Quote:ISLAMABAD : With river flows down by 21 per cent and water storage having declined by 34 per cent over the past year, the Indus River System Authority (Irsa) has sought details of an advisory of the meteorological department forecasting emerging agricultural drought conditions over the next six months.



Irsa sources told Dawn on Sunday that total water flows in the country’s four major rivers had declined by about 10,000 cusecs to 37,000 cusecs, compared with 47,000 cusecs last year. The sources said the total storage in two major reservoirs – Tarbela and Mangla – stood at about 1.5 million acre feet (MAF) on Jan 23, compared with 2.26 MAF last year, down by about 34 per cent.



The sources said that Irsa was convening a meeting of its advisory committee on Feb 1 to prepare a revised water management plan for the remaining period of the current cropping season and put in place a future course of action to cope with the water shortage.



The sources said the water availability was better last year and yet Irsa had to close down Chashma-Jhelum and Taunsa-Punjnad canals in February and March to overcome shortage. “The water availability situation is much worse this year and would need drastic water management steps to overcome the crisis-like situation,” an Irsa official said.



He said that Irsa did not agree to the Met department’s drought forecasts and had sought rationale behind the calculations. He said Irsa had estimated an overall water shortage of about 33 to 34 per cent this year against earlier estimates of 30 per cent, but Met department’s 40 per cent shortage estimates appeared to be on the higher side.



In a fresh advisory on weather conditions, the Meteorological Department has said that the country has already crossed two stages of drought - meteorological and hydrological drought – and was now entering the emerging agricultural drought stages, resulting in crop failures in barani areas and drought conditions in irrigated plains.



According to the Director General of Pakistan Met Department, Dr Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, “most parts of the country are experiencing extremely dry conditions mainly due to the prevailing El-Nino conditions in the Pacific Ocean”. The El-Nino conditions which developed in June last year and reduced Pakistan’s monsoon rainfall by about 30 per cent, were likely to continue till next summer, he said.



Dr Chaudhry said that meteorological drought occurred when rainfall was fell 40 per cent less than expected in any area for an extended period – a stage already surpassed because most parts of the country were under severe meteorological drought conditions as no appreciable rainfall has occurred during the last four months.



The second stage, hydrological drought, was already being experienced because there was a sustained deficit in surface runoff below normal conditions as the availability of surface water in major reservoirs had aggravated due to 30 per cent below normal rains during monsoon and persistent long dry spell afterward and no significant improvements was expected in the reservoirs during coming weeks.



He said that the country was entering the third stage of emerging agricultural drought which occurred when rainfall amount and distribution, soil water reserves and evaporation losses combined to start affecting crops. He said water storage in two dams – Mangla and Tarbela – when compared with the 10-year average data indicated the situation was similar to the drought year of 2002.

Quote:‘POL, power prices hike saved Pakistan from bankruptcy’



ISLAMABAD : Justifying increases in the prices of petroleum products and electricity during the PPP-led regime, the World Bank (WB) said on Tuesday that Pakistan would have gone bankrupt had it not placed a mechanism for raising tariffs of the energy sector in line with the trends existing in the international market.



While pointing out major macroeconomic challenges in the wake of uneven growth path and rising poverty, the WB unveiled its plan to provide $6.5 billion to Islamabad’s struggling economy under the forthcoming Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) for four years, 2010-2013

Quote:

Can someone shed light on what has happened to those who have been arrested? locking these guys up (some of whom are high value) must be taking a lot of resources, cant there be a quick trial and one to the head?

Quote:It depends on situation,circumstances and on what charges they were arrested.



I know for a fact that some people with links to the militants have been arrested by the army and then liquidated. Two TTP linked maulvis were arrested from my village and then brought back dead after a few weeks. A similar thing happened in another village near my village.

