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Open season for jihadis

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Asia Times-online publishes on 27 july 2005 the following article by Syed Saleem Shahzad:

KARACHI – Sophisticated terror attacks using the minimum possible resources to target civilians are the issue of the day, whether it be in Egypt, the United Kingdom or Spain. Invariably, Pakistan is linked to the attacks. In the case of the July 7 suicide attacks in London, three of the bombers were of Pakistani descent and had visited madrassas (Islamic schools) in Pakistan. Pakistanis are being sought in connection with the weekend’s attacks in Egypt.

Pakistan, simply, is widely reckoned as the premier breeding ground for jihadis, fueled by the Afghan resistance to the Soviets in the 1980s, the on-going troubles in Kashmir and the current Taliban-led resistance to foreign forces in Afghanistan. Continue Reading…

Center about Tajik Culture in Bolder, USA

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The Osimi Cultural Center is a non-profit organization that was registered on April of 2002 in Denver, USA. The main goal is the promotion of cultural and scientific collaboration between intellectuals for cultural and scientific communications. The Centers library prepares to present in the Internet different aspects of scientific and cultural heritages of Central Asia and Iran and its modern achievements. Take a look at this center.

Charlie’s war, act two

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Found in Asia Times, 19 July 2005, by William Fisher, NEW YORK – Today’s media have all but forgotten that the emergence of Afghanistan’s Taliban can be largely attributed to the policies of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a hard-drinking, party-loving Texas congressman who helped funnel billions of dollars in arms to “freedom fighters” like Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

In the 1980s, Charles Wilson, a colorful and powerful Democrat from the East Texas Bible Belt, was a member of a Congressional appropriations sub-committee. From that position of power he funneled billions of dollars in secret funding to the CIA, which used the money to purchase weapons to help the mujahideen drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Continue Reading…

The smash of civilizations

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Found in Asian Times, July 9, 2005, by Chalmers Johnson,

Note from Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch: The World Monuments Fund has placed Iraq on its list of the Earth’s 100 most endangered sites, the first time that a whole nation has been listed. The destruction began as Baghdad fell. First, there was the looting of the National Museum. That took care of some of the earliest words on clay, including, possibly, cuneiform tablets with missing parts of the epic of Gilgamesh. Soon after, the great libraries and archives of the capital went up in flames and books, letters, government documents, ancient Korans and religious manuscripts stretching back centuries vanished forever. What we’re talking about, of course, is the flesh of history. Worse yet, the looting of antiquity, words and objects not only never ended, but seems to have accelerated. From well organized gangs of grave robbers to American engineers building bases to American soldiers taking souvenirs, the ancient inheritance not just of Iraqis but of all of us has simply headed south. Though less attended to than the human costs of the war, such crimes against history are no small matter, as Chalmers Johnson indicates below. [1] Continue Reading…

Kashmiri Youth: Accepting the Challenges

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By K.N. Pandita

The history of a nation is usually interspersed with moments of passivity as well as of activity: it is seldom smooth and even. How the nation reacts to the upheavls or how it conducts itself during the interrugnums of peace and turmoil is the interesting chapter of its social history.

Kashmir is passing through an unprecedented period of turmoil. This nation of fairly substantial antiquity has seen through the millennia, short or long, periods of chaos and confusion as well as of placid peace and prosperity.

But the history of past one decade and half has no precedent. It is not one warlord pitted against the other: it is not one ruler bent on undermining the other. It is a period of deep divide within the civil society. It is a period just short of civil war. Continue Reading…