed to be housed nearby, and the implication was clear: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was not safe. In barracks across the country, military officers questioned the competence of Pakistan’s two most powerful men, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of the Army staff, and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I. Some officers even demanded that the Generals resign. Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, publicly disparaged the one institution that, until then, had seemed to function.

Amid this tumult, Shahzad wrote a sensational story for Asia Times Online, the Web site that employed him, saying that the attack on the Mehran base had been carried out by Al Qaeda—not by the Pakistani Taliban, which had claimed responsibility. He said that the Mehran assault had been intended to punish the military for having conducted “massive internal crackdowns on Al Qaeda affiliates within the Navy.” A number of sailors had been detained for plotting to kill Americans, and one “was believed to have received direct instructions from Hakeemullah Mehsud”—the chief of the Pakistani Taliban. It was not the first time that Shahzad had exposed links between Islamist militants and the armed forces—a connection that Pakistan’s generals have denied for years. But the Mehran article was his biggest provocation yet.

Shahzad, whose parents migrated from India after Partition, making him a muhajir—Urdu for “immigrant”—was an affable outsider within Pakistan’s journalistic circles. Asia Times Online is not connected to any of the country’s established newspapers; its editorial operations are based in Thailand. Shahzad had no local editor to guide him or restrain him. Only a few other journalists had written as aggressively about Islamist extremism in the military, and not all of them had survived.

A hallmark of Shahzad’s reporting was that it frequently featured interviews with Islamist militants, including Al Qaeda fighters. His work was sometimes inaccurate, but it held up often enough so that other journalists followed his leads. Perhaps because he had cultivated so many militants as sources, he occasionally seemed to glorify the men who were carrying out suicide bombings and assassinations. In 2009, he published a breathless account of a meeting with Ilyas Kashmiri, a top Al Qaeda leader. Shahzad noted that the terrorist “cut a striking figure,” was “strongly built,” and had a powerful handshake, adding, “Ilyas, with his unmatched guerrilla expertise, turns the strategic vision into reality, provides the resources and gets targets achieved, but he chooses to remain in the background and very low key.” At other times, like many Pakistani journalists, he seemed to spare the intelligence services from the most damning details in his notebooks. But on several important occasions—as in the case of the Mehran attack—he wrote what appeared to be undiluted truth about the Pakistani state’s deepest dilemmas.

An autopsy report showed that Shahzad had died slowly and painfully, his rib cage smashed on both sides, his lungs and liver ruptured. Someone, apparently, had intended to send a message by killing him.

The media in Pakistan immediately suggested a culprit. According to the newspaper Dawn, it was believed that Shahzad “had been picked up by the I.S.I. because of his recent story on the P.N.S.-Mehran base attack.”

Two days after Shahzad’s body was found, an I.S.I. official made a statement denying that its agents had played any role in the killing. Shahzad’s death, he said, was “unfortunate and tragic,” adding, “Baseless accusations against the country’s sensitive agencies for their alleged involvement in Shahzad’s murder are totally unfounded.” Forty-six journalists have been killed in Pakistan since 2001, and the I.S.I. had never before issued such a stark denial. The statement hardly quieted suspicion; in fact, it heightened it. “Everybody knows who did it,” Muhammad Faizan, a colleague of Shahzad’s at Asia Times Online and a friend, told me. “But no one can say.”

I met Saleem Shahzad nine days before he disappeared, and he seemed to know that his time was running out. It was May 20th, and Islamabad was full of conspiracy theories about the Abbottabad raid: bin Laden was still alive; Kiyani and Pasha had secretly helped the Americans with the raid. Mostly, the public radiated anger and shame.

I had called Shahzad to discuss a pair of stories he’d written about bin Laden. In March, five weeks before the raid in Abbottabad, Shahzad claimed that bin Laden had suddenly come across the radar screens of several intelligence agencies: he was on the move. The story also reported that bin Laden had held a strategy meeting with an old friend, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan mujahideen whom the State Department considers a “global terrorist.” Then, just after the Abbottabad raid, Shahzad published a report claiming that the Pakistani leadership had known that the Americans were planning a raid of some sort, and had even helped. What the Pakistanis didn’t know, Shahzad wrote, was that the person the Americans were looking for was bin Laden. Both stories struck me as possibly dubious, but it was clear that Shahzad had numerous sources inside Pakistani intelligence and other intelligence agencies in the region.

Shahzad and I agreed to meet at a Gloria Jean’s coffee shop, not far from his home. For years, Islamabad was a sleepy town of bureaucrats; however dangerous the rest of Pakistan was, the capital was usually quiet. This was no longer true. In 2008, the Marriott Hotel, only a few miles from Gloria Jean’s, was destroyed by a suicide bomber, who killed or wounded more than three hundred people. Lately, the Kohsar Market—the collection of expensive boutiques where the Gloria Jean’s is situated—had been declared off limits for American Embassy personnel on weekends, out of fear that it would be attacked.

Shahzad and I took our coffees upstairs. He pointed to a table in an alcove by a window. “Welcome to my private office,” he said, with a smile. “No one will be able to hear us here.”

We talked for a few minutes about the Abbottabad raid and the stories he’d written. Shahzad was tall and self-possessed; he had thick black hair and a round face offset by a trim beard. He was warm and expressive, the sort of reporter whom people talked to because he seemed genuinely nice. No wonder he got all those scoops, I thought. He was wearing Western clothes and spoke flawless English. He told me that he knew some of my colleagues, and offered to help me out in any way that he could.

And then Shahzad changed the subject. What he really wanted to talk about was his own safety. “Look, I’m in danger,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of Pakistan.” He added that he had a wife and three kids, and they weren’t safe, either. He’d been to London recently, and someone there had promised to help him move to England.

The trouble, he said, had begun on March 25th, the day that he published the story about bin Laden’s being on the move. The next morning, he got a phone call from an officer at the I.S.I., summoning him to the agency’s headquarters, in Aabpara, a neighborhood in eastern Islamabad. When Shahzad showed up, he was met by three I.S.I. officers. The lead man, he said, was a naval officer, Rear Admiral Adnan Nazir, who serves as the head of the I.S.I.’s media division.

“They were very polite,” Shahzad told me. He glanced over his shoulder. “They don’t shout, they don’t threaten you. This is the way they operate. But they were very angry with me.” The I.S.I. officers asked him to write a second story, retracting the first. He refused.

And then Admiral Nazir made a remark so bizarre that Shahzad said he had thought about it every day since.

“We want the world to believe that Osama is dead,” Nazir said.

Bin Laden was still alive, his whereabouts presumably unknown, when that conversation occurred. I pressed Shahzad. What did they mean by that?

He shrugged and glanced over his shoulder again. They were obviously trying to protect bin Laden, he said.

“Do you think the I.S.I. was hiding bin Laden?” I asked him.

Shahzad shrugged again and said yes. But he hadn’t been able to prove it. (The I.S.I. calls this claim an “unsubstantiated accusation of a very serious nature.”)

Shahzad said that he’d left I.S.I. headquarters that day thinking that he needed to be careful. Now, two months later, there was another reason to worry: a book that he’d written, “Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” was being released in three days, in both Pakistan and the West. The book, written in English, explored even more deeply the taboo subject of the I.S.I.’s relationship with Islamist militants.

“They’re going to be really mad,” Shahzad said.

