Fogs of War and Peace- A Midstream Analysis of World War III -by Robert L. Dilworth and Shlomo Maital

The war in Iraq, Afghanistan, continual conflict in the Middle East, and the global war on terrorism, are all intertwined in a greater battle of global conflict: World War III. However, the fogs that have been created to hide these conflicts from public opinion are obstructing a clear view of reality. Fogs prevent the public from accurately seeing this war unfold and from taking action in the government to help prevent, this now, inevitable conflict. This work unveils that the media and government are two thickening fogs that continue to obscure the reality of what is occurring. Media does little to help develop an in-depth understanding of the world. In turn this creates limited interest in reporting of foreign affairs among the market sectors they strive to reach. The government has focused on winning the hearts and minds of the American people in order to drive the cause of the war on terrorism. Yet, this war has unleashed greater struggles, which citizens have covertly been blinded to. While these global conflicts are seemingly isolated, the authors illustrate that they are, in fact, closely linked with similar underlying causes. The fogs of war and peace need to lessen so the American people can be accurately informed and global leaders are able to strive for better policies in order to bring World War III to an end. Seemingly unrelated conflicts raging in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and other global areas, are in fact, closely linked, as part of a greater battle, World War III. In the midst of conflict, this work delves into factors of World War III, and claims that we have already begun this new war. However, in an age where the average American citizen is uninformed on international foreign policy and conflict, the two fogs of government and media, are only contributing to this miseducation. These fogs have never been thicker in obscuring the reality of what is occurring. The fog that is media, explains what is occurring in cryptic sound bites by funneling certain information to the American people. Government, the second fog, affects citizens by either withholding or distorting information and opponents, and expands a great effort to deceive and distort current events. In turn it tries to win the hearts of the people by explaining that this is the only way to obtain the idea of peace. This work explains that through the distorted reality of the fogs, we are now in a stage of disinformation, misinformation, and noninformation, which block the view of citizens from what is truly happening and how to deal with it. It is the first analytical model that clearly examines the fogs of war and peace and how new perspectives must been found. The authors offer a model to help inform readers to better understand World War III, while illuminating the causes, nature, and dynamics of the global concern. In turn, they offer new policy directions for political leaders in America, Israel, and Europe and hope to bring to light these fogs of destruction.

“Dilworth and Maital make a persuasive case in Fogs of War and Peace that we are in the midst of World War III and that we are losing that war, and bankrupting our country in the process....Fogs of War and Peace deserves careful reading by any serious student of national security strategy.”–ARMY“The authors bring down to earth common sense and cross-cultural understanding into the discussion on some of the most crucial world problems of our time. Reading their manuscript from cover to cover gave me a new angle on world news, an experience I hope many Americans and Israeli's will share.”–Geert Hofstede, Author of Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations“Rarely are we afforded so clear a window on the future. If Western civilization is to avoid failure and meet the global threat of terrorism posed by a de facto World War III, then decision makers and educated citizens must attend to the incisive recommendations of Dilworth and Maital. They lay out the causes of this threat in convincing detail, provide a compelling model for analyzing both the Fog of War and Fog of Peace, and then clearly chart a road forward that utilizes the powerful, non-violent tools of discussion, dialogue and negotiation.”–Marc Holzer, Dean of the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University, Founder and Director of National Center for Public Productivity“Dilworth & Maital's work is a groundbreaking analysis of the cultural and economic underpinnings of current global conflicts. Their application of this framework to military conflict is, to my mind, essential in implementing a successful strategy to end these conflicts.”–Dr. John W. Bing, Founder of ITAP International, Former Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan“Drawing upon a wealth of personal knowledge, the authors provide fascinating insights regarding a series of major policy blunders in dealing with terrorism. They argue boldly that we are now engaged in an irregular and asymmetrical World War III against the terrorists for which we are not prepared militarily or psychologically. This alarming analysis calls for new strategies as we enter an era in which the United States has to meet this terrorist challenge while deeply in debt and heavily dependent upon increasingly expensive foreign oil.”–Dwight Ink, Former Assistant General Manager of the Atomic Energy Commission and Assistant Director of USAID.“This work is a brilliant, cohesive study and a must-read for Americans; not only those whose job it is to run the country but those who value the American way of life and who want to address the real truth of the possibility of World War III and the war against terrorism. It serves as proof that we, as a country, must redirect out thinking. This book provides that road map.”–Lieutenant Colonel Richard L. Williams, U.S. Army (Retired)“With a uniquely clear lens, Dilworth and Maital have been able to see through the fog enshrouding most world leaders to reveal the reality of the immense global struggle now engulfing our world.”–Clyde Prestowitz, President of the Economic Strategy Institute, Author of Three Billion New Capitalists, Rogue Nation, and Trading Places.

