PEOPLE

lmage by chatGPT

IS BACHA KHAN OUR COMMON HERITAGE?

By: Nasser Yousaf

I will try my best to ensure that what I say and write here is not considered as a diatribe.

A few months ago, I came to know that an Eid fair at the site of the Takht Bhai monastery was attracting huge crowds. I considered that as a disturbing information and asked my journalist friend to find out if that indeed was true.

My friend contacted the director museum who informed him that the news was not only correct but that it was something that the museum and archaeology department treated as an achievement. The director's point was that such occasions provided an opportunity to the people to know about their past and their heritage.

I have not been to the said monastery after it was taken over by UNESCO. I just couldn't see the site lose its past grandeur to the newly carried out brick and mortar work. Before that, I used to visit the site frequently to bask in its primitive solitude and contemplate its past including how the Buddhist monks would meditate and carry out their daily chores on this serene hillock. 

The director's logic clean bowled me, as they say in cricket, and I thought it best not to pursue the matter further with him. One always flinches back where logic or reason may attract the least respect.

Many centuries later, not far from the Takht Bhai monastery, a man lived in the village called Uthmanzai in Charsadda. One has to single out that man because he came to be known worldwide. But quite strangely, that tall, tannish man with prominent facial features, notably his aquiline nose, had a soul like the Buddhist monks. It was strange because the area where he was born, bred and lived would give in easily to violence on trivial issues. 

But Bacha Khan, as Abdul Ghaffar Khan came to be known universally as such, was made in a very tranquil, composed and peaceful mould. It was as if he was made from a softer clay as his poet, sculptor and engineer son Abdul Ghani Khan would have loved to describe him. Perhaps, he had the Buddhist spell cast over his persona because despite being a landowner of considerable proportions, he lived stoically like the monks. Unfailingly dressed in the traditional handwoven cotton, he adapted to doing all his chores without a whimper or protest. 

This last aspect of his life was witnessed during his long periods of imprisonment in the remotest faraway corners, first of the British India and then in Pakistan. Since a man of such incredible self-discipline and resolute calm could not be expected to indulge in felony, it was always Bacha Khan's unbending conscience that landed him in jails. His incarceration extended over a period of several decades with such apathy on the part of his tormentors that Bacha Khan would not even know of the passing away of his family members.

Bacha Khan struggled for the independence of India from the British yoke. Undoubtedly, he drew his inspiration from the Indian freedom fighter Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It even earned Bacha Khan the epithet of 'Frontier's Gandhi. An epithet because his detractors wanted to disparage him by so aligning him with Gandhi who was seen in the narrower profile of a Hindu. But one is quite sure Bacha Khan considered that to be an honorific.

Nobel prize, even in the otherwise literary field, is too political and ideological or else Bacha Khan would have won it hands down for peace. His nonviolent movement in one of the most formidable lands of the world is such that it could be the subject matter of epics. But unfortunately, it is not so. 

Bacha Khan could be posthumously confronted on several accounts. Bacha Khan, like Gandhi in India, could not foresee religious zealotry overwhelming India, in particular, with such frenzy that a vast majority of Indians would keep reposing trust in rulers with a fanatical bent of mind. We now have the advantage of witnessing all that. Fanaticism has demolished the secular and tolerant fabric of India with a vengeance. 

Although India witnessed this transformation nearly six decades after it gained independence, yet great statesmanship would be expected to foresee it in its incipient stages. Gandhi himself fell victim to the fanatic streak sooner than feared. The same applies to Mohammad Ali Jinnah who too could not foresee unrestrained religiosity spoiling the fruits of his vision.

Bacha Khan had an exaggerated view of his clansmen's sense of loyalty and nationalism. He quite innocently, if not mistakenly, believed that Pashtuns would rally around a kind of nationhood. He appeared to conveniently ignore the fact that Pashtuns were by instincts bigoted, prejudiced and loved to live in a state of servility despite their overtly formidable inclinations to assert their point of view through brute force. 

His movement gave rise to rhetoric such as calling on Pashtuns to flock together or disappear and Pashtuns of the upper lands in Afghanistan and the the lower lands in the present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were one people. All this of no avail as time has proved it so ruthlessly.

Perhaps Bacha Khan had the perspicacity but his long imprisonment didn't allow him to see enough evidence of it on ground. He was up against the full might of the wily British who were using the hinterlands of their empire as a buffer zone against the feared intrusion of the Russians.

