Saudi Arabia under siege

A expat teacher from Chico on life in an oil-rich dictatorship that’s running scared

By Joseph Marais

First span of the entrance causeway to Bahrain. PHOTO BY JOSEPH MARAIS

Secrecy’s the name of the game: The author, a Chico State graduate, has chosen to use a fictitious name for fear of reprisal from his Saudi Arabian employer. He has changed the name of the university where he teaches and the compound he lives in as well. Additionally, a model was used to represent him on our front cover.

By spring of 2009 I was ready to go home, but I couldn’t afford to do so. My teaching job in Europe paid well enough in local terms, but it would have taken me years to save enough money to finance resettlement in the United States.

So, turning to the job-search websites and swiftly scrolling past the low-paying jobs in places promising rewarding adventure, I blindly followed the dollar signs that—war zone or two excepted—pointed directly at Saudi Arabia.

Before long, I got it—a two-year teaching contract at a university, with a salary that would enable me to save enough to get back to Chico and tide me over during what promised to be a very long and difficult search for a job, given the state of the U.S. economy. The university was in a major metropolitan area on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Rumored to be more easygoing than Riyadh, the capital city, it was within easy range of helicopters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain in case the unhappy need might arise for a departure under duress similar to what happened in Saigon in 1975, or—more significant—did not happen in Tehran at the beginning of the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979.

But immediately after I began nosing around on teachers’ blogs, looking for info on my future employer—the “University of the Empty Quarter,” as a friend jokingly dubbed it—I did something uncharacteristic. I stopped investigating.

The blog posts had been grim enough to deter all but the most desperate jobseeker: contracts not honored; gross maladministration; evasive, slippery bosses; woefully substandard housing; and lots more. There was every indication that it was going to be a lousy gig, save for the pay. So I figured, why dig any further and risk the total ruin of the good attitude I’d so obviously need for my new adventure?

The University of the Empty Quarter has only male students. PHOTO BY JOSEPH MARAIS

What followed was four months of unrelenting anxiety and a furious daily searching for backup jobs should Saudi Arabia fall through. Every indication suggested it already had. No sooner did the ink on my contract dry than my putative employer seemed to forget I existed. Every few weeks, my contact at the university, making no mention of my numerous attempts to reach her by e-mail and phone, would e-mail me to ask if everything was going well, always closing her mail with the standard “If you have any questions, please .…”

I asked questions of all kinds, but I never received an answer. I wondered if it wasn’t an elaborate ruse, a suspicion that persisted until I got through passport control at King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, Saudi Arabia.

It didn’t take long for the lessons of those months of waiting to become clear: Incommunicado is the posture of the powerful (my employers) toward the powerless (me). This was true not just of the job, but of the country, too. Signified by the oft-heard inshallah(“God willing”), the unknown and unknowable preponderate. Answers are few, the weighing of odds and probabilities habitual. Puzzling over virtually any aspect of Saudi Arabia means the reading of tea leaves, stars and palms, and ultimately empty chatter to fill the vacuum of so little information forthcoming from the massively top-heavy concentration of power and responsibility that is the Saudi social and political structure.

Hassan, a Jordanian with a doctorate in computer science from a British university, admonished us: “You’re unused to this because you’re Brits and Americans and not Arabs; this, folks, is what it is to live under tyrants. All Arab regimes are tyrannies. You learn to live without any power whatsoever.”

The long-term effects of these strategies of enfeeblement are not hard to predict. Idealists don’t last long. You’re either here for the paycheck or you’re in the wrong place.

The University of the Empty Quarter, which has only male students, has managed to draw an impressive lot of academic talent. Teaching positions are reserved for those with degrees from universities in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia. More and more résumés pour in the deeper the American and British economies sink. And the university manages to retain some of this talent, in the face of whole flocks of fed-up teachers having fled, frustrated with maladministration and the train wrecks resulting from mismanaged visas, delayed residency permits, chaos within departments, and the university’s insufferably dreary faculty-housing compound, “Beau Geste Estates.”