Iran and the United States- The Rise of the West Asian Regional Grouping-Hooman Peimani

Iran and the United States- The Rise of the West Asian Regional Grouping

Hooman Peimani

A variety of political, economic, social, and security factors have created a situation conducive to the gradual formation of a regional grouping in West Asia. The countries of the Persian Gulf, Caucasus, and Central Asia are gradually gathering around Iran, a rising regional power. Regional and international isolation, sanctions, the Iran-Iraq War, and financial difficulties deprived Iran of its suppliers and forced it to develop itself to meet its needs. Iran has long-term interests in these three neighboring and energy-producing regions where the United States also has strategic interests. Peimani argues that the current unfriendly relations between the two countries are counterproductive for both and damage their interests. They can and must cooperate in these regions as their interests are not opposite and antagonistic, but different and compatible. Their interests require stability in these regions, for which the two should cooperate. As he points out, they must and can normalize their relations, among other factors, to preserve their long-term interests in these regions and elsewhere.

Muniruddin Ahmad: a life of learning -By Khalid Ahmad

BOOK REVIEW:--

Muniruddin Ahmad: a life of learning

by Khaled Ahmed

Dhaltay Saey Zindagi Nama;By Muniruddin Ahmad;Qausain Lahore 2006; Pp599; Price Rs 600His narrative conveys the hardships of the penury he lived in, but his mental toughness seems to tell us to ignore it. His encounters after his doctorate on the educational system of medieval Baghdad and his subsequent life as an academic in Germany are definitely more memorableMuniruddin Ahmad lives in Hamburg, Germany, but is known in Pakistan for his five collections of short stories in Urdu: Zard Sitara (Lahore, 1988), Shajar-e-Mamnu’a (Lahore, 1991), Bint-e-Haraam (Delhi, 1999), Bichri hui Koonj (Delhi, 2001) and Lafaani Ishq (Hamburg, 2005). He has produced a memoir in his ripeness, which is good because he has lived most of his life away from his compatriots in Pakistan, has seen a lot that is worth telling, and most of what he tells is a biodata of struggle. He writes a realistic style in Urdu which produces a lot of irony and also expresses his personality. And he is a natural story-teller, extracting fiction from life by tinkering with it just a little to retain art as imitation.Munir was born in 1934 in Rawalpindi in a Potohari-speaking family that came from village Changa Bangial in tehsil Gujjar Khan. Poverty didn’t block high IQ, and religion got the benefit of it first, as was noted on these pages in the case of Abdul Karim Khalid, a cowherd from a village near Gujrat, member Revenue Board Punjab, whose knowledge of religion and his ability to stand first in exams, led to his writing a dissenting treatise on ushr. Somewhere along the line, Munir’s grandfather, a solid Sunni Naqshbandi, converted to Ahmedi faith and genetically programmed the vicissitudes of Munir’s life.Childhood spent in Rawalpindi, Qadian and Peshawar, following the peripatetic career of his father in military accounts, somehow cut all the romantic frills from Munir’s life and gave him the ability to see through the hazes we create to make our workaday adjustments. The book explains many occasions when he comes across humbug and cannot resist the urge to sift the fake from the genuine. As he grew up in Pindi his short stories began to be published in the local literary magazines. He obtained ‘first division’ in matriculation and later found it quite normal to score distinctions while passing difficult Arabic ‘fazil’ exams. (One is tempted here to comment on his beautifully naturally calligraphic handwriting which impressed the examiners all the time!) His narrative conveys the hardships of the penury he lived in, but his mental toughness seems to tell us to ignore it. His encounters after his doctorate on the educational system of medieval Baghdad and his subsequent life as an academic in Germany are definitely more memorable. One encounter is with Detlev Khalid, a German convert to Islam, whom he first met in the Rabwa seminary. Detlev Khalid, a dilettante in faith and a philanderer by nature, met him again in 1969 when Khalid was at Islamic Research Centre in Islamabad. He had been backed