While Bacha Khan languished in jails, his illustrious child and the generous bard, Ghani Khan was surveying the scene and penning it down in his poetry. He made fun of how the clergy, the pirs and the elite Pashtuns had all been bought over by the British and pitted against an unarmed Pashtun struggler. Ghani Khan would mostly call such poetry as 'mumbo jumbo' in lighter vein but not without his signature satire:

O Pashtun, you cheat! you hoodwinked the mullah

He settled on lentil soup, staying aloof of flora

And the helpless Pir is at a loss whether to bark or crow

He couldn't grasp while his saintliness flew away 

I loved Uncle Jinnah arriving when the meal was laid

Neither beating nor the stick nor the bullets he heard of

Look at the lunatic he got old with a full stomach 

The system from the mouth through the intestines didn't bother him at all

Bacha Khan chose Afghanistan for his final resting place. Afghanistan was at that time under the Soviet Union's occupation but such was the state of his disillusionment that he preferred that occupied land because he considered it to be less torturous. He and his family were widely castigated for this decision.

If Bacha Khan was a politician, a more unambitious politician could not be found out in the annals of history. If he unflinchingly believed in nonviolence as a means to attaining his goal, a better example could not be found out anywhere in the world. If he believed that Pashtuns needed education, a better reformer than this indefatigable spirit could not be traced in the books. It can rightly be said that he worked for people who still refuse to understand him despite such monumental evidence on record. 

The monastery at Takht Bhai is indeed our heritage but we cannot relate to it in the present times. It is ludicrous to expect the Pashtuns with such philistine mindsets to call the ancient monks as their forefathers and preposterous to call the merrymaking at the site as appreciation of their past. The joke falls on its face.

Our heritage is Bacha Khan, but only if we try to understand it. Bacha Khan had such a towering character that even those calling themselves as his successors have absolutely no idea of. Bacha Khan had cultivated pockets of support throughout the erstwhile Frontier province but one has to say that his detractors far outnumbered his admirers. 

The space around Bacha Khan's teaching is shrinking fast. Bacha Khan didn't belong to a particular family or any one political party; he is our common heritage. Bacha Khan is the nonviolent face of the violent Pashtuns. The minnows claiming to be his successors have absolutely no capacity to understand this, leave alone the rest of his clansmen. 

PEOPLE

SURRENDER IN DOHA

Zalmay Khalilzad: A ROOTLESS WORSHIPPER OF MATERIALISM

By: Nasser Yousaf 

There is not a creature that moves on earth whose provision is not His concern. He knows where it lives and its (final) resting place: it is all (there) in a clear record.

Chapter 11 (Hud) Verse 6

After a very warm spell stretching for over a week, weather in Abbottabad has suddenly turned very pleasant. It's like it used to be when this place was a beautiful hill station. Light thunder and winds preceded rain which keeps pattering for the last about three hours.

While the rain played its music on our tin roof, I took my lunch on very tender chickpeas in thick liquidy juice with home-made tamarind sauce and plenty of finely chopped green salads. I had cherry-flavoured yogurt and very sweet melon cubes for my dessert.

Just minutes after I was through with these bounties, there was a knock at our door. It was Bilal, an Afghan lad of about 17, carrying a watermelon 🍉 which I had ordered a little while ago at the shop where he works with an elderly Afghan.I compelled Bilal into sitting on the wooden bench in our little foyer only to bring him a platter of the same food that I had had and some mint-flavoured juice.

We had never thought that the food we were preparing will be shared with us by Bilal. But God in His infinite wisdom had ordained that to be so.

Man will continue to err and strut around on earth as if he himself had made or created it.

One really feels sad for a great country like India to be ruled by a jingoistic philistine. Indians claim to have made tremendous gains in every field of life. But India has lost everything in the shape of Modi who keeps threatening Pakistan with stopping Pakistan's share of its water.

Honestly, these threats have never bothered me even a wee bit. Pakistan has great reserves of water in the form of glaciers in the North that God had ensured to provide for our needs as He so promisingly and unequivocally says in Sura Hud.

Pakistan has the best succulent fruits, and vegetables and food grains that people in countries like the US and Europe can relish only in dreams. I find fruits in America and Europe uneatable.

Quite unnecessarily, Pakistanis give too much weight to what ephemeral beings say about us. Our English-language press gives prominent coverage to people who are not known even to the Americans. And our  privileged clerks in the Foreign Office consider it their foremost duty to issue a statement or rebuttal each time Zalmay Khalilzad or any other American cadaver blurts out something or the other about the state of affairs in our country. 

America cannot stop us eat and drink what God has ordained to be our share. Americans can only deny visas to our rulers and their minions which alone appears to worry them when they react to what hocus pocus the gaunt, haggard and conceited American officials have to say about us.

Zalmay Khalilzad was born in Mazar-i-Sharif in the Balkh province of Afghanistan.His parents are, or were, from Laghman. He got his education in Kabul where he appears to have learned English-language in the charmless American accent. This dubious qualification got him his US citizenship and his European-origin wife. These credentials have gone to his crazy head and he keeps commenting on Pakistan as if the latter was his fiefdom.