A Saudi police officer. PHOTO BY JOSEPH MARAIS

At Beau Geste Estates, Western-educated professionals, most of them white, are corralled behind double, sometimes triple, walls topped with multiple strands of razor wire, replete with heavy machine guns, pillboxes, sandbags, surveillance cameras, floodlights, camouflage netting and concrete anti-car-bomb barriers, the whole patrolled by armored cars with mounted machine guns and heavily armed soldiers. Darker-skinned ultra-low-wage grunt workers imported from South Asia are housed in ghastly cinderblock hovels fronting directly onto busy streets.

Laws and strictures governing women in Saudi Arabia are not enforced on compounds inhabited by Westerners, where in general Western customs and laws are observed. Women may drive cars, need not wear the abaya (robe-like dress) or the hijab (head covering), and may go where they please without a male minder legitimating their public appearances.

The universal term of reference for living arrangements set apart from Saudis—“compound life”—can sometimes mean freedom from the constraints that govern life beyond compound walls, and access to cinemas, dance floors, bars serving alcohol, and other banalities turned exotic by their being otherwise strictly forbidden. Beau Geste is not such a place.

Beau Geste Estates has all the charm of a Motel 6 fortified against infantry assault, offering us residents little but the protection of its walls, barbed wire, and machine guns—a grim little fortress prison.

Radically unlike my compound is the Aramco compound, less than 10 miles from Beau Geste. If Mecca and Medina are Saudi Arabia’s soul, and the House of Saud its head, then Aramco—the gigantic Arab-American Oil Co.—is the heart, drilling, pumping, refining, and exporting the oil resting in the largest reserves on the planet, the source of much of the oil Americans rely on. (Saudis, by the way, pay about 50 cents per gallon for gas.) Aramco’s largely American engineering talent lives on a showcase compound that sets standards other compounds cannot hope to match, approximating the best of small-town America.

Beau Geste Estates, 0700 hours: A rickety Toyota bus overloaded with faculty eases from the compound onto the jam-packed 10-lane freeway. We traverse a hodge-podge landscape of scrap dealers, heavy-equipment lots, steel fabricators, strip malls, gas stations, office parks, unfinished skyscrapers and cheap restaurants. Remove the minarets, and it’s East L.A.—but no, maybe not: There’s no color; everything’s whitewashed or dun and sun-blasted, and what’s not brand-new is smeared with oily grime and grubby.

University students cut up for the camera. PHOTO BY JOSEPH MARAIS

There’s construction everywhere, and the highway is filled with cars long disappeared from American roads—hundreds and hundreds of huge, late-’70s/early-’80s gas-guzzling Detroit museum pieces that are battered and ridden to hell, with bald tires and lightning-crack windshields. It’s a panorama of dirty two- and three-story buildings, exhausted-looking palm trees, and trash—trash on the shoulder, trash flying out of car windows, trash in heaps and piles and pools and stacks.

The bus drives past the turnoff for the causeway to the island-kingdom of Bahrain and heads out into the long straightaway, across that endless, flat expanse where—floating mirage-like on the horizon—sits the University of the Empty Quarter, in the middle of nowhere, squatting behind its walls, nervous, unsure.

It is jobs that keep people here. Granted, there are a few converts seeking the real Islamic deal, and some expats defy categorization. But for the vast majority this is the only job they could find. For Americans, especially, home means joblessness, and that’s a large part of what’s at the backs of their minds when talk turns to the unrest in Bahrain and the prospects for its spread to Saudi Arabia.

Prior to Tunisia’s convulsions in January, worries revolved around the likelihood of terrorist attack, especially one like the massacre in May 2004 on a compound housing Western technicians and non-Saudi “third-country nationals” scarcely a mile from Beau Geste Estates. Attackers belonging to the so-called “Jerusalem Squadron” separated Muslims from infidels and beheaded twenty-two “unbelievers.”

While it’s disquieting to observe how easy it would be for gunmen to pull alongside and put a few hundred rounds into a busload of teachers, we know that the swift response to earlier attacks has evidently gone far in suppressing terrorist cells.

The recent assassination of Osama bin Laden, however, has revived substantial fears, now of retaliatory attacks. Bin Laden had–it’s fair to say has—admirers and supporters aplenty in Saudi Arabia, for reasons both political and religious. The rumor mill, running full blast, has it that bin Laden may have been taken out at the behest of the Saudi government, to eliminate one of the more potent threats to what bin Laden called “the near enemy”—the Saudi monarchy.