Since the founding of Pakistan, in 1947, one of the country’s central myths has been the indispensability of the Army. Along with its appendage the I.S.I., it has intervened regularly in domestic politics, rigging votes and overthrowing elected governments. Civilians have been viewed by the Army as a collective nuisance, easily undermined or ignored.

In the spring of 1999, when General Pervez Musharraf, then the chief of the Army staff, sent Pakistani soldiers into the Kargil region of India—setting off a war between the two countries—he didn’t even bother telling the Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. (Musharraf denies this.) Sharif tried to fire him, but Musharraf threw Sharif in jail and took control of the government. Musharraf ruled for nine years, bullying the Supreme Court and fixing elections, and exhausting the public’s patience for military rule. Since Musharraf left office, in 2008, the military has continued to pay the country’s civilian leaders little respect. In October, 2009, after an attack by Islamist militants on the Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, was prohibited from entering the compound. The country’s current President, Asif Zardari, is seen as serving merely at the military’s pleasure.

Pakistan is one of the world’s poorest countries, but it has the eighth-largest army, which takes up nearly a quarter of the country’s federal budget. The Army’s oligarchs have appropriated a remarkable amount of the country’s wealth; they have substantial investments in the oil-and-gas industry and own shopping centers, farms, banks, and factories. Members of the Army are believed to traffic in narcotics, guns, and mercenaries. Officers live behind high walls, in manicured compounds of a luxury unimaginable to the average Pakistani. Army officers send their children to special schools and avail themselves of special hospitals. “The Pakistani Army is like a mafia,” Ayesha Siddiqa, an independent author who has written extensively about the Pakistani military, said. “The Army has its own interests, and it will eliminate any opposition to those interests, including civilian governments.”

But the most pernicious of the Army’s activities has been its long alliance with Islamist militants. Since the late seventies, the military and the I.S.I. have trained and directed thousands of militants to fight in Indian Kashmir—an area that Pakistan has claimed since independence—and in Afghanistan. For years, the I.S.I. has offered sanctuary to Taliban leaders, who have used Pakistan as a base for planning operations.

In an article published in October, 2010, Shahzad reported that I.S.I. officials knew where top Taliban leaders were hiding in Karachi, yet had done nothing to pick them up. Some Western officials believe that the I.S.I.’s protection extends to the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar. In May, a retired senior Pakistani military officer told me that Mullah Omar was living in Pakistan, with the knowledge of the country’s security agencies. “Our people have his address,” he said. The I.S.I. also provides support to the Haqqani network, a Taliban-related guerrilla group. Publicly, Pakistan’s generals claim that they cannot find Taliban and Haqqani leaders. Although many American officials consider this a lie, Pakistan continues to receive as much as three billion dollars a year from the U.S.—most of it for the military.

In recent years, as Pakistan has edged toward anarchy, the I.S.I. has grown bolder and more violent. This spring, a witness testified in federal court in Chicago that I.S.I. agents were deeply involved in the planning of the terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008, which killed a hundred and sixty-three people. The witness, a Pakistani-American named David Headley, said that he had received espionage training from I.S.I. operatives, and that he had provided hours of video surveillance of the Mumbai target to the I.S.I. and a terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba. Headley testified that he understood Lashkar to be operating “under the umbrella of the I.S.I.” Shortly after the Mumbai attack, Shahzad published an article alleging that the operation was based on an I.S.I. scheme for an attack on another Indian target. At the time, the I.S.I. was under the direction of General Kiyani.

Since the late nineties, the I.S.I.’s links to bin Laden and Al Qaeda have been strong enough to expose some embarrassing entanglements. In 1998, the Clinton Administration fired cruise missiles at a jihadi training camp in Afghanistan, in the hope of killing bin Laden. The missiles missed him, but they killed several Islamist militants—and the team of I.S.I. agents who were training them.

The agency’s links to bin Laden continued after the 9/11 attacks. This May, I travelled to Afghanistan to meet an I.S.I. agent named Fida Muhammad, who had been arrested by Afghan intelligence agents. He was being held in Pul-i-Charki prison, outside Kabul. When I arrived, the Afghan guards brought Muhammad to a small room and left him alone with me and my translator. Muhammad told me that he’d been a prisoner since 2007. He was from Sada, a village in the Federal Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. He described himself as a civilian employee of the I.S.I. For much of the past decade, he said, he had escorted Haqqani fighters from their sanctuaries in Pakistan into Afghanistan, where they fought against the Americans. He had been hired for his knowledge of the trails that wind through the mountainous border. “I can pass right under the noses of the Americans and the Afghans, and they will never see me,” he said. He’d been arrested while spying on Indian agents inside Afghanistan.

Muhammad told me that his most memorable job came in December, 2001, when he was part of a large I.S.I. operation intended to help jihadi fighters escape from Tora Bora—the mountainous region where bin Laden was trapped for several weeks, until he mysteriously slipped away. Muhammad said that when the American bombing of Tora Bora began, in late November, he and other I.S.I. operatives had gone there, and into other parts of eastern Afghanistan, to evacuate training camps whose occupants included Al Qaeda fighters.

“We told them, ‘Shave your beards, change your clothes, and follow us,’ ” Muhammad said. “We led them to the border with Pakistan and told them they were on their own. And then we went back for more.”

Muhammad was part of a four-man team, and there were dozens of such teams. He estimated that the I.S.I. teams evacuated as many as fifteen hundred militants from Tora Bora and other camps: “Not only Arabs but Pakistanis, Uzbeks, and Chechens. I didn’t see bin Laden. But there were so many Arabs.” The operation had been sanctioned at the highest levels of the I.S.I. “There are people in the I.S.I. who believe the militants are valuable assets,” he said. (The I.S.I. denied Muhammad’s account.)

Amrullah Saleh directed the Afghan intelligence service from 2004 to 2010. He recently told me that in 2005 his men arrested an I.S.I. operative, Syed Akbar Sabir, who had escorted bin Laden from the Pakistani region of Chitral to Peshawar, passing through Kunar Province, in Afghanistan, along the way. “We believed that he was part of the I.S.I. operation to care for bin Laden,” Saleh said. In 2006, Sabir was convicted in an Afghan court of aiding the insurgency, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. I spoke to him at Pul-i-Charki in May. He told me that he was a trained physician and a member of a militia financed by the Pakistani Army, but he denied that he was an I.S.I. operative.

Since the raid in Abbottabad, U.S. officials have openly suggested that the Pakistani Army or the I.S.I. helped to hide bin Laden, but hard evidence has yet to be found. Perhaps the most suggestive hint of official involvement comes in the shadowy figure of Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj, who was the director of the I.S.I. in 2007 and 2008. He was very close to Musharraf—they are reportedly related by marriage. Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer, says that Taj was deeply involved with Pakistani militants, particularly those fighting against India. Riedel, who oversaw President Barack Obama’s initial review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, said, “Taj was very close to the militant networks. And his fingerprints were on everything.” In 2008, American officials successfully pressured Musharraf to remove Taj, suspecting that he had been involved in the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, earlier that year.

Before taking over the I.S.I., Taj was the commandant of the Pakistani military academy in Abbottabad. That is, he was the senior military official in Abbottabad at the time that American officials believe bin Laden began living there. Taj retired from the Pakistani Army in April, just days before the raid in Abbottabad. Attempts to track him down in Pakistan were unsuccessful.

Riedel said, “Taj is the right person at the right time. If the I.S.I. was helping to hide bin Laden, then it would make sense to park him somewhere permanently. Who better to be the park policeman than Musharraf’s favorite general?”