Zalmay's fame (sic) is owing to his having served to protect the US interests in Afghanistan, not the interests of what could have been his motherland called Afghanistan. What the Afghans had gained during the twenty years absence of Taliban, Zalmay Khalilzad squadered all that away in Doha as the representative of the self-proclaimed powerful country of the world. The blood of that 18-years-old soccer player who fell from the plane while trying to flee Afghanistan is to be found on the hands of Zalmay Khalilzad.

If the the Taliban were Afghans and Pashtuns and hence unbeatable on their surface, so is Zalmay Khalilzad. Why did he surrender to the militants rather than fight them like a true Afghan as our warrior-poet Khushal Khan Khattak had versified more than 350 years ago:

Da Afghan pa nang me wutharala thura

Nangyaley da zamane Khushal Khattak yam

( I have drawn my sword to vindicate the honour of the Afghan, a spirited soul of the era am I Khushal Khattak)

Abbottabad is a very small place. During our growing up years, we could never have imagined that one day this place will have such a substantial presence of the Afghans among us. And before I am misunderstood, I want to make it clear that I do not at all mind the Afghans living among us. Unlike the glib-tongued Khalilzad, these Afghans are all very hardworking and cheerful folks. They have served us unreservedly for years at the bare minimum wages.

But then there are hundreds of Afghan kids who loiter all day long in the garbage dumps to fend for their piece of bread 🥪. A large number of these kids are from Laghman to which the parents of the dishonourable Zalmay Khalilzad belong. He is dishonourable because he has never cared to find about these kids but he keeps himself worrying to death about whether Pakistan was behaving itself or not.

Pakistan should have known Khalilzad long ago, and declared him a persona non grata. But since our rulers trust more in America than in the Divine power to provide us our bread and butter, Zalmay Khalilzad is having a field day playing with our self-esteem.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the devil's hireling, has played the same role for the imperialist powers that Bacha Saqqa played in that luckless country in the 1920s on the instigation of the infamous Lawrence of Arabia.

Zalmay is neither an Afghan, nor an American; he is a non Afghan Afghan and a non American American. He has sold his soul to the devil to quench his materialistic thirst. He has an ungentlemanly demeanour as he keeps talking of Pakistan in disparaging terms. Pakistan cannot be blamed for whatever has happened to Afghanistan. America, western Europe and the Arab countries together with the likes of Zalmay Khalilzad must be held accountable for all that is wrong with Afghanistan. Afghans must know who their real foe is!

PEOPLE

Image by Chatgpt AI 

By: Nasser Yousaf

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY 🤑 💰

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

From: East Coker by T.S. Eliot 

There are now many government-run authorities in Pakistan. Pakistan has a massive bureaucratic machinery at the top of these authorities. Quite innocently, when we think that the hundreds and thousands of bureaucrats and their minions must somewhere be engaged taking care of our health, education, security, financial worries, sanitation, transport etc, these officials are busy doing something very peculiar.

Actually, Pakistan's officialdom mostly keeps contriving newest ways and means to further extend the size of the government. Self-interest acts as motivation. Top officers considering their end time to be nigh, compel the politicos into setting up authorities where these officers see themselves post-retirement. 

Wary of the pressure from the IMF and other international cops with regard to downsizing, the top bureaucracy always succeeds in convincing the government of the day that salvation lies in jettisoning the lower officials

This mindset has led to the creation of dozens of regulatory authorities both in Islamabad and the four provincial headquarters. Officers posted in these authorities get fat salaries. Such salaries would make Adam Smith whine and writhe in his old grave!

One such authority is called National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA). Common people hear this acronym only whenever they are burdened with an increase in their electricity bills. Otherwise, this authority has been found out to be only trying to making the filthy rich private power producing companies the filthiest richest. 

NEPRA recently came into limelight when after a secret huddle, its officers got themselves a more than one hundred per cent raise in their astronomical salaries.

'A rich man is an honest man—no thanks to him; for he would be a double knave to cheat mankind when he had no need of it.'

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

One odd upright and smart person in the media got the news. He perhaps got it under the Right to Information Act which Pakistan has enacted under pressure from the international community. NEPRA immediately announced not to comply with further requests for information under the Act. 

Many other powerful institutions in Pakistan including the judiciary consider themselves too sacred to be asked to share the information about their workings. Pakistan's constitution says all people are equal, but our judiciary says they are more equal than others in their monetary gains. 

God's plan is higher: God is almighty and wise. (Repentence) Chapter 9, Verse 40

Those trying to enrich themselves while befooling the public are not mindful of God and His power. The Qur'an tells us how those accumulating gold and riches while opting to stay oblivious of the Divine injunctions will be punished.

Jesus is said to have proclaimed, 'Assuredly, I say to you that it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel 🐪 to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.'

Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA), like NEPRA, is another authority that stings the common people like a cobra 🐍. The government, rarely if ever, implements the OGRA's advice for a decrease in prices of the basic utilities like oil and gas. But every spike in rates proposed by OGRA is enforced before one can say knife. 

