Pakistan fooling the World

Burqa & Bangles for Paki Generals

Benazir Bhutto, then in opposition, marched the streets with bangles on a plate for Pakistani generals. 'Wear these bangles if you cannot fight on the Siachen', she taunted them.

p235, Into the untravelled Himalaya by Harish Kapadia

Before 1987, this post called Qaid was in Pakistani possession till Subedar Bana Singh and his men captured it. After this debacle, Benazir Bhutto used to taunt General Zia-ul-Haq about losing Siachen and suggested he wear a burqa. After the loss of Kargil, the women in Pakistan were asking Nawaz Sharief to wear bangles.

Kargil is now the most richly decorated real estate in the world by Major General Ashok K Mehta (retd)

Creation of Pakistan a Blunder

Gen. A. A. K. Niazi

When I [Brig. A. R. Siddiqi] last met him [Gen A. A. K. Niazi] on September 30, 1971, at his force headquarters in Kurmitola, he was full of beans. Thumping his thighs in his characteristic, over-confident way, he said: "You just wait and see that I am going to make it to Calcutta one day..." He did indeed live up to his words, and made it to Calcutta less than three months later, but only as a prisoner of war.

Gen A. A. K. (Tiger) Niazi: an appraisal by A. R. Siddiqi

13 February 2004

The Pak Myth

"As for our war-mongers and zealots, the uneducated and ignorant majority, they should be informed by the government in power that India makes a formidable foe. Its armed forces are twice the size of ours, making it impossible for us to sustain a military conflict. Economically, if reserves are anything to go by, India is forty times our size. It is of no use us propagating the myth that one Pakistani soldier is equal in strength and courage to five Indian soldiers. Our retired generals, colonels, air marshals, wing-commanders, admirals and commodores do us a disservice when they air their views on the national media and relate how, whenever Muslims have gone to war, it has been against a foe far superior in number but their spirit of sacrifice and their valour have always made them victors. Wars now cannot be won without global sympathy and support. Propaganda must have credibility behind it."

End-game? by Ardeshir Cowasjee
18 July 1999

Kargil Misadventure

"The Line of Control was crossed by some 500 men. By sending in 30,000 men, artillery, and military planes to dislodge them, Pakistan claims that India escalated the situation. The world has failed to see the logic of this argument.

Pakistan's line is that the uprising in Kashmir is "popular, spontaneous and indigenous." Its line, as voiced by its foreign minister on the BBC, is that all that it provides to the freedom fighters is "moral, political, and diplomatic" support. Does he know that the BBC news, just after his 'Hard Talk,' showed the Islamabad correspondent talking to freedom fighters who had just descended from the hills of Kargil to their base depot at Muzaffarabad to rearm, regroup and return? Why do our men mock us, and make a laughing-stock of us in the eyes of the world?"

Lesson learnt? by Ardeshir Cowasjee

11 July, 1999

Energy Research in Pakistan

"Though genuine scientific achievement is rare in the contemporary Muslim world, pseudo-science is in generous supply. A former chairman of my department has calculated the speed of heaven: He maintains it is receding from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His ingenious method relies upon a verse in the Islamic holy book, which says that worship on the night on which the book was revealed is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states that this amounts to a time-dilation factor of 1,000, which he puts into a formula of Einstein's theory of special relativity.

A more public example: One of two Pakistani nuclear engineers recently arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had earlier proposed to solve Pakistan's energy problems by harnessing the power of genies. He relied on the Islamic belief that God created man from clay, and angels and genies from fire; so this highly placed engineer proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy."

Islamic failure by Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy

February 2002