financially by Asia Foundation. Munir doesn’t say it but in Pakistan he was often referred to as a ‘CIA plant’.Khalid got into trouble with the police after he seduced a local lady and had to leave. Later his troubles with other women — mostly in the shape of marriages he couldn’t be serious about — in Africa are also faithfully narrated, but somehow the fact that he contributed a paper to the PPP parliament that apostatised the Ahmedis is missed out. Khalid ended up advising against apostatisation but no one listened. He was hounded out of the Islamic Research Centre, not so much out of prejudice as for his sheer lack of character. Munir thinks he actually had no faith but took on the faith of the country he visited.He found the same kind of thing in Annemarie Schimmel, not in terms of character, but in her avoidance of owning up to being a Muslim, or denying it, after the Islamic world became convinced that she was one. Munir thinks that if she had become a Muslim she should have owned up to it among non-Muslims too. He tells us that Annemarie had married a Muslim Turk in her youth but never revealed it, writing her name as a maiden, Fraulein. One wonders if one can blame the great lady for not labelling herself. She was a mystic and admired mystics; branding herself as a Muslim would have been spiritually unexciting.When the German rednecks were convulsed by her refusal to condemn Imam Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, she showed the kind of grit Munir admired. Munir himself showed the courage one expects from him as the anti-hero of his narrative when he went public with his disapproval of the Muslim ‘literary criticism’ of death on The Satanic Verses, and faced threats against his life from his expat friends. The problem with being a Muslim is that one keeps being pushed out of the pale by clearly unworthy co-believers. But one can’t even wave it away because one can die as a follower of this internecine faith.His predictable bad encounter was with the Pakistani ambassador in Bonn, Mr Sajjad Hyder, about whose tough conduct towards his colleagues he writes in some detail. He tells us about the famous Khairi Brothers, mentioned as pioneers of the idea of Pakistan by Pakistani nationalism’s historiography. Sons of Khan Bahadur Abdul Hamid Deputy Collector of UP and cousins of the famous Maulvi Nazir Ahmad of Urdu literature, Abdul Jabbar and Abdul Sattar became footloose and struck out in search of Islamic wisdom in the Arab world.The Khairis opened a seminary in Lebanon but escaped to Turkey when Lebanon broke free from Turkey, and then escaped to Germany when the First World War caused Turkey to be invaded by the British. They attended the Socialist International Conference in Stockholm where they claimed they had submitted a blue print for the freedom of the Muslims of India. Munir tells us that Socialist International has no record of Khairi Brothers proposing a resolution that India be divided between Hindus and Muslims. The Khairis lived in Berlin which was also home then to Pakistan’s great thespian, Rafi Peer. They attached prefixes of Prof and Dr to their names for which they were dragged to the court of law and had to pay fines.Rafi Peer married a German lady and an ‘irregular’ nikah was performed by Jabbar Khairi, which came to nothing anyway because Rafi Peer left Germany for India in 1930 and abandoned the wife he had thus acquired. His daughter now lives in Germany and has written a book on the great German humanitarian work Dr Ruth Pfau who became a saint in the eyes of many Pakistanis for looking after the lepers of Karachi. (Rafi Peer’s German daughter has good contact with his children in Lahore.) Jabbar Khairi had also a German wife who gave him three children. Munir has corresponded with one of them called Zainab. The Khairis returned to India after Gandhi interceded for them. During the Second World War the Khairis were sent to jail ‘as German spies’. Only Sattar worked for the Muslim League and died after release from jail in 1945.Munir has raised objections to the Ahmedi establishment too. One can’t go into that here because of the bad times — including the possibility of a pogrom at the hands of an entire population converted to Al Qaeda — the community is facing these days in Pakistan. But his first cousin Nasir Ahmad Khan alias Pervez Parvazi, who critiques memoirs, may have something to say in reply. *

