"The culture of gun ownership can be traced to what the mostly Pashtun tribesmen call their “warrior instinct”
Where do they think they are, Vermont?
"Pakistani tribesmen fear losing their guns — and rockets" by Tim Craig, Washington Post | January 16, 2015
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Seven months after Pakistan’s army launched a massive operation to oust militants from the country’s loosely regulated tribal areas, it is preparing to allow more than 1 million displaced residents to return home.
Another quiet refugee crisis caused by wars of western aggression built on lies -- with a pliable ally to do the dirty work.
But the military is telling them there might be one condition: giving up some of their weapons.
For generations, the Pashtun tribesmen who populate the area say they have considered carrying a firearm outside to be as important as wearing sandals — and Pakistan’s government has made little effort to stop the practice. Unlike most of Pakistan, where there are gun-licensing requirements, the tribal belt is semiautonomous, and residents say that has given them a right to keep an array of weapons.
Now, though, the army vows it will keep the area clear of militants and bring more order to the famously unruly region.
Whether Pakistani security forces succeed will be a key test of the government’s long-term strategy for curbing terrorist attacks. Many analysts are skeptical that anything close to true order can ever be established in North Waziristan and Khyber Agency, and the tribesmen say that is why they are unlikely to disarm.
Good for them, even though much of the weaponry is from western sources supporting covert terror groups and operations.
“We have been keeping arms to protect our tribes, protect our people,” said Shah Jahan, a 50-year-old tribal elder from Khyber Agency. “But the government is asking us to go back without arms. How could we protect our honor and our dignity?”
No one in the world can argue with that, especially Israeli occupiers.
Here in northwestern Pakistan, the culture of gun ownership can be traced to what the mostly Pashtun tribesmen call their “warrior instinct” and the fact they rarely had to look far to find a weapon. Over the decades, Pakistan and foreign governments, including the United States, have dumped arms into the area to try to influence the near-continuous war in neighboring Afghanistan.
More like falling in, but.... good way to keep wars going and war-profiteers phat!
As a result, it is common for men in the region to own not only assault rifles but also rocket launchers and grenades. Some tribesmen even claim to possess antiaircraft weapons.
Those men say going home without a gun would be like going home without their wives.
Interesting point, and I often think of the widows of the drone strikes and how hard life is for them.
Many doubt that Pakistan’s army can provide protection against Islamist militants, drug-runners and other criminals.
“Without weapons, we have no protection,” said Babu Khan, a 42-year-old trader from Khyber Agency living in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar. “How would I defend myself and defend my family?”
The army declined to comment on the conditions they plan to set before the refugees can return home. But the army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, has given assurances to U.S. officials that the military will maintain a long-term presence in the region. Last week, Secretary of State John F. Kerry announced $250 million in U.S. aid to help rebuild and modernize North Waziristan.
So that is what he was doing hanging around Pakistan before greenhouse-gassing the planet and flying to France for that facade.
“We understand that the weapon is part and parcel of the culture, so it may be a difficult thing, but we do need to regulate things,” said Nasir Khan Durrani, head of the police department in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders the tribal areas.
Residents of Khyber Agency and North Waziristan argue that the 1948 agreement that made those areas part of Pakistan left it up to individual tribes and councils to regulate weapons ownership.
Oh, it's up to the states?
They say they were expected to stockpile weapons to settle land disputes, battle rival tribes and serve as a front-line militia to help Pakistan protect its western border.
That is what is basically at the bottom of every war, and yet the war-promoting media of AmeriKa provides layers of layers of other excuses and reasons.
Now, they say, they fear that weapons they left behind won’t be there when they return. Pakistan’s military often displays caches of seized guns and ammunition to showcase the apparent success of its operations. The tribesmen suspect that many of those weapons came from their properties, not from terrorists.
It's called a public relations photo-op so they can maintain the image and illusion in front of you. C'mon!
Before he fled, 66-year-old Gula Khan said, soldiers showed up and ransacked his home.
No, no, no.
“Three hundred rounds and 12 hand grenades were taken from my home,” Khan said. “And now they are saying: We will protect you and the country when you go back, and you don’t need weapons.”
Because then you could fight back against tyranny.
Btw, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were very big on gun control.
A military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, acknowledged that the army seized some weapons from tribesmen. But, the official added, “the weapons collected from displaced tribesmen are no match to the huge cache of arms and ammunition recovered from militants’ hideouts.”
I thought you guys were disarming the terrorists? What's with the displays of success if.... how do you sigh in Pashto?
Whatever the case, Pakistan’s military is battling history as it seeks to clean up the area.
Northwestern Pakistan is dominated by Pashtuns, who for centuries have been resisting foreign invaders along a major trading route linking Asia and Europe.