One wonders why a job that can be performed by an efficient clerk under the administrative control of the federal secretaries with the help of a mathematical calculator is seen to by an army of officials at a great cost. Authorities would normally argue that they earn their own revenues through licensing etc, but the cost in any case is borne by the public.

The provincial government in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) is presently considering a proposal to set up an authority for the cultivation and promotion of hemp (bhang). This is what must be called as a very ridiculous idea because the province already has an agriculture department with a massive workforce and extensive infrastructure.

Another controversy brewing in the province is with regard to the proposed establishment of an authority to oversee the exploration of minerals. Again, the nincompoops appear to have suddenly woken up to the reality that KP has vast untapped reserves of minerals. One may ask what was the Minerals Department doing for years if it didn't know about these latent treasures.

Every single Pakistani is bearing the brunt of the capricious upward revision of toll rates by the National Highway Authority (NHA). Such revisions totally run contrary to what the government could be heard crowing about that inflation or the cost of living had come down to less than one per cent as of March, 2025. Does the State Bank of Pakistan not take into account the NHA's shenanigans while calculating the rate of inflation, one may ask?

During our untellable torturous ordeal in the private hospitals in Pakistan we found out the farce that the Health Regulatory Authorities both in Islamabad and KP happened to be. Often during our round-the- clock stays in the private hospitals, we would find out the doctors and their staff running helter skelter. 

No, not that they would be in the midst of an emergency dealing with the sick. But to the contrary, as the lowly-placed officials would tell us, the hospital was expecting a 'special guest.' That 'special guest' would not be the angel that Abraham and his kind wife would be preparing for to receive. But some officials from the health regulators for whom everything was being made spick and span in addition to a sumptuous meal 

People in Pakistan in general and in KP in particular have little time to read anything other than what they have to learn by rote from the textbooks. Making the best of the public's loathing for reading, those at the helm would spare no effort to befool us.

Presently, there is a kind of madness in evidence in Pakistan where the federal government and all the provincial governments could be seen doling out laptops and other attractive and fanciful gifts among the students. May one ask, the prime minister, all four chief ministers, the respective chief secretaries and hundreds of their secretaries when did they last check their own email accounts? And if they did, in which one singular case did they reply to the sender?

One shouldn't feign not to know. This is all gimmickry aimed at buying the sympathies of the prospective voters. All this extravaganza will only add to our miseries, rendering us to approach the IMF with even bigger begging bowls in the coming months. The rhetoric that this or that would be our last application to the draconian lender is little more than balderdash.

Nobody is writing about this. Media in Pakistan, both the print and electronic, is controlled by the big business.

Dr. Mehdi Hasan, brother of Dr. Mubashir Hasan, once said that the petty shopkeepers who put up hurdles in front of their shops to prevent parkings were also our feudal lords. There are many different types of feudal lords in our country. Even the chowkidar who stands guard at the entrance of his Sahab's office and the chauffeur who drives the sahab to and fro also consider themselves entitled to the titles of 'feudal lords.'

The pseudo intellectuals in the Pakistani media have largely gone unnoticed as the rightful claimants of the title of 'feudal lords.' After remaining confined to the print media for years, these feudals have now invaded the TV screens in our living rooms. They may not be more than a hundred but they treat themselves like the other four stakeholders in the Pakistan's scheme of things.

At the back of these pseudo intellectuals are the business interests. They get salaries in millions. A TV producer who recently quit his highly paid job, because his conscience was pricking him beyond his control, revealed that the anchors would reach only two minutes before they went on screen. They knew they hadn't got anything new to say!

They simply had to be the heralders of the doomsday scenario or one odd gospel that suited the business interests of their employers. Otherwise they are too proud standing alone like the puddle, as George Eliot would have called them, as the river of wisdom rushed by.

This is the story of the rich.

When I asked AI to let me see an image of the Biblical metaphor of the camel and the rich man, the machine asked me, man of which ethnicity would you like in the image? I told him/her, of any ethnicity because all rich people were alike.

PEOPLE AND POETRY

IMAGE BY CHATGPT SHOWING THE 15TH CENTURY MARKETPLACE IN FLORENCE, FLORENTINES WEARING GREY CLOTH AROUND THEIR NECKS WHILE JEWS IN YELLOW CLOTH AROUND THEIR NECKS.

By: Nasser Yousaf

EUROPE, JEWS, MATERIALISM AND DECAY

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) is universally known for his poem 'The Waste Land.' The epitaph at Eliot's gravesite reads:

In my end lies my beginning

I am not a student of literature in the academic sense. But I have always found literature consoling me, consoling me even in my unconsolable moments of grief.

Somehow, I can see and hear the sounds and sights of what is inscribed on Eliot's gravestone. Despite the odds, the world might finally be beginning to see the real evil that is laying waste to the land.

Reading 'The Waste Land,' is not easy; it has the uncanny strength of making one runaway from poetry like plague. But Eliot lends one courage to face such an eventuality.