Shahzad was not the only Pakistani journalist whose reporting made him a target of the state. Umar Cheema, a reporter for the News, an important Pakistani daily, has published numerous articles on the military’s failures. At three in the morning on September 4, 2010, Cheema was driving home from a tea shop in Islamabad, where he’d met some friends, when he was forced off the road by two unmarked Toyotas. Two men in police uniforms approached his car. They told him that he was suspected of running over and killing a pedestrian.

The policemen directed Cheema into the back seat of a black Land Cruiser, where two other men handcuffed him and covered his face with a shawl. After two hours, the car came to a stop. He was led up a stairwell, and a heavy door closed behind him. Cheema asked, “What police station have we come to?” One of the men responded, “Shut up.” “That’s when I knew I was in trouble,” Cheema told me. During the next half hour, he was stripped, beaten with rods and a leather strap, and sexually humiliated. “I was crying out to God,” Cheema recalled. Then the shawl covering his face was removed: standing around him were five masked men. They shaved his head and eyebrows and took degrading photographs of him. “We’re going to make an example of you,” one of the men said.

Cheema, who is thirty-four, described his ordeal over tea at my hotel in Islamabad. He spoke without hesitation, and seemed remarkably fit, given all that he’d been through.

The torturers, Cheema said, put the shawl back over his face and drove him to a village a hundred miles from Islamabad. One of the men removed the cuffs and told him to walk into the street. “You’ll find your car right over there,” the man said. “Don’t look back.” They’d taken Cheema’s glasses, wallet, and cell phone, and given him a hundred rupees—the equivalent of a dollar and twenty cents. “That was for the toll on the way home,” he said.

Cheema’s captors made it clear that they were working for the government. “You are being punished for your reporting,” one of them said during the interrogation. Cheema had no doubt that he had been detained by the I.S.I.; ten times over the previous six months, he told me, the agency had warned associates of his that it was unhappy about his reporting. (The I.S.I. denied that it had anything to do with the assault.)

Pakistani journalists say that it is not easy to predict when the security agencies will detain, torture, or kill a reporter. Pakistan is a peculiar state: it is unjust and autocratic, but it is also partly open and partly democratic. The media there is loud, lively, and varied, and there are good newspapers, magazines, and television networks that investigate official misconduct. And although reporters in Pakistan are routinely threatened and sometimes brutalized, a small cohort seems able to write more freely about sensitive subjects.

The journalist best known outside Pakistan is Ahmed Rashid, the author of several books on Pakistan and Afghanistan; his book “Taliban” was a best-seller in the U.S. He has published dozens of revelatory reports on the military and intelligence services. Rashid says that he has been threatened repeatedly by the I.S.I. over the years, and was once warned personally by Musharraf. Rashid’s colleagues believe that his prominence in the West has protected him; he writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and the Financial Times.

These days, Rashid says, he has had to be more careful. After a recent threat, he stayed out of Pakistan for a couple of months before returning to his home, in Lahore. “There is a red line in Pakistan—there has always been a red line,” Rashid said. “But, after Saleem Shahzad, no one knows where the red line is anymore.” He went on, “It’s debilitating. You can’t really go out and report. Sometimes you just sit and think about what is going to happen.”

Saleem Shahzad wasn’t well known outside the country. Asia Times Online, which he joined in 2000, had only a small presence in Pakistan, and was struggling to attract international readers. Shahzad seemed to enjoy the freedom that the Web site offered, even if it meant that he had to surrender some influence. In the preface to “Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” he wrote, “Independent reporting for the alternative media best suits my temperament as it encourages me to seek the truth beyond ‘conventional wisdom.’ As a result, I study people and situations from a relatively uncompromised position.”

In the decade after 9/11, Shahzad’s reporting increasingly attracted notice within Pakistani media circles. Many of his articles for Asia Times Online were reprinted in the Pakistani press. What stood out was his legwork: he often travelled to the tribal areas near the Afghan border to meet with members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Zafar Sheikh, Shahzad’s best friend and a local correspondent for the Saudi state television network, told me, “Saleem would say, ‘Let’s have a joyride!,’ and then we would go off to somewhere crazy to meet the militants.” Shahzad took to the rugged life. During the government’s offensive against militants in the Swat Valley, in 2009, rebels were impressed by his ability to sleep, untroubled, for hours in the open air.

Sheikh warned Shahzad that the stories he was writing could get him in trouble with the authorities. “I told him so many times, ‘Saleem, you’re going to be killed, what you’re doing is too dangerous,’ but he was reckless.”

In September, 2009, Pakistani officials announced that Ilyas Kashmiri, the Al Qaeda operative, had been killed in a drone strike. On October 15th, Shahzad published a memorable rebuttal—his account of meeting Kashmiri, with a dateline from North Waziristan. “We planned this battle to bring the Great Satan and its allies into this swamp,” Kashmiri told him. Shahzad got the story right: Kashmiri was still alive. The article’s tone bordered on gloating. Shahzad wrote that Kashmiri’s arrival in the border areas would send “a chill down spines in Washington as they realized that with his vast experience, he could turn unsophisticated battle patterns in Afghanistan into audacious modern guerrilla warfare.”

Tony Allison, a South African who works in the Thailand offices of Asia Times Online, was Shahzad’s editor. “Sometimes, Saleem would disappear for three or four days, and I wouldn’t know where he’d gone, and then he would emerge with a great story,” he told me. “I knew he could get the story and I trusted him.”

Shahzad was not universally respected by his peers. No doubt there was some resentment over his scoops. But sometimes he seemed to be regurgitating the stories his sources told him without checking whether they were true. Sometimes he got things seriously wrong. His story claiming that Pakistan’s leaders assisted the Americans’ raid in Abbottabad, for instance, is not supported by any available evidence.

“I liked Saleem, but I didn’t always know what was right and what was wrong,” Cyril Almeida, the chief political columnist for Dawn, told me. “It was difficult to know where he was getting this stuff.”

In Shahzad’s book, there are many vivid anecdotes; for instance, he details an incident in which an Al Qaeda militant and former Army officer, Major Haroon Ashik, smuggled a shipment of night-vision goggles through Islamabad International Airport, assisted by an aide to President Musharraf. The story seems solid, as it is based on an interview with Ashik. But the book’s analysis is shallow: Shahzad depicts Al Qaeda not as an embattled and fragmented entity, as most of the available evidence suggests it is, but, rather, as an Islamist version of SPECTRE, from the James Bond films—a monolithic, secretive power whose influence stretches across the globe. Similarly, instead of portraying the group as a far-flung franchise operation, as it is widely seen in the West, he claims that Al Qaeda has been intimately involved in directing other militant groups in the region, including the Taliban.

Shahzad’s book, even more than his daily journalism, leaves the impression that he harbored sympathy for the killers he writes about. Not only does he describe with enthusiasm the exploits of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters like Ilyas Kashmiri; he refers several times to “Khurasan”—an outdated term for Central Asia that Al Qaeda followers often use to denote the region. At the end of the book, Shahzad writes, in an oddly prophetic register, “The promised messiah, the Mahdi, will then rise in the Middle East and Al Qaeda will mobilize its forces from Ancient Khurasan for the liberation of Palestine, where a final victory will guarantee the revival of a Global Muslim Caliphate.”

