A delegation of six Pakistani politicians, refused to step into a body scanner at Dulles International Airport in Washington, saying it was an affront to them.They chose, instead, to go right back home.

The pols, senators from the National Assembly from the restive Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), that includes the North West Frontier Province and Balochistan, were in America for a 15-day official visit. The head of the delegation, Senator Abbas Khan Afridi, was quoted as telling Pakistani news channel Geo-TV that they considered the body-scan an insult to parliamentarians of a sovereign country. He said they were informed before their arrival in the US that they would not face any such discrimination during their visit at the invitation of US secretary of state Hillary Clinton (DNA India).

Body scanners were introduced in 19 airports across the United States after a suspected Nigerian terrorist tried to explode an “underwear bomb” on Christmas, last year. The device failed, but the attempt triggered off a wave of heightened security across U.S. airports. Nationals from 14 countries, including Pakistan are on a list that demands that citizens be subject to a full body scan upon their arrival to the States.

In this case, the senators’ tantrums makes one wonder if they had something to hide…or if they were just feeling shy.

Its title, Five Flawed Assumptions of Obama’s Afghan Surge, says it all, and the piece itself summarizes concisely points that this site and many others have been arguing for months:
1. Expanding the ground war against the Taliban will in no way guarantee us any greater success in finding and confront members of Al-Qaeda.
2. We cannot build an Afghan National Army capable of defending its national sovereignty within a few years.

3. We cannot work with President Karzai.

4. A an alleged withdrawal date will not exert pressure on President Karzai, who has been forging alliances with the expectation that we will leave eventually anyway.

5. Pakistan may take on insurgents that challenge its own government, but it never has, and probably never will fight members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban on the border if they are merely using the region to launch attacks into Afghanistan.

Conducting a war under these realities is a lot harder than waging one under the false assumptions the Obama administration has presented.

Surprisingly, the Time article does not even offer an “on the hand” argument. This article is firmly against Obama’s Afghanistan policy, in more decisive terms than any publication of its stature. It’s worth checking out.

The most recent Time issue also includes a typically wishy-washy editorial from Joe Klein, who does include a gem of a sentence in which he calls Obama’s deliberations over the war: the struggles of a highly intelligent, dispassionate man to find a rationale for a mission that is crucial but slightly crazy, a decision that will define his presidency.

Amen.

Quickly reviewing all major post World War II wars, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg asks a series of tough questions he would like the president to answer on Tuesday:

Does it make sense, for example, to spend lives and treasure trying to eradicate “safe havens” in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg?

Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us?

Can Afghanistan’s nominal government, with its President elected by fraud and its recent rating as the second most corrupt on earth, be finessed or somehow remade?

The sum we are already spending annually on Afghanistan is greater than its gross domestic product. Are there nonmilitary ways we could deploy that sum which would advance our goals as efficaciously?

Would even forty thousand additional troops suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation-building program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed? (Counterinsurgency theory suggests that it would take more than ten times that many; would forty—or ten, or twenty—thousand be only a first installment?)

Any counterinsurgency campaign, we’re told, requires a very long commitment. Is the voluntary association of democracies called NATO, organized to deter war more than to wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—a decentralized populist democracy struggling with economic decline and political gridlock—have that capacity? And what about Pakistan?

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Speaking of Pakistan, Washington Post columnist Colbert King asks a perfectly reasonable question: But what happens if, in the face of an U.S. escalation in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda moves its terrorist network to Pakistan or beyond? Will U.S. forces follow?

I suppose the short answer is that Blackwater is already there, and U.S intelligence is undoubtedly working with the Pakistani military. The question is whether our soon to be 100,000 troops will be fighting a single Al Qaeda operative six months from now. Some would call that a reason to claim victory and go home. If we get bogged down fighting the Taliban, along with related and completely unrelated insurgents, however, that war could last a lot longer.
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A graphic from the National Post, a Canadian paper, highlights the geographic hotspots where NATO forces have suffered their casualties. The Helmand and Kandahar provinces in southwestern Afghanistan lead the way, with 342 and 210 fatalities respectively. The charts also provide some visually jarring data of the increase in NATO deaths and deaths from IEDs from the relatively tranquil days of 2005 to the present.
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Reuters runs a speculative article quoting administration sources that believe the U.S will begin drawing down troops from Afghanistan beginning in 2013.

Their logic is that by then the U.S will have concluded its training of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan police, such that they can help themselves.

Other officials scoffed at the notion, calling it unrealistic. One truth we can be assured of is vague ‘future withdrawal’ rhetoric from the Obama administration, whether from his lips or in the form of ‘secret leaks’ to the press.

This will be done to damper down opposition to the war. Rank and file Democrats will say, “I don’t approve of this war, but I guess it will be over soon.” We all know how this will go down. And yet we watch…

A reporter talks on her cell phone outside the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower on November 27, 2008, hours after the terrorists struck. By Arko Datta/Reuters/Landov.