Eliot writes in his main essay on Dante, 'great poetry is felt and enjoyed before it is wholly understood, but it is only when it is fully understood that it can be read as it ought to be.'

Eliot had literally runaway from riches when he opted to forsake the easy prospects of gaining prosperity through the influence of his family in the US to a life of passion and hard living in England.

My inference from reading 'The Waste Land' is that of a land laid waste to by materialism and unrestrained greed. A land that man has surrendered to working slavishly and the mechanical pursuits of sex and sports etcetera.

I would hasten to add to the list the acquisition of European pieces of art by the wealthy Arab princes. I wonder if Eliot would not have done similarly by including it in his imagery. The poem after all is a kaleidoscope drawn from influences.

Such antique collections to which one neither belongs by history or culture nor the same permit any fanciful thoughts of belonging to only brings to mind the imagery depicted like that in 'a game of chess,' 'the fire sermon' and other sections of the poem.

Israel, as it is now, was handed over to its present Jewish occupiers by Britain. The Balfour Declaration made it possible in 1917 in the middle of the first World War. The wordings in the accursed declaration clearly state that Zionists be informed of their state in the Palestine.

The affinity that countries like the US and Britain feel towards Israel need always be seen as unnatural and indeed scandalous. Israel lies far away from the western shores in the Middleeast to have anything to do with their interests. Truly, imperialism like the raven feeds on carrion.

But even such bizarre favours from the US and Britain have not deterred Jews from looking the gift horse in the mouth. European men of letters have for centuries pointed it out while blaming the Jewish finances as the greatest living threat to the western civilization.

It may be self-deceiving to presume that one can take Jews for friends. Jews are not the kind of people who can be pleased or who can be befriended. Even God and his chosen messengers Moses and Aaron could not cultivate the friendship of the ingrate Jews as we learn from the reading of the Holy Qur'an in the chapter titled 'The Cow.'

God sent Jews food from the heaven, but they soon got fed up even with that. Thanklessness and barbarity is in the Jewish blood of which we find ample evidence not only in our scripture but also on the ground before our eyes. Gaza is the latest example of the Biblical sickness that is the Jewish mindset.

Thought-provoking imagery in 'The Waste Land' is phantasmagoric like the fast changing scenes in the present-day musical videos.

Writer and poet Ezra Pound was the alter ego of Eliot. Without the wise counsel and superb editing of Pound, the poem, of which we are talking, would not have been as popular and widely read and studied as it is now.

One just needs type Ezra Pound in Google and the search machine instantaneously delivers results like:

'Ezra Pound was a distinguished poet and writer, but pound for pound, he was also a malignant anti-Semite. He believed Jews to be responsible for a multitude of the world's problems and embraced stereotypical conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media and banking industries.'

An unwitting admission by Google, isn't it? It's more like a prophetic proof of what Ezra and Eliot had called as the domination of Jewish finances that would be the ultimate undoing of western civilization. One can now safely add to it the total annihilation of the western media.

Somewhat more charitable results emerge in the case of Eliot. But not without plenty of explanations that Eliot had been mislead into forming his opinions about the Jewish people.

It's not just the financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank that are being controlled by the Hebrews, but also the rampaging world of IT. There is hardly any subject on which one may find an an objective analysis, especially if the subject has the word 'Jew' in it.

One may try and open William Shakespeare's 'The Merchant of Venice' and Christopher Marlowe's 'The Jew of Malta.' One will find convincing evidence of how many hundreds of explanations are there to daub the two plays into favourable colours so as not to bring Jews into disrepute.

Jews have manipulated even the Old Testament to their liking. For instance, Zionists say Torah forbids Jews taking usury from the Jews, but not from the other people to whom Jews lend money. There is all round ubiquitous mutual protectionism in the Jewish society, community, culture, tradition and history.

Once during a visit to South Africa, Eliot was staying at a place where the hostess was a Jewess named Sarah Gertrude. One night while asleep, Eliot heard an urgent knock on his door. It was his hostess, asking him to leave the next morning. Actually while checking through Eliot's works before going to bed, Sarah had come across a line which she thought was anti-Semitic.

Before Hitler decimated them in Germany, many centuries earlier Jews had suffered a similar fate in Rome. Jews were always battered in Europe but they always vent their spleen on the Palestinians and emptied their guns on the poor folks.

In the ancient Roman Empire, more than 40, 000 Jews were killed in the first century CE. But the hatred for Jews in that land had not diminished even in the Renaissance, and indeed right up to the two world wars.

Mary Ann (nom de guerre George Eliot 1819-1880) had set one of her lesser mentioned novels 'Romola' in the 15th century Florence. I rate this historical fiction as one of her most erudite and painstaking works. At one place in the novel she writes that in the market places, the Florentines wore grey cloth as against yellow for the Hebrews. It showed the racial profiling of the Jews on account of their dishonourable habits.