Saudi Arabian women must wear the traditional black abaya and full head covering at all times in public, even when swimming, as these two women are doing in the Persian Gulf. PHOTO BY JOSEPH MARAIS

However, it wasn’t until recently that anyone gave serious thought to the possibility that the Saudi government could be overthrown.

The threat the Saudi regime faces is evident in Bahrain, whose rich minority Sunni monarchy holds sway over an aggrieved, disenfranchised Shia majority. Every workday, the bus takes us past the entrance to the causeway over which went troops and armor belonging to the Saudis and member states of the GCC—Gulf Cooperation Council— that put down the recent demonstrations in Bahrain with savage force. Even if, as rumor had it, the Saudi-flagged armored personnel carriers that ringed Pearl Square in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, were filled with hardcore Pakistani and Algerian mercenaries, the smashing of the demonstrations put a halt to jokes about whether Saudi national guardsmen can shoot straight.

Clearly signaled was the absolute refusal to accept disobedience, much less rebellion, by Shia citizens of a fellow Sunni kingdom immediately next door, and especially not when the fear is of an Egypt-like copycat revolution culminating in the fall of the House of Saud. All eyes are on the Shia, who comprise about 10 percent of Saudi Arabia’s population, because while Shia discontent is only one of the several sources of instability in Saudi Arabia, the Shia make the Sunni very nervous, and all that fabulous oil is right down the road where the Shia happen to live.

As explained to me by one faculty member, an ex-Catholic convert to Islam and graduate of the London School of Economics, Sunni live in mortal dread of Shia, who the Sunni are absolutely convinced will slice their throats the instant the Shia get the chance. That’s a rather overheated view, said another faculty member, in this case a Sufi from Pakistan. Whatever else may be said, there’s no doubting that Sunni-Shia tensions make the Catholic-Protestant divide look like just another sour Thanksgiving Day dinner with family you can’t stand.

Events in Egypt began to turn heads back in late January and into March, when mass popular protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square morphed into a serious revolt that threatened not just the Mubarak government, but the entire Egyptian establishment, as well. Egypt, directly across the Red Sea and a short hop by plane from Saudi Arabia, was familiar, a safety valve for many of the students at the University of the Empty Quarter—horny young Saudi men with lots of cash, thirsting for fun and some whiskey, sick of the suffocation at home, dying to get away and meet some girls without need of the elaborate ruses resorted to at home and freed of the risks they entail. Egypt was also a pillar of the unshakeable order dominated by the United States, and the feeling that swept the campus was that, if Mubarak could go, anything was possible.

Now that the regional lid has come off and everyone is wondering whether Saudi Arabia is next, trying to figure out what’s going on here makes the long-ago work of Kremlinologists look easy. To ask students about it is extremely risky. Of the innumerable, unwritten, ironclad rules, No. 1 is: Never talk about anything that actually matters. No. 2 is: If you wish to violate No. 1, make sure the corridor is empty, the door is locked, and voices are kept low. Religion—out. Politics—out. Sex—out. Social system—out. The government—way out. The monarchy and the Saud family? Mention them, and people turn into ice statues.

“The attendants are not Saudi, of course,” says the author. “No way would a Saudi pump gas!” PHOTO BY JOSEPH MARAIS

Since the University of the Empty Quarter nowhere provides clear rules, it’s all guesswork about where the minefields have been laid. Whispers in departmental corridors of “one wrong note and they’ll toss you out” encourage teachers to play it safe. Yet students often complain bitterly about the extreme suffocation of Saudi life.

They bemoan the absence of music, art, cinema and theater, and gripe that “there’s nothing to do.” They complain about the impossibility of pursuing activities that elsewhere are commonplace, such as a dance class, a music lesson or a yoga session. Many are irritated with the domination of the mosques and the inescapability of religion, and chafe at the forced insularity of life in Saudi Arabia. It’s the rare student who does not express an intense desire to get away from the country.

By far, the top complaint is the merciless sexual segregation. Meeting women is as outrageously difficult as it is insanely risky, and it is not unusual for a young Saudi man to have never spoken to a Saudi woman who is not his mother or sister.