That is why it is known as the graveyard of empire. It led to the collapse of the Soviet Union as AmeriKan war planners intended, and future historians will link the 9/11 false flag and AmeriKa's presence in Afghanistan to the empire's fall.
Even as British forces colonized the rest of modern-day Pakistan and neighboring India in the late 1880s, they were never able to fully conquer Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Just like Russia, and it is likely no one ever will, either.
Well, that was where the BSG print ended.
And it was during that era that large quantities of weapons from foreign sources began flowing into northwestern Pakistan, said Nizam Khan Dawar, chairman of the Tribal Development Network.
In the 1930s, local tribal leader Mirza Ali Khan, also known as the Faqir of Ipi, led a rebellion against the British from North Waziristan. Khan received weapons and support from Germany, at the time ruled by Adolf Hitler. German-made weapons from that era are on display in a local museum, Dawar said.
OMG! Hitler armed the Taliban!!!
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the United States worked with Pakistan to arm and train the Afghan rebels.
The beginnings of Al-CIA-Duh.
After the Soviet army withdrew in 1989, Afghanistan slipped into two successive civil wars. In the 1990s, Pakistan shipped weapons and explosives through tribal areas to help the Taliban seize control of the Afghan government.
Related:
"The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban's reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,"
according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia.
"The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the
Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul," adds respected
journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State
Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw "nothing
objectionable" in the Taliban's plans to impose strict Islamic law,
and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime:
"The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last
seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan." "The
Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that," said another U.S. diplomat in 1997."
More recently, weapons stolen from NATO forces in Afghanistan often ended up on the black market in northwestern Pakistan. The area is also home to a lucrative bootleg weapons manufacturing industry.
Yup.
Even the Taliban, which gained effective control over North Waziristan in the mid-2000s, didn’t mess with residents’ guns, the tribesmen said.
“There was no music. No dancing. We weren’t allowed celebrations or sports or festivals, but we were allowed to carry our guns,” Sayed Hamid Shah said.
Officials also launched a weapons buyback program that year, but it was quickly halted because of a lack of interest among residents.....
Like I'm losing mine, and at this point I need to go take some shots myself -- on the basketball court.
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Related:
"Afghans arrest 5 in Pakistan school massacre" by Rahim Faiez, Associated Press January 18, 2015
KABUL — Afghan security services have arrested five men in connection with the massacre at a Pakistan military school last month that killed 150 people, most of them children, officials said Saturday.
The men, all non-Afghans, helped support the Dec. 16 assault by the Taliban at the Army Public School in Peshawar, three officials said. They said the men were arrested in recent weeks near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan.
The Afghan officials spoke on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to brief journalists.
The attack in Peshawar, in which seven Taliban gunmen in suicide bomb vests slaughtered children gathered in the school’s auditorium and hallways, shocked and enraged citizens across Pakistan.
This has the smell of a psyop for sure!
Though the neighboring countries have long had tense relations, Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, has pledged to coordinate counterterrorism efforts with Pakistan in the wake of the school attack.
Western diplomats and military officials have said the level of cooperation since then is unprecedented.
Hmmmm!
One Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said those arrested by Afghanistan might be used in a prisoner swap with Pakistan.
Then did they do it or not?
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That has proven to be a hoax like Sandy Hook (in fact, they actually passed off the same kid in both), and its purpose was to establish military tribunals and conduct executions. The war is over(?).
Decide for yourself whether the Globe coverage of the Pakistan war is up to snuff because I'm current with the coverage (been double-checked and confirmed).
NDU:
"Pakistan hit by worst-ever blackout" New York Times January 26, 2015
ISLAMABAD — Towns and cities across Pakistan plunged into darkness early Sunday when a transmission line short-circuited the national electricity grid, a development that the government blamed on a terrorist attack and that presented another indictment of officials’ faltering efforts to solve the country’s chronic power crisis.
Good thing everyone has a gun!
Emergency efforts to end the blackout, described as Pakistan’s worst ever, resulted in a partial restoration of power in the capital, Islamabad, and the most populous city, Karachi, by Sunday evening.
The important people got their power back.
Even so, 80 percent of the country remained without power, including provincial capitals Lahore, Peshawar, and Quetta, an official said.
That's the rest.
The minister for water and power, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, blamed separatist rebels in the western province of Baluchistan who, he said, had blown up a critical transmission line. But experts said the attack only highlighted the growing vulnerability of Pakistan’s power grid, which has come under severe strain since an electricity crisis began in earnest about seven years ago.
I think they need a U.S troop presence.
The government has also been grappling with a severe fuel shortage that closed gasoline stations across Punjab.
Never you mind that NATO supply line convoy rumbling through your town.
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