November 26th would mark the one year anniversary of the carnage in Mumbai, when armed gunmen from Pakistan rampaged through the city by the sea indiscriminately shooting innocent people and taking two five-star hotels hostage.

There was so much that was gruesome about that attack. The sheer brazenness, for one. The fact that someone could just hop off  a boat and start shooting into the crowds.

Then, there was the media coverage – with the Western outlets focusing on the attack as targeting Americans and Britishers and the Indian media falling all over each other, trying to outscoop each other; revealing sensitive information and hampering rescue efforts as they dragged on over 60 hours.

In the end, 117 people were killed in the attacks. Died before their time, because some doped-up, impoverished extremist from a remote valley believed that this would, in some way, be tantamount to achieving whatever it is that he set out to accomplish.

PBS is due to broadcast Secrets of the dead: Mumbai Massacre – a documentary based on the testimonies of those who survived the attacks. It is due to air November 25th.  Check your local listings.  If you don’t live in the United States, you can always catch the documentary a day after its broadcast on the PBS website.

“This film offers an unprecedented, inside view into the attacks,” says Jared Lipworth, executive producer of Secrets of the Dead. “It not only reveals how the victims and terrorists acted during the massacre, it highlights how consumer technologies and social media gave the victims a chance to survive, while also putting them directly into the line-of-fire of the terrorists who were hunting them down.”

The film, made by Australian Elizabeth Pitt, is heart wrenching.

Watching it made me relive the anger and horror I experienced as I watched hour after hour of the non-stop TV coverage of the attacks. I remember being glued to the TV set, ranting on Facebook, G-chatting with friends back home, and checking Twitter for updates. It’s also amazing to note technology’s role in this attacks. From the Perpetrator’s side – there was the use of cell phones, satellite phones, GPS systems and on the Victim’s side – it was text messages from cell phones, blackberries, and I-phones. Nowhere before, have the predators and prey been so wired. It’s chilling to think of how information was used as a weapon and as a means of escape in this incident.

I am not sure what lessons India learned after this attack. But a hat tip to the crazy chaotic nation for not going to war with Pakistan, despite its security being blatantly breached by its rogue neighbor.

For more, read Marie Brenner’s “Anatomy of a Siege” in Vanity Fair (a piece that focussed only on the Taj and its survivors, prompting  author Mira Kamdar to quip “It’s almost as if Ratan Tata commisioned this piece.)

But as Pakistan continues to be pock marked by suicide bombings on a weekly basis, the country’s pop stars are now changing their tunes; singing no longer of love songs, but having their lyrics reflect Pakistan’s new reality, that includes inflation, unemployment and rising violence.

In some cases, the lyrics are also blatantly anti-American, with one pop group telling The New York Times, the Taliban is more the West’s problem and has a very small part to play in Pakistan! So what are the Pakistani bands tuning out? Check this out.

Stylish Dil Chahta Hai changed the way we looked at Bollywood forever

I love it when cultures cross-pollinate.

When Dil Chahta Hai ( The Heart Desires) came out in 2001, everyone in Bollywood straightened out their sky-high teased hair, dusted off their bulky shoulder padded jackets, and sat up!

The movie was a spectacular success, only because it was so unlike anything Bollywood had seen before.

In the film, the young stars (A-lister Aamir Khan, C-lister Akshaye Khanna, and really cute, but relegated to the bottom of the barell D-lister Saif Ali Khan) portray affluent, yuppy, thoroughly Americanised Indians.

They partied hard, jetted off to beach resort Goa in a BMW, spiked their hair with enough Gel to make them glisten like Baby Seals and generally were seen as very aspirational.

The movie, with its catchy tunes and stylised production, was funny, slick and an instant classic. It changed the way we looked at Bollywood forever.

Now, here’s something that is bound to change the way you look at Pakistan forever.

Slackistan is Pakistan’s first ever “slacker movie.” If your head is stuffed full of “Pakistan” images – i.e. images of bombings, the Taliban, suicide attacks, then this movie aspires to show audiences Pakistan’s other side.

The gap between privilege and poverty is so stark in that country (much like India) that many people who live within the bubble of prosperity fail to see what’s right in front of their eyes.

Slackistan is a no-budget, indie flick by first-time British director Hammad Khan and features the Pakistani young and privileged as they drift around in a rarefied world of cars, dating, drinking and parties.

Worrying only about what to wear and where to go, this group of fashionably-dressed kids could be in Orange County or New York’s Upper East Side, writes Riazat Butt in The Guardian.

The film is set in Islamabad, with locals or “Islooites” with no acting experience playing themselves.

“They are the kids of businessmen, politicians or professionals,” explains Hammad Khan in his interview to The Guardian.

“They are the future of Pakistan. They will inherit Islamabad and it is more interesting to look at what they might do with it, rather than look at the poor or the radicalised who have very little real power. The film is about growing up, too. It asks, can we really do this for the rest of our lives?”