Though Saudi men complain bitterly of sexual straitjacketing, their sense of grievance in no way sensitizes them to the situation of Saudi women. Saudi men—at least the sons of privilege with whom I routinely deal—have no interest whatsoever in having women enjoy even the tiniest sliver of the sexual freedom they would want for themselves. What support I have heard voiced for the liberalization of women’s social roles, such as coeducation and the right to drive, is because it would expand men’s access to women. This is a problematic proposition, given many Saudi men’s insistence on certifiable sole-proprietor rights to a woman’s body and mind—an utter lack of rights defended as a way of life.

What Saudi women might have to say of these issues is a matter of huge speculation. An accurate picture is difficult to obtain due to the simple fact that Saudi women are permitted so little voice in a society not much given to the exercise of independent voice in the first place.

As a rule, with male students especially, the farther afield a Saudi has traveled, the more uneasy he or she is with the entire Saudi system. But Saudis no longer have to travel to discover that they’re living in an absurd prison.

A residential street late at night. Even during the day, the streets are often quiet and empty. PHOTO BY JOSEPH MARAIS

It’s true that the days when the religious police fired shots at satellite dishes are long gone, and everybody knows that government blockage of forbidden websites is effortlessly circumvented. Access to whatever it might be that’s on the airwaves is as easy as it is in Manhattan, and the women are in on it as well—unimpeachable sources say the girls have more porn on their desktops than do the boys.

But firewalls against porn are not the only artifices suffering structural fatigue. Many students are troubled by an awareness of gigantic holes in their education, with its hopelessly narrow focus on the Islamic world and the Quran, and the hygienic curricula at the post-secondary level. The things that matter—religion, politics, sex, history, philosophy, literature, art and the exercise of freedom—are not so much off-limits as beside the point, the point being well in hand courtesy of The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, aka King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

The Saudi message in Bahrain was: Question the social order, and we shoot. Islam is the basis for the social order, but discussion of Islam is off the table.

A colleague of mine began his teaching career in a village on the banks of the Blue Nile in Sudan in the early 1980s and has never left the region. Behind closed doors he rails against the preposterous idiots who “imagine that something is going to change. Nothing will ever change, period. Saudi Arabia is a medieval theocratic dictatorship, has been since the seventh century and will be a thousand years from now. All notions to the contrary are pure folly.”

He may be right. I have always been impressed, on my many long walks through residential areas, by the overwhelming dominance of walls. Century upon century of ruthlessly enforced public piety drives people behind unassailable locked doors. In all but the very poorest districts—inevitably neighborhoods housing non-Saudi migrant laborers—every lot is walled, and as often as not the wall is topped with barbed wire. Windows are always closed and darkened. I have never seen wash on a clothesline, never seen children at play or a couple on a stroll. I have never seen anyone washing a car, never heard anyone practicing the piano or anyone singing, never heard a radio, never heard music of any kind. I’ve never heard a television, never witnessed a spat. Never heard a baby crying, never heard laughter from behind these walls.

Will Saudis topple their regime? Too hard to say. There could well be the most furious discontent boiling beneath the surface, but I’d never know it.

Consider the question through a different frame of reference. Nearly all my students are from rich families. Most have never cooked a meal, washed their own clothes, made their own beds, swept a floor or scrubbed a toilet, and they’d be amused to be told they owe it to themselves to try. Many own cars I wouldn’t be able to afford to insure, let alone purchase. Most have never worked a day in their lives and intend to keep it that way, and most will have little or no trouble doing so if all goes according to plan.

The plan? Show up on campus somewhat regularly. Attend class now and then. Arrive late, leave early, neglect the work. Butter up the teacher. Keep it up till you get the diploma. Get a job at Aramco, or a commission in the military with its 0800 start and noon knock-off, tea and cigarettes in between. Either way, the pay is handsome, retirement early, and the majority of the work is showing up—the labor is for the foreigner, be he American teacher or Bangladeshi toilet-cleaner.

We expats wonder, what in the world are we doing here? We fantasize that we’re promoting the transition from a medieval theocratic dictatorship into something that can work in a modern world. But that would amount to a revolution, and Saudis are way too sharp to upend things. Why derail a gravy train, especially when, as Saudis will explain, it was Allah who put this oil beneath these sands?