When Shahzad was in college, he was a member of the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist political party that has fed thousands of recruits into militant groups. Some of his classmates received training as guerrilla fighters, and Shahzad told other journalists that these young men became key sources for his reporting in the field. In recent years, friends and colleagues say, Shahzad stopped supporting Jamaat-e-Islami, finding its ideology too radical.

Although Shahzad didn’t support the militants’ aims, his feelings for them ran deep. “I think Saleem had great sympathy for the militants, not because he believed in the caliphate but because he understood their side of the story,” Allison, his editor at Asia Times Online, said. “He understood and empathized with them. He had empathy for the Western soldiers in Afghanistan, too. This is why he was trusted by the militants. He did not share their vision, but he understood their vision.”

Shahzad was socially conservative: he didn’t drink, and friends and colleagues describe him as pious. But they say that he didn’t support Islamist violence. “Saleem felt that there was a kind of endgame unfolding between the militants and the Americans, because the Americans had been so stupid in Afghanistan,” Hameed Haroon, the publisher of Dawn, told me. “This permeated his writing. But he was against the terror.”

Because Shahzad had relationships with a number of I.S.I. agents, he was one of a small class of reporters more likely to become targets of the intelligence agencies. Talking to the I.S.I. allowed him to get privileged information, and to verify information that he had picked up on his own. But maintaining a relationship with the I.S.I. may have created expectations of loyalty. Almeida, the Dawn columnist, told me that he refuses to talk to the I.S.I.: “Once you start talking to these people, that creates a relationship, and then they think you owe them. Then, if you do something they don’t like, they feel betrayed.”

Ayesha Siddiqa, the independent author who has written scathingly of the military, said that, two years ago, she turned down an offer to meet General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief. “Once you go into the headquarters, they have you,” she told me. “They can photograph you there, they can put out the word that you were visiting, they can blackmail you.” Siddiqa, too, has been threatened repeatedly by associates of the military and the I.S.I. Since Shahzad’s death, she has felt more pressure than ever before. “It wears on me,” she said. “Some days, you can’t work. I know that they could come for me anytime.”

Siddiqa spoke to Shahzad only hours before he disappeared. At about 4 P.M. on May 29th, he called her on her cell phone. She was driving, she said, so the conversation was brief. Shahzad seemed interested in some aspect of official Pakistani duplicity. She recalls him saying, “Pakistan should stop lying to the U.S.—even if we don’t want to do what they want us to do, we should stop lying about it.” They agreed to speak later that day.

According to Shahzad’s friends and colleagues, he had been warned by the I.S.I. at least three times before he finally disappeared. Shahzad documented one of those encounters in remarkable detail.

On October 16, 2010, Shahzad published an article about Abdul Ghani Baradar, then the deputy commander of the Taliban. The next day, he was summoned to the I.S.I.’s headquarters. The Baradar story touched on the I.S.I.’s relationship with Taliban leaders—an extremely sensitive subject. Earlier that year, American and Pakistani intelligence agents had arrested Baradar during a raid in Karachi. At the time, both the Americans and the Pakistanis hailed Baradar’s arrest as a breakthrough in their difficult relationship. But I.S.I. agents later told a different story: they had orchestrated Baradar’s arrest, after discovering that he was holding secret peace talks with Afghanistan’s leaders, without informing his I.S.I. handlers. The I.S.I. agents had set up the raid in Karachi in order to cut off the peace talks. Shahzad, in his October article, wrote that the I.S.I. had quietly released Baradar.

After a tense meeting with two I.S.I. officers about the article, Shahzad called Ali Dayan Hassan, the director of Human Rights Watch in Pakistan. Hassan suggested that Shahzad make notes of the meeting. Shahzad did so, and sent a copy of them to Hassan. Shahzad wrote that he was met at headquarters by two I.S.I. officials—Commodore Khalid Pervaiz and Rear Admiral Nazir, the same officer who gave him the warning in March.

Nazir and Pervaiz were courteous as they asked him to reveal his sources for the Baradar story. Shahzad refused. They asked him to publicly retract the story, and Shahzad refused to do that, too. The I.S.I. officers did not push him, he wrote.

But at the very end of the conversation Nazir made an ominous remark. He said, “We recently arrested a terrorist and recovered a lot of data—diaries and other material—during the interrogation. The terrorist had a hit list with him.” He then added, “If I find your name on the list, I will certainly let you know.”

Seven months later, on May 22nd, the naval base at Mehran came under attack. The siege lasted fifteen hours and was covered, live, on Pakistani television. Footage shot by cameramen just outside the base showed plumes of fire from the ruined jets spiralling into the night sky.

Five days after the incident, Shahzad published his report saying that the attack was a reprisal for the Navy’s arrest of sailors who were Al Qaeda sympathizers. High-level naval officers, Shahzad wrote, had been secretly negotiating with Al Qaeda over the fate of the detained sailors. To move the discussions along, militants had already carried out three attacks on naval targets in Karachi.

Shahzad quoted naval officers as saying that the arrest of the Islamist sailors had set off a chain reaction. “That was the beginning of huge trouble,” one officer told Shahzad. According to the article, top officers in the Navy believed that the ease with which the militants had attacked the naval base indicated there was a “sizable Al Qaeda infiltration within the Navy’s ranks.”

Indeed, Shahzad wrote, the Mehran attack had been carried out by a group of fighters led by Ilyas Kashmiri—the Al Qaeda fighter whom he had praised for his “unmatched guerrilla expertise.”

Three days after the attack, the naval base at Mehran got a new commander: Commodore Pervaiz, one of the two I.S.I. officers who, in October, had warned Shahzad to tone down his reporting. The embarrassing Asia Times Online report was published on Pervaiz’s second day in command. Two days later, Shahzad disappeared.

Commodore Zafar Iqbal, an I.S.I. spokesman, told me that Pervaiz would not be available for an interview. “Out of the question,” he said.

The Islamization of the Pakistani military causes deep worry among policymakers in the United States and Europe. Pakistan, which is believed to possess about a hundred nuclear warheads, has the fastest-growing atomic arsenal in the world. The fear is that rogue members of the military could help a terrorist group like Al Qaeda acquire a warhead, or that a group of Islamist military officers could overthrow the government. “The Pakistanis are worried to death about the security of their nuclear weapons,” a senior American military officer told me. “They would never tell us that, but we are sure of it.”

Even before the attack on Mehran, there had been signs of violent radicalism inside the Pakistani military. Two assassination attempts against President Musharraf in 2003, both of which nearly succeeded, were carried out by Al Qaeda fighters who were assisted by Air Force officers. And in October, 2009, came the attack on the Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, killing twenty-three people. The attackers wore Army uniforms and seemed to know the layout of the headquarters. One of the lead attackers was a former medic in the Pakistani Army.

Shahzad argues in his book that it was around the time of the attempts on Musharraf’s life that Al Qaeda made its first substantial inroads into the Army. “From 2003 onwards Al Qaeda succeeded in sowing the seeds of dissent within Pakistan’s armed forces,” Shahzad writes. “Pakistan’s tribal youths and formerly pro-establishment jihadi cadres moved away from Pakistan’s ruling establishment and promised allegiance to Al Qaeda.”

In the weeks after the Abbottabad raid, Islamist groups tried to capitalize on the outpouring of anti-American anger inside the Pakistani military. The most active group appears to have been Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global movement that advocates a peaceful restoration of the caliphate, the theocratic state that once ruled the Islamic world from Spain to the Arabian Sea. Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in Pakistan, but it is allowed to operate in many countries, including the United Kingdom.