Quote:It is often assumed that Sufism stands opposed to Wahhabism. Wrong. Sufism and Wahhabism, in fact, share a fatal characteristic – they are religions of the status quo. In Pakistan, Sufism legitimises barbarities of inequality and starvation – ‘do nothing, it’s god’s will’ - while at the same time justifying structures of oppressive power, Pirism and landlordism, rather like Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. Contemporary Sufism, rather than being a solution to Pakistan’s problems, is the cause.



I was sitting at the shrine of Shah Kamal in Lahore, with the dhol beats and whirling dervishes dancing to connect to the ‘centre of the universe in themselves’, when a friend turned and pointed to an old German fellow sitting a few meters from us. “He just delivered a lecture on Sufism. He is an expert on the subject, and talked about how it’s a religion of peace and love.”



I replied curtly: “Have you ever been in love? Have you had your heart broken? What peace is there in that state? What peace was there when Mansur had his head chopped off on the orders of the Baghdadi Emperor? What peace was there when Shah Inayat was fighting against the Mughal emperor for his life and that of his commune? What peace is there in Sassui’s peeling feet as she searches for her beloved through the desert of Sindh?”



My friend agreed and said: “But they pay me – I have to go along with them.”



Western and Pakistani policymakers think Islam can be codified as either a religion of peace and love and given the brand of Sufism, or as a religion of violent jihad. They think it’s better, at this point in time, to promote the peaceful religion of Sufism.



Note how the word Islam is taken out – Sufism is codified as not really Islam. Thus Sufism is considered a perfect native antidote to [size="7"][color="#FF0000"]the violent religion of Islam[/color][/size].



Why are dollars, pounds, rupees and Euros going to promote Sufism? What is it about today’s Sufism that allows it to serve a purpose for the American empire, and what function does it play locally in Pakistan?



The answer was hard for me to stomach. I had spent much time researching aspects of Sufism, and I thought I’d found a touchstone from which to articulate a spirituality that was socially radical and politically challenging to Pakistan’s parasitic elite and the US/Nato invaders. Ziauddin Sardar, polymath writer and scholar of Islam, forced me to face the facts.



He called Sufism “docile”, acting as an opiate for the masses, with most Pirs/Syeds/Sufis amounting to nothing short of “confidence tricksters”. And indeed, Sufism is docile. A shopkeeper in Main Market, Gulberg, had an emblem of the Sufi saint Lal Qalandar hanging in his shop, which he had got from Sehraw Sharif, Sindh, the town where the saint is buried. He said that “what these people do not realise is that 80 per cent of what we pray at the shrine [of Lal Qalandar] comes true.” A popular song sung across the Punjab at Sufi shrines tells women that if they light a lantern at the shrine of saints, their desire for a ‘son’ will be answered.



[color="#FF0000"]Items given by holy Pirs - threads, rings, blessings, [size="6"]and even sexual induction before marriage[/size][/color](in the case of a notorious Sindhi landlord/Pir) - are taken as altering the universe and leading to the granting of prayers of health, wealth, and other worthy claims by this mass of the wretched that is the Pakistani citizen. It is not only candles and lanterns that are lit at the shrines; money is exchanged and power is sustained. It is this power that has created a “docile” Sufism.



Pakistan is a vastly unequal society. Government figures put those below the poverty line at close to 40 per cent of the population, though the true figure may be closer to 50 per cent. Inequity is the hallmark of the Sindh province of Pakistan, which is celebrated as “the land of the Sufis” and is where Sufis and Pirs hold power. A recent World Bank report noted that Sindh has the narrowest distribution of land ownership, with the richest one per cent of farmers owning 150 per cent more land than the bottom 62 per cent of farmers put together. Feudal landlords in vast parts of Sindh have holdings of thousands of acres, and most of them are Syeds or Pirs. These lands were sometimes acquired during the Mughal era but were largely consolidated during the British colonial rule in India. The British, looking for local collaborators, found Sufi Pirs willing to oblige.



Sarah Ansari, in her book, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843-1947, notes: ‘the Sindhi Pirs participated in the British system of control in order to protect their privileges and to extend them further whenever and wherever possible’.



Today’s feudalists are keen to protect and promote “docile” Sufism to sustain their wealth and power – this time with US help.