Every day, Saudi pilots in their American-made F-15s and British-manufactured Tornados take off from the Royal Saudi Air Force base just down the road, scream past my classroom window and head out over the Gulf on another leisurely run to fill up the flight log and keep Iranian radar-operators on their toes. It’s nice, easy, air-conditioned work, and they aim to keep it that way.

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Time to bury the idea of strategic asset

[If there is any chance for Pakistan and India to ever break-off hostilities, then it will come by first adopting the ideas about strategic depth and strategic assets that are laid-out in the following article.  Both Pakistan and India are showing signs that they are attempting to shake-off the Imperial stranglehold, which works to exacerbate their natural divisions.  By befriending the US, over other strategic partners, and opening doors to American corporations, both countries have opened the door to meddling which comes most often in the way of enticement, instead of threat.  By giving India and Pakistan the military and economic boosts they seek, they have gained the advantage of the benefit of the doubt, whenever Imperial policies collide with national interests.  Governments can overlook a lot of underhandedness, if doing so brings promises from their benefactors of even greater rewards in the future. 

Rest assured, that should either government ever defend is own national interests over Imperial designs, then they should expect to find that the rug has been pulled from under their feet.  The moment that either government accepts the idea that they will do the right thing for their people, even though they will lose the benefits gained from Empire, that is the beginning of their liberation.  That is the beginning of freedom from outside manipulation.] 

A. S. PANNEERSELVANThe language of strategic asset reduces the ideas of home, state, country, and continent to movable pieces on the chessboard.

It is strange that even the killing of Osama bin Laden at Abbottabad, near Pakistan’s capital, has failed to raise fundamental questions about the idea of creating Frankensteins in the name of strategic assets and the wisdom of the defence experts and strategic analysts. A cursory look at history since the end of the Second World War shows that strategic assets proved to be an albatross around humanity’s neck: they played a key role in undermining legitimate political struggles across the globe. Yet the military narrative has not freed itself from the stranglehold of two fatally flawed ideas — strategic asset and strategic depth.

Before exploring the debilitating impact of these two terms —strategic asset and strategic depth — it is important to understand the origins of these terms. They were the product of the colonial imagination where the world was divided among the empires, and the geostrategic pivots determined the expansion or shrinking of any colonial power. One state was pitted against another and people became collateral damage even before the term could gain the current political currency. The Cold War invested the two terms with an entirely new meaning and scale of application and the damage done to peoples and countries across the world was incomparably greater.

West Asian authoritarianism, for example, is in part the creation of the notion of strategic asset in the form of oil reserves. Much has been written, by way of strategic analysis, about the role of the Soviet Union in Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. But its move into Afghanistan is the source of our present concern and the one that redefined international politics permanently. The United States, the Arab dictators, and Pakistan used the Soviet occupation as an excuse to create a political Islam that not only distorted the religion but also unleashed unprecedented violence against its perceived enemies and against itself. The Soviets left Afghanistan by February 1989 but the so-called ‘liberators’ never left the country, which has been under one form of occupation or another since 1979. The mujahideen and their jihads were supported, funded, trained, armed, and seen as great strategic assets that could provide strategic depth to bleed the opposition to death. This vision did not take into account the irreparable damage it would inflict upon the Muslim world in general and Afghanistan and Pakistan in particular.

Well-known Pakistani writer Zahid Hussain pointed out the cost to Pakistan during an India-Pakistan-Afghanistan editors’ meet. He said: “I think 2007 was the turning point for Pakistan, when almost a dozen militant leaders got together and formed the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This group had a distinctive agenda of enforcing a so-called Sharia rule in the style of the Afghan Taliban — before that, the focus of the Pakistani militants had largely been on fighting the U.S. coalition forces across the border…. That also changed the perception of how the Taliban and the Afghan Taliban are tied together. It is not only the nexus between the TTP and al-Qaeda; there is also a growing nexus between the banned militant groups and the Taliban, and a new form of al-Qaeda that has emerged. I think probably al-Qaeda has taken a different form, which the Americans have failed to understand. The new al-Qaeda is largely Pakistani. Further, there is also distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban: TTP provides the recruits or suicide bombers, but al-Qaeda largely attracts educated Pakistanis who have not been a part of other militant organisations.”