Himself being fully devoted to religion, T. S. Eliot didn't much appreciate George Eliot's aversion to faith. It is not known whether Eliot also got inspired from George's description of a waste land that she had penned in the case of Prague in her novella titled 'The Lifted Veil.' A few lines from that description may sufficiently describe the scene for us:

'The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visistants infesting it for a day.'

The Prague in the above and the waste land in T. S. Eliot's poem is today's Dubai. The skyscrapers are the metal sheets and men, women and children hurrying in and out of the shopping malls the mechanical toys. No further elucidation is needed.

This Ramadan the UAE ambassador in Israel hosted a party for his bloodthirsty hosts. The ambassador did well because he knew too well whose permission mattered in the building of the waste land back home.

POETRY

Image by: Chatgpt AI

BY: NASSER YOUSAF

RE-READING GHANI KHAN IN THE PRESENT TIMES

The poetry of our Pashtun poet Ghani Khan (1914-1996) has captured the imagination of his clansmen for the last many years. Like his father and a younger sibling, Ghani Khan spent may years in jail as a prisoner of conscience. Here is a poem that he wrote in the Hyderabad Jail in Sindh.

We need to understand that not all that Ghani Khan wrote in verse was of a class that he would have called as inspirational. His soliloquies are a class apart, profound and deeply touching.

But Ghani Khan's monologues are lacking in poetical strength. Among those are the monologues where the poet could be seen taking issues with the mullah. Incidentally, all such monologues are very popular and have been rendered as songs by several singers to great popular acclaim.

In my opinion, such monologues could be called as doggerel. A doggerel is a roughly written humourous poem, though not intentionally. Ghani Khan himself has titled most of such poems as 'mumbo jumbo.'

Since our intellect appears to have frozen in time, we find ourselves being fascinated by little more than wine, women and mullah in our poetry. I consider Ghani Khan at his best in his metaphysical poetry.

Mullah comes within the ambit of what ought to be called as pedestrian poetry. The below given translation is one of those that Ghani Khan has titled as 'mumbo jumbo,' and is ostensibly directed against the narrow-minded mullah.

I have replaced mullah with our common present mindset which is as retrogressive and outdated as that of a mullah. Hence, the mullah in the second line is a 'naysayer.' There were more powerful adjectives or nouns, but a naysayer also connotes cynicism and rhymes best.

Our country recently saw a controversy of sorts surrounding reforms in the religious seminaries. The discussion took a convuluted political turn when even those in three-piece suits, skirts and tight jeans took sides to settle petty commercial scores with the government of the day. 

The mullah or the vested interest won the day but that reminded me of a beautiful retort in a very early 20th century novel titled 'THE PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN,' by James Joyce. It says:

'I will pay your dues, father (priest), when you cease turning the house of God into a polling booth.'

Our brains need no better diet than the stale and trite talk shows brought to our households every evening by the business concerns and their salespersons masquerading as erudite anchors. We are quite content with that. People quote these anchors as if they were the ancient Greek philosophers. Whereas these anchors simply paddle the business interests of their respective TV- channel owners.

I am not an apologist for my Pashtun clansmen. I tended to empathize with the younger lot in the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM). Though not very learned, these youngsters somehow looked to be capable of raising the level of political and intellectual discourse. But in the post-Taliban takeover of Kabul, PTM appears to have thrown its gains to the winds.

It would now appear that the PTM youth were plain rabble-rousers. Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up the fate of such people or a group of people in these words: A nation never falls but by suicide. 

In view of the foregoing, I feel constrained to take recourse to one of Ghani Khan's popular poems and reread and apply it to our present lackluster and unproductive times. I see it directed against the society as a whole. I see Ghani Khan taking refuge in the company of his wine-bearer from the balderdash thrown up at him by the society.

MUMBO JUMBO 

Come, come here, O wine-bearer

Away, away with you, O naysayer 

How much do I detest you and 

Your stale and banal address

May you fall from the high pedestal 

By looks you are a queer animal 

Little do you know what love entails

A senseless denier of beauty as well 

Here, this gathering is of revelers 

So away with you, farther away

Wine is not meant to be tasted 

By lips hewn so rough as you have 

Go there where food is doled out

To sate on tripe all for you left

Just as a vulture would swoop, so

Spread your wings around the dung

A mosque compound is your reserve

For profaning women ad nauseam

 

Wretched eyes wretched stomach 

So luckless and all to no purpose 

Come, come here see the madman

Raise your glass and be a faithful 

Follow the creed of the really blessed 

Find your paradise in the living world

POETRY

IMAGE BY CHATGPT 

DRINKING ALONE 

A Sonnet (of sorts)

By: Nasser Yousaf 

In my troubled gruesome life;

The end of which is in sight 

I stepped on too many toes

And raised many eyebrows

I said many things burlesque

Little piffle now remains unsaid

A dadaist was I believed to be 

A movement that has since licked dust

Poetry should not mean, a wise man said 

But be

So I find myself bound to the northwest 

Muttering my confiteor to be blessed 

In the calm sipping my wine all alone

Save whistles of the shepherd so forlorn

(Dadaism: a movement in the early 20th century symbolizing presentation of nonsensical works of art.