After the attack on the Mehran base, people working on behalf of Hizb ut-Tahrir distributed leaflets at military bases and in cantonments in Karachi, with the aim of stirring up a revolt. One leaflet said, “O true officers of the Pakistan Army! Your leaders broke their promises again… . These traitorous leaders are spilling your blood and the blood of Muslims in Afghanistan and the tribal areas, and they are doing this for America… . This is a request for you to prepare a plan to give power to Hizb ut-Tahrir.” The incidents, which took place on May 3rd, May 7th, and June 23rd, were confirmed by Commodore Iqbal.

Pakistan’s military leaders have become acutely nervous about Hizb ut-Tahrir, and about the Islamist threat more generally. In June, they announced the arrest of Brigadier Ali Khan, who worked at Army headquarters, because of alleged associations with Hizb ut-Tahrir. According to Pakistani press accounts, Brigadier Khan had denounced Kiyani and Pasha in language similar to that used in the leaflets.

Iqbal told me that Khan’s arrest was approved at the highest levels. “You don’t just arrest a brigadier,” he said. “It’s a very big deal.” Some American officials believe that the arrest of Khan, who was only months from retirement, was designed to send a message to lower-ranking officers that Islamist sentiment—and insubordination—would not be tolerated. “Khan was a fall guy,” the senior American military officer told me. Khan’s arrest may have been ordered to reassure the U.S. as well. American officials say that Kiyani and Pasha, for all their faults, are the best allies the U.S. is likely to get.

The attack on the Mehran base was especially troubling, because it could be seen as a test run for an assault on one of Pakistan’s nuclear bases. “You have to appreciate how impressive the attack in Karachi was,” the senior American military officer said. “They practiced it. They knew the layout of the base. They probably built a mock-up of the place. And no one knew a thing.”

Commodore Iqbal did not rule out the possibility that the attackers were helped by Al Qaeda sympathizers inside the base, but said that there was “no proof” yet. At least three Pakistani sailors have been court-martialled.

The presence of Islamists in the Navy, and at Mehran, was not a secret among Pakistanis. But Shahzad’s article was particularly incendiary. Not only did he report that sailors at the base had helped the attackers; he wrote that the Navy’s leadership was bargaining directly with Al Qaeda. “Consider the time when Saleem’s piece came out,” a high-level American official told me. “The military felt humiliated. It felt backed into a corner.” The official added, “When you’re backed into a corner like that, you strike back.”

The first order to harm Shahzad was issued shortly after his article on the Mehran attack appeared. The initial directive was not to kill him but to rough him up, possibly in the same way that Cheema had been dealt with. But a senior American official confirms that, at some point before Shahzad was taken away, the directive was changed. He was to be murdered.

Five weeks after the killing, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said publicly that it had been “sanctioned by the government” of Pakistan. In fact, according to the American official, reliable intelligence indicates that the order to kill Shahzad came from a senior officer on General Kiyani’s staff. The officer made it clear that he was speaking on behalf of Kiyani himself. (General Athar Abbas, the spokesman for the Pakistani Army, called this allegation “preposterous.”)

After the discovery of Shahzad’s body, some of his friends and family members told me they believed that the I.S.I. agents had meant only to beat him, and that things got out of hand. They had reason to think so. A year earlier, during an altercation with a guard outside a social club in Islamabad, Shahzad had been shot. Shahzad’s brother-in-law, Hamza Ameer, told me that the guard had become angry after Shahzad complained about being denied entry, because he had forgotten his membership card. The bullet had penetrated his liver, and it remained lodged near his spine. (According to Ameer, Shahzad eventually pardoned the guard in a Pakistani court, as is allowed under the law, so the guard went free.) Shahzad’s autopsy report says that a ruptured liver is one of the things that killed him.

But Dr. Mohammed Farrukh Kamal, one of the physicians who performed the autopsy, told me that Shahzad had been beaten with a heavy instrument, like a metal rod, and he dismissed the notion that Shahzad had been killed by mistake. “You don’t hit a person that hard by accident,” he told me. “They meant to kill him.”

Shahzad’s journalism may not have been the sole reason that he was targeted. I.S.I. officials may have become convinced that Shahzad was working for a foreign intelligence agency. This could have elevated him in the eyes of the military from a troublesome reporter who deserved a beating to a foreign agent who needed to be killed.

In fact, Shahzad, at the time of his death, was in contact with several foreign intelligence officials. He told me that a Saudi intelligence official was among those who had told him that bin Laden had met with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen now considered a terrorist. Shahzad himself, under questioning from the I.S.I., had admitted that another source for that story was General Bismillah Khan—then the Interior Minister of Afghanistan, and a loathed figure in the Pakistani military.

More crucially, it appears that, in the months before Shahzad was killed, some foreign intelligence agencies tried to recruit him. Roger van Zwanenberg, the publisher of Pluto Press, the London imprint that released Shahzad’s book, told me that members of British intelligence had asked Shahzad for help during a short visit that he made to London in March. The intelligence officers wanted Shahzad to help them get in touch with Taliban leaders. “Saleem declined,” van Zwanenberg said. He added that, when Shahzad attended a conference in New Delhi this spring, officers from an Indian intelligence agency offered to put him on a retainer. Several of Shahzad’s colleagues confirmed this.

There is no evidence that Shahzad was working for any foreign intelligence agency, but mere suspicion on this front could have imperilled him. “What is the final thing that earns Shahzad a red card—the final thing that tips him over from being a nuisance to an enemy?” a Western researcher in Islamabad said to me. “If someone concluded that he was a foreign agent, and that the stories he was putting out were part of a deliberate effort to defame the I.S.I. and undermine the I.S.I.’s carefully crafted information strategy—if anyone in the I.S.I. concluded that, then Saleem would be in grave danger.”

On June 3rd, four days after Shahzad was found in the Upper Jhelum Canal, a C.I.A. officer, operating a pilotless drone, fired a missile at a group of men who had gathered in an orchard outside the village of Ghwa Khwa, in South Waziristan. Locals who ran to the scene saw many bodies, but a group of militants who had survived told them to stay back. “Kashmiri Khan! Kashmiri Khan!” one of them yelled. Among the dead was Ilyas Kashmiri—the terrorist whom Shahzad had once proved to be still alive, and who he said was responsible for the attack on the Mehran base.

Three days later, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, announced that, this time, Kashmiri was definitely dead.

Given the brief time that passed between Shahzad’s death and Kashmiri’s, a question inevitably arose: Did the Americans find Kashmiri on their own? Or did they benefit from information obtained by the I.S.I. during its detention of Shahzad? If so, Shahzad’s death would be not just a terrible example of Pakistani state brutality; it would be a terrible example of the collateral damage sustained in America’s war on terror.

If the C.I.A. killed Kashmiri using information extracted from Shahzad, it would not be the first time that the agency had made use of a brutal interrogation. In 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an Al Qaeda operative held by the Egyptian government, made statements, under torture, suggesting links between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden; this information was used to help justify the invasion of Iraq.