A tenuous peace process, weak governance, a security structure that is yet to gain the confidence or competence to tackle sectarian violence, growing doubts about whether to make a deal with the “good Taliban” or to break the “bad Taliban”, and the wavering international commitment have made Afghanistan more vulnerable then ever before. There is an apprehension in Kabul that with the death of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. might not show the same intensity to wage its “war on terror” as its principal enemy has been eliminated. With multiple players trying to create their own strategic assets, Afghans fear that their country might once again be divided into myriad fiefdoms of warlords and drug mafia. The tragedy is Afghanistan today is much worse off than it was before the Soviet occupation and withdrawal.

This dangerous trend spilled over to India in the form of increased militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, a shocking terrorist attack on Parliament, the monstrous Mumbai carnage, to name just a few of the horrific experiences of the past decade and a half. It is not that India is free from delusions of strategic assets and the grandeur of strategic depth, despite every move backfiring badly — notably with respect to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. But that is another story.

Till the armed men from across the border reached the valley, a large number of informed Indians understood the Kashmiri struggle, and did not hesitate to criticise the government of India for rigging elections. They refused to accept the BJP’s demand for the abrogation of Article 370, which confers a special status on Jammu and Kashmir. However, the overt militarisation of the State inspired by the strategic interests of Pakistan has hurt the people of Kashmir incalculably. In reality, the power enjoyed by J&K today is decisively lower than what was enshrined in Article 370 of the Indian Constitution.

The same is true for most of the Northeastern States as their special status has been hugely undermined by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the constant appointments of former Army Generals as Governors, who tend to wield more power than the respective Chief Ministers. India’s new strategic interest in using its close relations with Myanmar’s military junta to check China’s reach to the Bay of Bengal has already taken a toll. The country has virtually ceased its support for the pro-democracy movement and its iconic leader Aung San Suu Kyi and no one knows what the fallouts will be.

The language of strategic asset reduces the ideas of home, state, country, and continent to movable pieces on the chessboard. It is a language that is never peopled; it has no capability to empathise or be poignant; it fails to understand pain; and it has no sense to understand the profound grief of any society that lost its liberal space to a variety of bigots. The security experts’ idea of supremacy is directly pitted against the people’s deepest dream of living fully while existing. To achieve this, we need to temper the power of the entrenched security establishments and retrieve the space for a larger political discourse.

(S. Panneerselvan is the Executive Director of Panos South Asia. Panos South Asia has been organising an annual editors’ retreat that brings together the influential media personalities from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to increase the information flow to curtail the mutual trust deficit.)

Pakistan – Are we being completely deceived?

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful

As-Salam-o-Alaikum (Peace be unto you)

I hope you have been well. The ‘Osama Killed’ fiasco continues. The script has been revised several times in the past 10 or so days already.

It is now safe to conclude that the entire episode is just one massive hoax. I encourage you to watch the following videos in full,

- The bin Laden Hoax – Its Uses & Objectives

- Webster Tarpley: Next False Flag Terror Op will be Blamed on Pakistan’s ISI

Now let us take another objective look at the situation,

The ‘factual’ information that we have been allowed to see is as follows,

- A tail of a Blackhawk stealth helicopter
- A house in Abbottabad

And if you want to count it,

- Osama’s ‘family members’, though no proof exists that they are Osama Bin Laden’s family members or indeed there are any people at all in the Pakistani custody.

.Everything else has been nothing but pure speculation, statements, revised statements, and yet more revised statements.

What the propaganda has successfully achieved so far, though with certain bumps here and there, is that a ‘raid’ in Pakistan actually took place. The propaganda machine be it American or Pakistani (and I am including the militaries of both countries), has in fact managed to get the public accept the larger story i.e. a ‘raid’ took place, and left most speculators arguing the finer points of the script.