Confiteor: a prayer of confessions)

BOOK REVIEW

IMAGES BY AI

It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it?

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942)

EVOLVING SITUATION IN AFGHANISTAN (A REVIEW)

BY: NASSER YOUSAF 

Some may say I have no right to comment on the subject mentioned anthology edited by you. I say this because I didn't purchase this work but received it as a gift. I couldn't even have purchased it because it doesn't carry a price tag, and hence must not be available for sale in the market. I was a little taken aback when I read your copyright notice with strong-worded warnings because I thought to myself how could anyone copy from it when it is not supposed to be bought and sold in the market.

I am sorry for presuming that this collection of essays on Afghanistan is intended and meant for the officers in the Foreign Office, and the cautionary note is for these officers not to copy from it for their thesis while undergoing training in the Pakistan's elite academies. I also wonder how many Afghans, the protagonists in these essays, even know about such a collection.

My comments on the contents of this collection of essays may thus be called as unsolicited. Though, not unjustified because it has ostensibly been published with the taxpayers money. I may also add that I try to read almost everything about Afghanistan which may be due to our closeness to this country and its people.

I have to say the following about what has been discussed in the aforesaid anthology: 

1: I couldn't find the ordinary Afghans in these essays, the Afghans who live in mud-houses and tents in Pakistan and Iran. It refers to those Afghans just in passing or simply as 'numbers,' 39 millions or 40 millions at different places. Ironically, even after 20 years of the Western evaluators on the Afghan soil, we couldn't arrive at an agreed-upon number. It's as if one million people do not matter in the discussion. 

2: The Institute of Strategic Studies (ISSI) appears to be a body of the Foreign Office of Pakistan. Precisely, Afghan Refugees have now lived in Pakistan for 45 years, if we consider the arrival of Soviets on the scene in December 1979. Since Afghans marry early, three generations of them were born on the Pakistani soil during the last 45 years. A child, who could be seen rummaging in the garbage for his piece of bread, his/her father and the grandparents.These people can speak the Pakistani languages like Urdu, Punjabi and Hindko better than many locals in the areas of their respective residences. A vast majority of them have never set foot on the Afghan soil. Recent years have seen forcible repatriation of more than six hundred thousand refugees from Pakistan to Afghanistan where they are said to be living in miserable conditions.

3: The essays say absolutely nothing about these people. These people have their elders and children buried in the Pakistani cemeteries and their daughters married off to the Pakistani lads. Forcibly evicting these people from their tenements and then denying them entry in Pakistan even after passing through a cumbersome and malfunctioning legal channel is like extracting a tooth without the administration of anaesthesia. It's painful beyond the power of words to explain. How could officialdom allow this?

4: Both sturdy and frail-limbed Afghan labourers have built our upscale colonies and houses by the sweat of their brows. They have baked our breads and brought the vegetables to our doorstep. Afghan kids have disposed of our awful garbage for decades. Pakistan's farcical online visa system has made even these Afghans totally dependent on the agents and go-getters. Like in all other departments, we Pakistanis know better than all other people in the world how best to make mockery of the online systems.

5: The aforesaid essays tell us nothing of these Afghans, but tell us only of the Taliban as if the land and its resources are only theirs since time immemorial. This despite the fact that Taliban came to be known only from 1996 onwards. Some of the essayists have laid too much emphasis on which militant group is operating where and with what particular bent of belief. Giving so much importance to such trivial considerations has made the militants look bigger than what they can actually attain which is perhaps what the West wants to brandish as a grave threat to the world.

6: The essays talk of how much in billions of dollars and euros were expended on the rebuilding of Afghanistan and the training of its armed forces by the allied forces led by Mr. Sam. But it doesn't talk of why those security forces trained along modern lines couldn't withstand the Taliban onslaught even for one day. Both the Taliban and those trained by the West were Afghans. When we talk of being invincible, we don't talk of the Taliban, but the Afghans. This saga invariably starts relating itself from the the three Anglo-Afghan wars and as of now ends at the discomfiture of the NATO.

7: Western authors love rhetoric and cliches. The Taliban's retort that the West had the watch but the former had the time could in fact have been rephrased as the West had the 5000-pounders but the Taliban had the jacket. It's as simple as that. The jacket forced NATO out of Afghanistan. It's strange that anything other than this could be attributed to the end result. 