Kashmiri, who was forty-seven, was a guerrilla fighter who received training from both the Pakistani Army and the I.S.I. According to American officials, he fought in the guerrilla war inside Indian Kashmir, working closely with the I.S.I. According to one frequently heard story, Kashmiri, returning from an operation in India, presented Musharraf—then the chief of the Army staff—with the head of an Indian soldier. But, as Musharraf began to curtail the activities of militant groups operating in India, Kashmiri moved to the tribal areas and started waging war against the Pakistani state. He brought together the 313 Brigade, an amalgam of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and other fighters. Kashmiri was accused of playing a key role in one of the two unsuccessful plots to assassinate Musharraf in 2003, and he is believed to have helped orchestrate the 2009 attack on the Army’s headquarters. Earlier this year, David Headley, the Pakistani-American who testified in Chicago about the Mumbai attack, named Kashmiri as a key terrorist planner.

On May 27th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Islamabad, and she presented to Pakistani leaders a list of high-value targets. According to ABC News, Kashmiri was on the list. That morning, Shahzad had published the article naming Kashmiri as the perpetrator of the attack on the Mehran base—broadcasting, once again, his connection to the militant leader.

Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. officer, said, “After the Abbottabad raid, the Pakistanis were under enormous pressure to show that they were serious about Al Qaeda.”

Shahzad, at the time of his death, was in contact with several Taliban and Al Qaeda militants. It’s obvious from his book that Kashmiri was one of them. Muhammad Faizan, Shahzad’s colleague, said, “The militants used to call him, not the other way around.”

After Shahzad’s murder, the Pakistani government appointed a commission, led by a justice of the Supreme Court, to investigate. In late July, the justice, Mian Saqib Nisar, summoned a group of Pakistani reporters and editors and briefed them on his progress. Bani Amin Khan, the inspector general of the Islamabad police, also appeared at the meeting, with some of his investigators. According to reporters who attended the briefing, one of the investigators said that he had seen something unusual in Shahzad’s cell-phone records: more than two hundred and fifty-eight calls to and from a single number during a one-month period.

Imtiaz Alam, the secretary-general of the South Asian Free Media Association, told me that after the briefing he approached Khan and pressed him for details. Khan’s answer, according to Alam: “The calls were with Ilyas Kashmiri.” When I asked Khan about Shahzad’s case, he threw me out of his office.

The evidence is fragmentary, but it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which Pakistani intelligence agents gave the C.I.A. at least some of the information that pinpointed Kashmiri. Likewise, it seems possible that at least some of that information may have come from Shahzad, either during his lethal interrogation or from data taken from his cell phone. In the past, the I.S.I. and the C.I.A. have coöperated extensively on the U.S. drone program.

This relationship has been strained since the bin Laden killing. For the moment, much of the drone program, once based in Pakistan, appears to be frozen. According to the senior American military officer, the drones are no longer flying out of Shamsi Air Base, in Pakistan, but from Afghanistan, and the intelligence used to target militants is now being collected almost entirely by American networks. Most of the drone strikes are being carried out without prior Pakistani knowledge.

“We want the Pakistanis’ coöperation, but we are prepared to go without it,” the military officer told me. The Americans’ unilateral approach to drone strikes is causing intense tension with Pakistani leaders, and not just because of their claims that the strikes kill many civilians. The drone strikes sometimes reveal that the Americans and the I.S.I. are working against each other.

On March 17th, four missiles fired from a drone hit a group of men who had gathered at a market in the village of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan. As many as forty-four people died. The Pakistani government denounced the strike, claiming that it had killed a number of tribal

elders, and demanded an apology.

As with nearly all drone strikes, the precise number and nature of the casualties were impossible to verify. The high-level American official told me that the “tribal elders” were actually insurgent leaders. But he offered another reason that the Pakistani officials were so inflamed: “It turns out there were some I.S.I. guys who were there with the insurgent leaders. We killed them, too.” (The I.S.I. denied that its agents were present.)

What were I.S.I. agents doing at a meeting of insurgent commanders? The American official said that he did not know.

A senior counterterrorism official said that the Kashmiri strike was not connected to Shahzad’s death. At the same time, the official acknowledged that in the past the U.S. had received intelligence from the Pakistanis on Kashmiri, and confirmed that the Pakistanis continue to share information on targets.

Commodore Iqbal, the I.S.I. spokesman, reiterated the agency’s insistence that it had no involvement in Shahzad’s death. But he said that the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. were still coöperating. “We are giving the Americans a lot of intelligence,” Iqbal told me. “We don’t feel like we are getting much in return.” When I asked him if the I.S.I. had coöperated on the strike that killed Kashmiri, he said, “I can’t answer that.”

These days, the high-level American official told me, most drone attacks in Pakistan are “signature strikes,” which are carried out when a group of people match a certain profile—they are operating a training camp, for instance, or consorting with known militants. Such strikes are not directed at specific individuals—like, say, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s new leader. Usually, the agency doesn’t know the identities of the people it is firing at. “Most of the high-value targets have been killed this way,” the American official told me.

In the case of Kashmiri, the American official initially told me that he had been killed in a signature strike. “We did the strike, and we found out later that it was him,” the official said. When I pressed him, though, he said, “We sort of thought he would be there.” He declined to elaborate.

Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. officer, said that helping the agency kill Kashmiri would have made eminent sense to the I.S.I. Kashmiri had become an enemy of the Pakistani state, and had maintained potentially embarrassing contacts with Pakistani security services.

“If you start from the premise that the Pakistanis had something to do with hiding bin Laden, then you have to assume that they were trying very hard to put everything back into the tube,” Riedel said. “And so it would have made sense for them to get rid of Saleem Shahzad. And Kashmiri, too.”

In Pakistan, reporting on Shahzad’s case ceased, for the most part, after a few weeks. Shahzad’s wife, Anita, recently communicated with me, via e-mail. “I don’t want to rewind to that bitter time,” she said, adding that Shahzad had been “a brave man.” She assured me that “here in Pakistan they are trying their level best to find the culprit.”

In the wake of Shahzad’s death and the Abbottabad raid, the tone of the Pakistani press darkened. Some columnists argued that the Pakistani state was poised to fall to Islamist militants. Ayman al-Zawahiri “is the man waiting to become the caliph of Pakistan,” Khaled Ahmed wrote in the Friday Times, an influential weekly.

This spring, Umar Cheema, still recovering from his ordeal with the I.S.I., was invited to the U.S., where he was honored by Syracuse University for his journalism. Cheema told me that while in America he was offered several fellowships, as well as the prospect of asylum. He decided to come home. “If Pakistan were not in such dark shape, I would leave,” he told me. “But it is my duty to try to make this a better country for the next generation.” He quickly broke a number of important stories, including one charging that Yousaf Raza Gilani, the Prime Minister, and the twenty-five members of his cabinet paid no taxes last year.

Zafar Sheikh, Shahzad’s friend and colleague, took a different path. Years ago, Sheikh said, he regularly accompanied Shahzad on road trips to the tribal areas, and sat in mud huts and interviewed Taliban commanders. He, too, had aspired to write revelatory stories about the inner workings of the I.S.I. But now he has set those ambitions aside.

“I used to be a brave journalist,” Sheikh told me one day as we rode in a car across the Punjabi plains. “But I will be frank with you. I don’t want to get killed like Saleem. I don’t want to suffer like Saleem did. So I’m not part of the war anymore. I am just writing stereotypical bullshit stories—and no one is angry.”

We drove on for a little longer, toward the Upper Jhelum Canal, and, a few minutes later, we found the place where the laborer had discovered Shahzad’s body. The water was streaming into the intake grates.

“I used to look for stories that would open people’s eyes,” Sheikh said. “Now I am just a stupid correspondent doing stupid stories. And I am happy. I am happy.”