There is nothing that can be given as concrete proof that a ‘raid’ by US Navy SEALs took place in Pakistan in Abbottabad, apart from the statements and the helicopter tail. Interestingly, one is forced to wonder that if the body of ‘Osama’ was extracted by the SEALs and then dumped into the ocean (just like the mafia gangsters dispose the bodies of their victims), what proof does the Pakistani Government and the Pakistani Army have to conclude that ‘Osama’ was indeed killed in the ‘raid’ in Abbottabad, that there was indeed an intelligence failure on the part of Pakistani intelligence as the ISPR statement read? i.e. unless they authorized it in the first place.
(http://www.ispr.gov.pk/front/main.asp?o=t-week_view&id=1736#wv_link1736).

Perhaps the US showed them the (fake) pictures of ‘Bin Laden’ as proof that the ‘raid’ took place and they bought it though no one else did as events have later proved. Also, no statements were made by the Army that any intel or info had indeed been exchanged with the US in the immediate aftermath of the ‘raid’.

Our government’s and military commanders’ conduct becomes even more questionable when one puts into perspective the fact that neutral and governmental sources in the US and UK have stated time and again that Osama Bin Laden died a long time ago (somewhere between 2001 and 2002) because of kidney failure. The late Benazir Bhutto stated as much as well. With this new perspective one is also forced to wonder whether this was the claim that confirmed her death sentence.

There are also reports from the locals in Abbottabad that there was a protective perimeter in place around ‘Osama’s compound’ (a fact that has been silently suppressed by the media) at the time of the ‘raid’. The two Pakistanis first on scene after the ‘raid’ were the local SHO and the local intelligence officer. The SHO? Really? We all know the immaculate efficiency of the Pakistan Police.

The hypothesis could be that the CIA had bought the local law enforcement off and they placed the perimeter around the ‘compound’ and the military was unaware, but the local intelligence officer was on the scene as well. Was he bought off too? But most importantly, do an SHO and a local intelligence officer have the required amounts of ‘guts and brains’ to manage such an undertaking? You know the answer better than I do.

Then there is the Air Chief statement that the ‘radars were off’ at the time of the ‘raid’. I laughed out loud when I read that one. One thought Kaleem Sadat, the previous Air Chief, was perhaps a US stooge, but this person Rao Qamar Suleman has left him behind by a long shot, a real War on Terror lackey this one.

Of course this preposterous statement was immediately ‘shot down’ by the many competent and far more patriotic former Air Force commanders (and I am sure the current officers and airmen of the PAF aren’t too impressed either). But the important aspect is, why would Rao Qamar issue such a dumb statement? Why such intense rather desperate effort to lend credibility to the US storyline?

In the midst of it all, you have a ‘roaring’ Imran Khan rising like a valiant savior on the political horizon in this hour of desperate need. It is no coincidence either ladies and gentlemen. He is being propped up by the establishment to be its new public face. The same establishment that facilitated and consolidated Musharraf for 10 years, then engineered the ‘Lawyers Movement’ to give him safe exit and maneuvered the likes of Zardari in power. The same establishment that has handed over the keys of Karachi to a Hindu terrorist organization and has turned this vital metropolis into a hotbed for racial, linguistic, and sectarian terrorism.

The same establishment is now engineering the political uprising of Imran Khan (No wonder PML N is so enraged, they thought it was their turn); All of this in the immediate aftermath of the ‘Osama incident’. The credibility of Imran Khan, in stark similarity to the rest of the political elite, can be understood from his ‘hell-ov-a’ U-turn on MQM. The bitter enemies of the past became best friends overnight. What filth!

The other rising pillar is Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the new power in upper Sindh and lower Punjab. The potential heir of the ‘Saraiki Suba’ I suspect, and PPP’s replacement.

The new setup will likely comprise of Imran Khan, Jamat e Islami, MQM, and Shah Mehmod Qureshi. The PMLs will be in the opposition probably, tough luck for PML N.

But one must understand that this new set up is probably being brought in to dampen down the fury of the masses and the multitude of the loyal patriotic soldiers and officers of Pakistan military. In the meantime, the CIA script for Pakistan is in full swing. Incidentally, Imran Khan, like a dedicated employee has been clocking face time with the US officials and the ISI chief (he admitted the second part himself).

A straight shot, Imran Khan is through and through the Jews’ man. That is my flat out analysis based on this and other information. And if he is crooked then this new set up is crooked (much like the present one, only worse). And if the set up is crooked, then so is the establishment which is and has been designing the set up.