8: One of the essays tell us that Taliban delegates were accommodated in the most expensive hotels during their stay in Qatar. Those talking of rehabilitation should realize that even this grand hospitality didn't help change the hardened mindset. Taliban deliberated but at their own terms because they knew well that the interlocutors across the table suffered from the pangs of resistance-fatigue. Apparently, the negotiators and mediators didn't even try to make the Taliban agree to some kind of flexibility on their part. Such a stance could have been the holding of a referendum where only men would vote. The West probably thought such a solution would have made it look to be compromising on its self-styled stand on the women's rights. Based on ground realities both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even a men only referendum wouldn't have given Taliban the mandate to return to power. Had this not been true a great majority of the refugees would have returned home to the Taliban controlled Afghanistan. As things turned out, both the refashioned country and women rights were lost to the fighters on the table. 

9: The essayist Thembisa Fakude ought to have known better that it was in Qatar where the Afghans lost their independence to a group of militants. In its eagerness to show its importance to the world and win undeserved plaudits, Qatar bartered away the most-adored possession of the Afghan people. Before long, Taliban too would realize that the victory that they gained was indeed pyrrhic.

10: The stolid bureaucratic corridors which engaged in prolonged talks with the Taliban would most likely pooh-pooh the foregoing ground realities. The conceited bureaucracy is perhaps more rigid than even the Taliban.

10: The essay titled 'China and Afghanistan' by Amin Mohseni gives a detailed list of Afghanistan's mineral deposits. The essays details that Afghanistan has untapped deposits of copper, lithium, uranium, gold, diamond etcetera including in how much quantity. It's a most intriguing account of Afghanistan's mineral wealth which undoubtedly this godforsaken country must be having but of what use is it to the thousands of Afghan kids as young as three who could be seen working as garbage-collectors on the streets of Pakistan. If the essayist is originally from Afghanistan, as his name suggests him to be, why he and others like him have runaway from their motherland. It's all too easy to settle down in the US or Europe and start writing sermons and an altogether different thing to face the reality head on. Every Afghan, both illiterate and semi or highly educated is trying to runaway and work as a slave in the West in whatever capacity possible.

11: Together, Hamid Karzai (2002-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021) ruled Afghanistan as presidents respectively for close to 20 years. Both of them were of the Pashtun stock. They spoke fluent English language, and were very popular in the West. The Afghan people appeared to like these two gentleman, but the liking looked to be one-sided. While Karzai still remains stationed at home after the fall of Kabul in 2021, Ashraf fled to one of his several favourite hideouts from where he had sprang leaving behind a trail of allegations of malpractices. One always wonders what kind of foresight or understanding of the job the twosome had if they couldn't foresee the gathering storm around them. They couldn't even defend themselves against widespread allegations of doling out illicit favours to the people around them. They both had opportunities to leave indelible marks of good governance but they appeared to be consuming their energies in self-glorification in the eyes of the West. Karzai and Ashraf Ghani betrayed the trust of the wretched Afghans like no one else. How could the two forgive themselves especially Ghani who is said to be very highly educated?

12: The essay about Germany's contribution to the efforts in Afghanistan by Christian Wagner appears to be an exercise not worth the while. Germany through its consistent behaviour as an irresponsible state has proved that it should not have been allowed to come out of its status of pariah in the post World War 11 scheme of things. Germany should never have been permitted to rearm itself. Germany's rearming would now appear to have been allowed to aid and abet genocides by Israel on unarmed people like those in Gaza. Germany believes it is the only way it can atone for the crimes it committed against the Jewish people. By supplying arms to Israel to kill kids in Gaza, Germany has demolished the trust it was trying to reconstruct in Afghanistan. God is surely angry with countries like Germany, the US and UK. Why else would we see 17 billion euros spent on the training of 80, 000 Afghan police force by Germany go in vain. It appears that those euros were thrown in an oven in a baker's shop at the Shahr-e Naw in Kabul as the policemen supposedly trained by the rogue state of Germany didn't perform their duty even for an hour when the crunch time came.

13: After reading all the essays, one may safely assume that China, Russia and Iran have emerged as the most responsible states from the quagmire called Afghanistan. These three countries have behaved most reasonably both with respect to their own economic and geostrategic intersts as well as respecting the sovereignty of Afghanistan. The NATO countries led by the US have suffered a most ignoble defeat yet. They had to suffer this because wherever America and its partners go in the world they invariably interfere with the way of life of the people they come in contact with.

In conclusion, it can be argued that if Pakistan army can withhold the Taliban legions, although not without a heavy cost, why couldn't the Afghan military trained by the so called superior forces do the same even for one day? The Afghans are said to be formidable warriors. Training by the Western forces and being in possession of the most deadly weapons should have enabled them to offer at least some resistance. This part of the macabre drama needs to be told. It cannot be told in the niceties of the diplomatic jargon; if it is so attempted to be narrated than it will hardly help.

I hope the above will be shared with all the essayists in the best interest of the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, the three countries that suffered the most from the tragedy.