Militants Strike India, Pakistan Alike - Results In The Indo-Pak...

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 12:36:00 -0400

Militants Strike India, Pakistan Alike - Results In The Indo-Pak Border Being Lit Up (Space-Picture)

At least 34 people were killed in separate terrorist attacks in India and Pakistan Wednesday.

In Delhi, India, militants placed a suitcase full of explosives outside the city’s high court, where nearly 300 people were lined up for the day’s proceedings.

The explosion left at least 11 people dead and more than 60 injured — the blast broke windows in the court house offices and caused a panic on the streets.

Police have made initial sketches of two suspects, both men. One is presumed to be around 25-years-old, the other around 50. The Indian National Investigative Agency has opened an investigation into the attacks, while a Pakistan-based militant group has already claimed responsibility.

Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami e-mailed a statement to a number of Indian media outlets, claiming to be behind the bombing. HuJI, whose name means “Islamic Struggle Movement,” has been behind a range of attacks in the region, including the attempted assassinations of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharaff and Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

“We own the responsibility for today’s blasts at Delhi High Court,” the email sent by HuJI said. “Our demand is that Mohammed Afzal Guru’s death sentence should be repealed immediately else we would target major High Courts and the Supreme Court of India.”

Afzal Guru was convicted of conspiracy after the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi that left 12 people dead.

Separately, In the Pakistani city of Quetta on Wednesday, two suicide bombers attacked a gathering of state police officers. At least 23 people were killed and more than 50 injured.

Authorities suspect that the Quetta bombing was done in retaliation after the arrest of al-Qaeda militants on Monday.

Police and state officials are increasingly becoming the targets of such attacks in Pakistan, as well as places like Afghanistan and Iraq, where militants believe that foreign governments have too much control.

LOVE THIS!

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:15:51 -0400

LOVE THIS!

THIS IS OUR INDIA: A Photo Story From July 2011 - Being Indian...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:03:00 -0400

THIS IS OUR INDIA: A Photo Story From July 2011 - Being Indian is more about a state of mind than it is about the color of your skin or the God(s) you worship!

Every year Ahmedabad’s Lord Jagannath Rath Yatra passes through Muslim dominated areas of Jamalpur, Dariyapur, Shahpur and Kalupur. In the past, the Police used to put ‘Janata curfew’ in practice in Muslim areas with cooperation of local peace committee members. Under this mechanism, the Muslims used to observe self imposed curfew during the passing of Rath Yatra in their area. This means, the Muslims would not come out of their homes during the time of Rath Yatra. Police with help of local Muslim leaders continued this practice for several years.

However for last two-three years, Janata curfew has stopped. The Muslims now come out of their homes and line up to see the Rath Yatra on both sides of the roads. The children enjoy it most.

The photographs below presents a beautiful picture of Hindu-Muslim brotherhood. The Muslims are extending their hands for ‘prashad’ of Bhagwan Jagannath from a decorated motor truck of Rath Yatra procession.

Jagannath Mandir’s Mahant Shri Dilipdasji was equally welcomed and honored in Hindu and Muslim areas during the Rath Yatra. Before this, Jagannath Mandir Mahant would not visit Muslim areas, but this year a new younger Mahant visited Muslim areas too and received a grand respect and honor by the Muslims who welcomed him and greeted him overwhelmingly. So when a group of Muslims offered white shawl to Mahant, one of the trustees of Jagannath mandir offered sweet to the Muslims.

A group of Muslim women and children also offered prayer throughout the day wishing peaceful Rathyatra in Khanpur area.

And while in the past, the Police’s job was to become barrier between Hindus walking in Rath Yatra and Muslims in their areas of domination, this year the Police force were helping bridge the two communities. Earlier in Muslim areas, Police used to speed up the procession by constant whistling, hitting sticks on the roads and running behind and pressurizing the Rath Yatris, but this year the atmosphere was so friendly that Police didn’t feel such steps were needed to impose.

When in Muslim dominated Dariapur area, one of the Raths was facing some problem in its wheel mechanism, the local Muslims rushed there to offer help on their own. They brought the needed instruments and tools. Both Hindus and Muslims together repaired the Rath.

India Needs To Break-Away From The False-Gandhi Family Amid all...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:39:53 -0400

India Needs To Break-Away From The False-Gandhi Family

Amid all the recent fuss about Anna Hazare, perhaps everyone has missed the most intriguing political news story of the week in Delhi: the tentative reappearance of Priyanka Gandhi, daughter of Sonia Gandhi and sister of Rahul Gandhi. She is a bright and capable woman who had previously been touted as, potentially, a very powerful political figure.

The Gandhi-Nehrus have dominated Congress, and thus India, for most of the 64 years since Indian independence. Sonia Gandhi is today the president of Congress and, in effect, the boss of the prime minister, Manmohan Singh. But the time for her to pass up control of the family dynasty may possibly come sooner rather than later. At that moment, it is generally assumed that of her two children it will be Rahul who takes
over. He has been groomed to rule, as indicated by his position as MP for the family’s longstanding constituency, Amethi, in Uttar Pradesh. He is also a leading reformer in the Congress party and one of the four people nominated by Sonia this month to keep an eye on party affairs while she is abroad for medical care.

Yet 41-year-old Rahul Gandhi has been hesitant to the point of timidity when it comes to thrusting himself forward. His reluctance towards politics makes him resemble his father, Rajiv Gandhi, as a young man. (Rajiv was pushed into the prime minister’s seat on the day his mother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated). During the protests and fasting by the Hazarites this month, for example, the youngish Rahul has been notable mostly for his absence. He first flitted away to Maharashtra, then kept his head low in Delhi.

Only on August 26th did the scion of the ruling family give a substantial comment on the whole affair, in parliament. Possibly this marks the start of his efforts to take a more prominent role, especially given his mother’s evidently serious illness (she is reported to have been treated for cancer in New York).

But as interesting was the appearance of his sister, Priyanka, who came to parliament to hear her brother speak. A decade ago the chattering classes of Delhi speculated that it was bright Priyanka, rather than Rahul, who would make the dynasty’s more compelling heir. Then she backed away from politics and made clear that her interests were not in public life. Yet her appearance on the 26th, sporting a new, longer hairstyle that makes her seem the spitting-image of her powerful grandmother, Indira, should get the chattering going again. In times of turmoil, perhaps Congress yearns again for a strong woman at the helm. Maybe the Indira look-alike is signalling a message of return with her longer locks. Could Priyanka, in fact, be Congress’s the hair-in-waiting? (Sorry.)

This is our India: A Hindu Guru celebrating the arrival of Eid...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:30:46 -0400

This is our India: A Hindu Guru celebrating the arrival of Eid with a Muslim Imam…

The Indian Muslim The hard-line Deobandi school of Islam has the...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:25:58 -0400

The Indian Muslim

The hard-line Deobandi school of Islam has the support of only around 20% of India’s 16-18 crore Muslims and most Indian Muslims prefer Sufi flavored versions, Timothy Roemer, the then Ambassador to India, told Farah Pandit before her first visit to India as Obama’s Administration’s ‘Special Representative to Muslim Communities.’

In a thorough analysis of India’s Muslim population, Roemer pointed out that despite this, the more liberal, Sufi-influenced Barelvi school and the Shias feel neglected by the Congress party, which has been more bent towards the Deobandi school.