From this point of view, the immediate acceptance by the government of the US storyline, the acceptance by the military high command of the US storyline, and the absurd statement of the Air Chief immediately make sense. The elite are corrupt and crooked.

All of this became even more apparent when I read that Major General Isfandiyar Ali Khan Pataudi, Armoured Corps — GOC 25th Mechanised Division, Karachi was to be the possible new ISI chief (http://rupeenews.com/?p=36706) .

Major General Isfandiyar Ali Khan Pataudi is the son of the late Major General Nawabzada Sher Ali Khan of Pataudi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sher_Ali_Khan_%28general%29). Major General Isfandiyar is descended from the line of the Nawabs of Pataudi and, by relation, is the uncle of the Indian actor Saif Ali Khan.

Certainly, being Saif Ali Khan’s uncle by relation is not the greatest sin, but this is not the problem. Please visit the link http://www.reachouthyderabad.com/newsmaker/hw56.htm

Let me quote from the above webpage,

“It is a 3,000 years old movement spread all over the globe. It has been existing in India for the past 250 years and in twin cities 130 years. Globally Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Benjamin Fraklin, Henry Ford, Clive Lloyd and All Presidents of United States of America were its member. In India Swami Vivekananda, C. Rajagopalachari, Motilal Nehru, Fakruddin Ali Ahmed, Madhavrao Scindia, Nawab of Pataudi, locally Nizam of Hyderabad, A.R. Lakshmanan.”

The ‘old movement’ in question is the movement known for the past 400-450 years as ‘Freemasonry’.

I have made every possible effort to find out which Nawab of Pataudi was the first Freemason. But the information resources have dried up without success. Surprising that even a resource like the internet could not ‘cough up’ a word on it.

Regardless, the Nawabs of Pataudi like other nawabs and rajas on the British payroll, enjoyed their royal privileges in India until 1971 when fiefdoms were abolished (these ‘royals’ nonetheless remain still). Saif Ali Khan’s father Mansoor Ali Khan was thus the last official Nawab of Pataudi.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawab_of_Pataudi)

The purpose for stating all this is that the Nawabs of Pataudi were certainly British loyalists hence they were allowed to remain Nawabs even after the British left. They were most certainly freemasons as well.

Incidentally, freemasonry membership is very often handed down from father to son. So, if the tradition of freemasonry has been handed down from father to son, it is very much possible that the late Major General Nawabzada Sher Ali Khan of Pataudi and now his son Major General Isfandiyar Ali Khan Pataudi are both freemasons as well. So are we about to have a freemason installed as the DG ISI (provided of course that the current DG isn’t a freemason as well)?

Incidentally, the late Major General Nawabzada Sher Ali Khan of Pataudi held the position of Federal Minister for Information, Broadcasting & and National Affairs from 1969 to 1971 under Yahya Khan’s administration. Maintaining such a key position in such a tumultuous period when the Masonic and anti-Pakistan elements successfully engineered the breakup of Pakistan is further very disturbing information that puts both the late Major General Nawabzada Sher Ali Khan and now his son Major General Isfandiyar Ali Khan Pataudi under very bad light.

In the view of all of this information, I am forced to conclude that our, federal, provincial, military, and bureaucratic (including Judiciary) top positions are heavily compromised and held by Enemy agents. All of the ruckus being made is designed to keep the Muslims of Pakistan, its patriotic civilians, loyal soldiers, and dedicated officers, in a state of complete confusion until one fine morning when we are being told that Pakistan is facing balkanization (as per the Enemy plan) and when it is too late (also as per the Enemy’s plan). Another very important reason for maintaining this confusion is to avoid a state of ‘legitimate’ all-out confrontation between the Muslims of Pakistan and anti-Pakistan forces (very much like in 2001 when Musharraf was placed for exactly this objective at the onset of the invasion of Afghanistan).

The objective of this article is by no means to discourage the people of Pakistan but to clear this air of confusion. Indeed what I have discussed is the worst-case scenario, I may certainly be wrong, indeed I hope to Almighty Allah with all my heart that I am wrong and the situation is apparently not as bleak as I see it to be. But I think I am not too far from the truth.