Wealth is created by a pool of landless serfs who toil thousands of acres for their spiritual masters, while seeing their own children starve. These serfs create the wealth that sends the Bhuttos and the Gilanis to universities such as Oxford and Harvard, while their children get “blessings” and threads of “Pirs”. This stream of inequity from generation to generation is based on a lame theological idea, which nonetheless has been promoted by the Mughal Empire, the British Empire, the landlords themselves, and now by the American Empire, and thanks to such patronage has gained far more ground than the Taliban. It states that the Prophet was given divine light/knowledge, which passes on to his descendents. These descendents append the honorific title of ‘Syed’ [literally, ‘master’], and claim divine and material privileges.



Pirs justify their superiority on a similar argument – they were given the light, and this light continues to radiate in their descendants. At a recital of the poetry of the radical Sufi Waris Shah held each year in Lahore, the descendents of Iman Bari Sarkar (a Pir) enter the arena to be received with awe and sought for blessings by the crowd. The recital stops and they are escorted to the front and seated. All eyes are on these holy men who are not only descendents of a Pir but also Syeds – thus, doubly blessed with ‘light’! And then they begin expounding their ideology: “We the Syeds get different treatment from God Almighty, for our good deeds we get double the reward compared to ‘murids’ [non-Syeds] who only get single reward for a single good deed … but, it’s not easy to be a Syed … [he laughs] … we have to suffer double the punishment for our any wrong deeds whereas you [non-Syeds] get only single punishment for a single wrong deed!”



There you have it! Our holy man explains why he has a Land Cruiser jeep and “non-Syeds” have donkey carts. He explains why most Pakistanis are living in poverty while he and his Syeds and Pirs are lapping it up in luxury.



Contemporary Sufism is the ideology of Sindh’s landlords. It is the ideology that is used to uphold their wealth and despotism, and keeps millions in serfdom. A similar pattern is repeated throughout Pakistan. Given the lack of proportional representation and the vast inequality in power in each district between Pirs and the rest, it is almost always the case that elections flood parliament with Pirs/Syeds/landlords. The current Pakistani Prime Minister (Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani) and Foreign Minister (Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi) are examples. Both have the claim of being descended from Holy Pirs as the basis of their wealth and distinction. As a result, we cannot expect parliament to challenge inequity and injustice in Pakistan.



Parliamentarians know that lack of education, coupled with the obscurantism of contemporary Sufism, sustains their power. Like the British before them, the Americans don’t care about Pakistan’s growing multitude of serfs and the underclass, they don’t care whether the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister of Pakistan are deeply rooted in the cause of inequity and injustice in the country and part of the promotion of a system of starvation – a Sufism that tells people to take a blessing instead of demanding food, education, justice and liberty. Like the British, they will fund whoever furthers their interests. We, however, must care.



This is an article by Qalandar Bux Memon, editor of Naked Punch, from the



[url="http://www.thesamosa.co.uk/index.php/comment-and-analysis/politics/224-bad-sufi-the-client-faith-of-the-american-empire.html"][color="#FF0000"]The Samosa[/color][/url], a new UK-based politics, culture and arts journal, campaigning blog and website.

Quote:ISLAMABAD : Giving warning of plunging into the debt trap again exactly on the same line as in the decade of 90s, the Macroeconomic Brief released by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) on Monday stated that external liabilities soared by almost $3 billion in the first three months of current fiscal 2009-10 and in the wake of persistent increase in external debt the country could face debt servicing difficulties.



“Pakistan’s external liabilities soared by almost $3 billion during the first quarter. This does not augur well for the fiscal balance in future. If the increase in external debt remains consistently unmatched by GDP growth and foreign exchange earnings, then Pakistan may once again face debt servicing difficulties, [color="#FF0000"]similar to that of the late nineties, when a major part of taxation revenues were being eaten up by debt servicing[/color],” stated the Macroeconomic Brief.

Quote:PIDE warns country may fall into debt trap