Roemer pointed out that though only 20% of India’s Muslims supported the Wahabi (hardline Arab) school or it’s Indian counterpart, Western UP’s Deobandi school, political fortune has always favored this segment as it had the Congress Party’s ear.

“The Barelvi school, which proudly promotes the Sufi ideal of pluralism, has a following of over 75 percent of Sunni Muslims in India. Many Barelvis converted to Islam from Hinduism and Sufi influence allowed them to retain elements of their prior faith and culture.

“Unfortunately, they tend to lag behind economically and educationally. Imam Mazhari blamed the Barelvis’ current lot on the Partition — before Indian independence, Barelvis sided with the Muslim League that supported the creation of Pakistan. The Interfaith Harmony Foundation’s (IHF) Khwaja Iftikhar Ahmed agreed, adding that the move was in reaction to the Congress Party’s alliance with the Deobandis.

“Barelvi contacts lamented that Partition heartburn has left them “politically orphaned.” To this day, Barelvis resent the perceived Deobandi influence over the Congress Party and its allies, and the very public support the Congress Party has thrown behind their rivals, including the appearance of the Home Minister and National Security Advisor at Deoband rallies over the past year.

“This chip weighs heavily on the Barelvis’ shoulders, despite the fact that all 29 Muslim MPs and five Muslim cabinet members are Barelvi,” Roemer said in the cable.

The report noted that Indian Islam is heavily influenced by the mystical and tolerant strain of Islam known as Sufism. Though Sufism originated outside India, he noted, it had many similarities with Hindu religions — such as its liberal, accommodating and mystical nature. This, he pointed out, helped it coalesce with the Hindu religions that were present in India.

“Noted Islamic scholar Imam Mohammad Mian Mazhari noted that the Sufi “unorthodox approach,” which accepted the local customs of South Asia, including Hindu influences, facilitated its spread in India. When Sufi Muslims came to India as far back as the 12th Century, they embedded older South Asian traditions within a syncretic Islamic tradition,” he pointed out.

He added that unlike in some countries in the Middle East, which look down upon Sufism as a corrupt or unauthentic version of Islam, Sufism is still considered “mainstream Islam” in India by both Sunnis and Shias.

While the Barelvis are heavily influenced by Sufism, Roemer pointed out that the Deoband school has tried to purge such influences to create a purer form of Islam.

“Deobandis, who make up approximately 20 percent of India’s Sunni population, follow a more puritanical version of Islam,
shunning many Sufi traditions. Deobandis mainly reside in western UP and are the elite of Indian Sunnis.

“The Deoband school, based in UP, has become a model of Islamic scholarship and graduates have founded Deoband institutions throughout South Asia and beyond.

“Compared to their Barelvi compatriots, Deobandis more closely resemble Wahhabis in their austere interpretation of Islam and more conservative stance on social issues, including the role of women.

“Deobandis have tried to distance themselves from Wahhabism because of the stigma associated with conservative Arab Muslims. Imam Mazhari estimated that less than five percent of Indian Muslims are “true Wahhabis,” but he fears the numbers are growing,” he explained.

The Sunni Muslims, such as the above two, make up around 85% of India’s Muslim population, with the remaining being contributed by sects such as Shias (related to Persia, rather than Arabia).

“Historically, Shias enjoyed the status of India’s landlords. Unfortunately, this linked their fate to the decline of the landed property system after independence and Shias lost their political and economic clout.

[Expert Zafar] Agha admits that compared to Sunnis, Shias failed to adapt to the new democratic India, where numbers
(i.e. votes) matter and Shias fall short. They have struggled economically because employment had been viewed as beneath the Shia landholders,” he noted.

Roemer did not forget to mention that Shias are changing rapidly, especially in matters such as Women’s empowerment.

“Shia youth, especially women, are changing the mind set in the community and exploring career opportunities in both high tech and traditional fields.

“Shias are searching for a new political identity as well. According to Agha, Indian Shias tend to be more liberal and cosmopolitan and feel a kinship with higher caste Hindus,” he noted.

However, the historic support of Shia’s for the Congress too is starting to change, he added.

“Historically, they have supported the Congress Party. Given the patrilineage of their imams, Shias easily relate to the dynastic politics of the Congress Party, including Congress heir Rahul Gandhi of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

“In certain elections Shias have thrown their support behind other parties, including the BJP, in retaliation for Congress’ cozy relationship with Deoband. Both Agha and Imam Mazhari noted that Shia and Barelvi leaders have discussed forming a political alliance to counter Deoband and the increasing influence of Wahhabism.

“The alliance would balance each group’s strength: Barelvis have the numbers and Shias have a higher level of education and more contact with the Indian elite,” he noted.

Roemer added that India is likely to have around 160 to 180 million Muslims (about 15% of the population). “States with the highest Muslim population include: Jammu and Kashmir (67 percent), Assam (30.9 percent), Kerala (24.7 percent), West Bengal (25.2 percent) and Uttar Pradesh (18.5 percent). Uttar Pradesh (UP) has the most Muslims with a population of 30 million,” he pointed out.

Anna becomes an icon, Irom Sharmila forgotten Anti-corruption...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:51:50 -0400

Anna becomes an icon, Irom Sharmila forgotten

Anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare’s 13-day fast might have attracted thousands and captured the imagination of an entire nation, but in sharp and dismaying contrast is the iconic struggle of Irom Sharmila in Manipur.

She has been on a fast for over a decade, without food and water. Her brother said that the indifference by the government, politicians, civil society, even media and the people is shameful.

For ten years Irom Sharmila Chanu hasn’t eaten a morsel of food, nor taken a drop of water. She is fasting in protest, demanding that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act must go to free Manipur from fear.

Today, the Gandhian on a modern day satyagraha is a high security prisoner booked under attempt to suicide.

She weighs just 37 kgs and most of her body organs are wasted. Her menstrual cycle has stopped. The Indian state has kept her alive on a cocktail of vitamins and nutrients and she is force fed twice a day through her nose.

When Team Anna already backed by thousands asked Sharmila for her support, the Iron lady expressed her solidarity but asked why could she not get the advantage of exercising her non-violent protest for justice as a democratic citizen of a democratic country.

“When Anna started fasting for four days in the month of April, Parliament, intellectual circles, the NGOs and the citizens of India discussed his issue very deeply. So, we thought that we the people from North east are not the citizens of India,” her brother said.

The AFSPA gives the Army and the paramilitary forces the power to use force, shoot or arrest anyone on a mere suspicion. Sharmila began her fast after an incident in Malom when ten innocent civilians were gunned down by men of the Assam rifles.

The faith of the young woman in a hospital bed still remains unshaken.

“Whether Anna supports her or not, it doesn’t matter. If he supports her it’s very good as a citizen and as a human being. But at another point if he doesn’t support her that is also fine with us. Sharmila will continue her fasting until she gets her demand,” her brother said.

Sharmila’s simple Gandhian fast is an epic protest that remains unparalleled in history.

She is only matched by the protest of 12 mothers of Manipur who disrobed themselves to protest the indifference of a disinterested nation when Thangjoram Manorma, was picked up by the Assam Rifles claiming she was part of an underground group. Her body was later found with clear signs of brutal torture and rape.

The women of Manipur have protested bared and dared, but sadly no one is listening.

This is our India: Muslim couple taking their kid (dressed as a...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:48:30 -0400

This is our India: Muslim couple taking their kid (dressed as a pagan God) to a school play…