Khyber - Story of an Imperial Migraine-Charles Miller

Khyber - Story of an Imperial Migraine
Charles Miller

REVIEWED BY A PAKSTANI PASHTUN

Macmillan, New York, 1977

This is an American book, but an English edition is published by MacDonald and Janes. Ostensibly it deals with the North-West Frontier, but in truth it treats the Frontier in the context of Afghanistan; the country and the people, Pathans, of both the N.W.F.P. proper (the Settled Districts) and the Tribal Areas are here seen by the rulers in Kabul, and often presented by the author, as an Afghan irredenta. Mr Miller quotes extensively from my works, and pays the compliment of calling my book the definitive work on Pathan history. And indeed in that work I tried, as he does, to see the Frontier and its people in their ethnic and historical relationship with Afghanistan. But his book, while covering much the same ground, appears twenty years later and is able to take account of the stresses in the sub-continent, and in Kabul, that have developed in that time. He does, however, stop short of the latest Afghan development, the seizure of power by Nur Muhammad Tarakki, and the displacement of Durrani rule for the first time since the Afghan State was founded by Ahmad Shah in 1747.
Inevitably there is in his story much reference to Russian designs and actions in all three Afghan Wars, and in the intervals between them. It would be true to say that this book, perhaps for the first time, sets in ordered perspective the pressures, Russian, British, Afghan, tribal and other, that have afflicted this strategically placed, land-locked, multi-racial country. As such it fills in many gaps - particularly in the 1897 revolt - left in the story told hitherto. On a broad view it suggests too that the days of Russian influence may be far from over. The departure of the British and the partition of India have seen to that. The title, Khyber, is far too narrow for the subject.
The story grips and the style is bracing. The author is not without sympathy for the British - even Roberts gets a good mark and Warburton figures as "a sort of Frontier Kissinger". Mr Miller falls into the trendy trap of condemning Englishwomen in the East - "the British memsahib had yet to establish herself as the most noxious figure in the annals of British imperialism" - but cannot himself refrain from admiration of the courage and honour of such as Lady Sale and Mrs Starr. He maintains a reasonably fair attitude in the assessment of Afghan character, and of the motives of Russian, British and Afghan rulers. The pictures drawn of Sher Ali, Abdurrahman, Amanulla, Nadir, are true enough, and when the author arrives at Nehru, Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his son Wali Khan, he writes with some discernment. In Abdul Ghaffar there is a true nobility; he bears no grudges. Wali he underrates; Wali is no demagogue; given a little more luck, he might have pulled Pakistan together. But the family is not Yusufzai; it belongs to a sibling sept, the Muhammadzai of Hashtnagar (not the same as the Muhammadzai Durranis who ruled in Afghanistan for over two centuries). There are, too, lapses in statements of fact, suggesting that the writer is not entirely familiar with his terrain, for instance both Malakand and Nowshera are wrongly stated to be 40 miles from Peshawar, and the Khyber railway is broad, not narrow, gauge. The Kashmir Maharaja was never a Brahmin, but a Dogra Rajput. Kitchener did not disband The Guides. Its is not true that the Waziristan tribes all abstained in the 1897 uprising; it started at Maizar in Madda Khel Wazir country. What is true is that the Mahsuds refrained; they had been trounced in an expedition in 1894. On a personal note, while grateful for kindly references to my endeavours, I feel Mr Miller should have acknowledged that the specimens of Khushhal Khan's poems he quoted (pp. 9 and 45) are my English translations. At one point he suggests that Harry Flashman was an historical character, but a reference to the Index shows that here he is kidding!
On one major point he goes astray. His maps and some of his references show that he does appreciate the difference between N.W.F. Province proper (the Settled Districts) and the Tribal Areas. But he often fails to grasp the logic and effects of that difference. He suggests for instance that Congress influence was strong among the trans-border tribes, and even that the people of the Districts might welcome rule by Kabul. In fact the Khan Brothers' influence in the tribal areas was very small, and if a joinder were ever effected, I would expect Peshawar to absorb Kabul, and not Kabul Peshawar. Further, the crowds faced by Mountbatten when he came to Peshawar in 1947 in his green shirt echoes of Freedom at Midnight! - were not tribal, but mainly city and village mobs. I was there and I know. This is not to undercut Mountbatten's panache at that confrontation.
The illustrations are good, particularly that of Abdurrahman, but the author seems to enjoy curdling the blood by details of tortures inflicted by him and other Afghans. The prose is striking, but sometimes a little naive, as when he writes of the Rani of Jhansi, a Mutiny character, as "a dainty young woman, who may have been braver than Nicholson, a smarter politician than Palmerston, and a greater patriot than Gandhi". He has his knife into Lytton and Palmerston.
All said, this is a book most valuable in setting the Afghan and Pathan scene in a bright, ordered and historical perspective, from the time of Mount stuart Elphinstone in 1809 up to the present date, ending just before the Tarakki coup and the ouster of the Durranis. It may be that the Durranis will return, and Tarakki prove no more permanent than was Bacha-i-Saqao forty years ago. What do the Soviets plan?
Mr Miller owes much to Kaye's three volumes on the First Afghan War and to Fraser-Tytler's Afghanistan. This is far better history than the contemporary fictional work, The Far Pavilions, dealing with many of the same events and characters. In reviewing Khyber it has been hard not to feel a little like Boswell on Johnson, or Johnson on his biographer. But on the whole it leaves a good taste in the mouth.