Just days before the RJD-sponsored rally in Patna on December 23, CPI-Maoist naxalites on Sunday night blew up a small railway bridge between Karmandiha and Sasaram, 96 km from Gaya, in Mughalsarai division of ECR.
Maoists, who were prevented from holding a rally in Patna, have threatened to disturb RJD rally by targeting railways, among other things. The RJD has booked 18 special trains to ferry party supporters to Patna from different parts of the state.
Sources said that over two dozen armed naxalites reached the spot around 1 am and blew up the bridge. “It could have been fatal had they blasted the bridge half-an-hour earlier when the Howrah-New Delhi Rajdhani Express crossed the bridge,” a railway official said. [Maoists blast rail bridge to disrupt rally]

The Communist contribution to the development of India.

B Raman thinks that besides the Americans, Osama bin Laden has one more enemy who is out to get him – the Shi’ites of Pakistan and Afghanistan. They are hunting for bin Laden not because of any love or sympathy for the Americans, but for their own need for revenge.

That might be because they haven’t forgotten what he did to them in 1988. It was then that hundreds of Shi’ites of the Northern Areas (NA – Gilgit and Baltistan) of Pakistan, known before 1947 as the Northern Areas of Jammu and Kashmir, were massacred after a demand raised by them for the creation of an autonomous Shi’ite state called Karakoram, consisting of the Shi’ite majority areas of the NA, Punjab and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). Military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq called in bin Laden, then living in Peshawar, and his Sunni tribal hordes to carry out the massacre.

To avenge these deaths, a Shi’ite airman is believed to have caused an explosion on board the aircraft in which Zia was travelling from Bahawalpur to Islamabad in August 1988. This was followed in 1991 by the assassination in Peshawar of Lieutenant-General Fazle Haq, a retired army officer, close to Zia and hated by the Shi’ites because of his suspected role in the assassination of a respected Shi’ite leader. [Osama and his Shi’ite nemesis]

Osama mean time is appearing all over the region. He is in Tibet-Laddakh region, Iran, Balochistan all at the same time.

On Sept 10, in 2002 and 2003, Osama bin Laden came up with his lecture to the world and surprisingly this year there was no message. This has led B. Raman to wonder

The absence of an anniversary homage to the terrorists of the 9/11 operation by Osama is interpreted by some as an indicator that either he is already in the custody of the US or Pakistan and will be produced before the world just before the polling day in the US or that he is dead or that his health has deteriorated aggravating the speech disability reportedly suffered by him due to the sharpnel injury. There is, however, no evidence to corroborate any of these interpretations. He must be presumed to be alive and free till there is evidence to the contrary.[Osama

While religion is something which you use to attain inner peace, Islamic terrorists have hijacked it to justify their barbaric activities. Mosques are used to preach hatred as seen in Tom Friedman’s program on the Roots of 9/11. In one segment he sits through the Friday prayer at the Al-Azhar mosque in Egypt, where thousands of common people are involved in a personal communion with their God. But once the prayers are over, some people take over and start preaching hatred filled words against America and there is no one stopping them. But now with the barbaric masscre in Beslan, there has been some introspection in the Arab world.

“Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims,” wrote Abdul Rahman Rashed, general manager of the popular Al Arabiya television channel. In a blunt column in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al Awsat, Rashed listed attacks carried out by Muslims in Iraq, Russia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. “Our terrorist sons are an end product of our corrupted culture,” he wrote. “The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us.”

The Saudi daily Arab News blasted Putin as “a servant of state dictatorship and control,” a man who could not afford to lose his “tough-man image.” But the editorial saved its harshest condemnation for the guerrillas, “who had put themselves in a position where no one would shed tears when the punishment came. They reached a new low when they chose toddlers as bargaining chips.”

An editorial in Lebanon’s Daily Star called for “better governance systems and socioeconomic opportunities in those countries and regions, including our Middle East, that seem to generate so many terrorists.” “Terror emanates largely from despair, hopelessness and humiliation,” the editorial said. “And these are sentiments whose causes can be identified, tracked, grasped and addressed.”[Russian School Takeover Stirs Self-Criticism Among Arabs]

As an after effect to terrorism striking home, Saudi Arabia took a decision to allow women to get commercial licences. They also started the Saudization program where they would bar foreigners from working in gold and jewellery shops. Now to combat terrorism, the Saudi Arabia Govt. is subsidizing the employment of young Saudis hoping that better economic opportunities would counter terrorism.

Across the Middle East, millions of young Arabs are struggling to break into stagnant job markets. Political analysts say this mismatch is starting to generate destabilizing pressure that could bring governments down if they’re unwilling to reform economies hobbled by cronyism, Byzantine regulation and rigid state control. The problem is particularly acute in this resource-rich country of more than 25 million people, where many have long viewed work as something done by others. The government is struggling to provide economic possibilities for the 60 percent of the population under 18 years old.

After bombings and shootouts this year that have killed about 50 people in the kingdom, the Saudi government has come to view putting more of its people to work as a matter of national security. With oil prices hovering near a two-decade peak, it is putting some of the new income into a languishing campaign to recast the labor market with a Saudi face. [Saudis Fight Militancy With Jobs]

The previous NDA administration had started a negotiation process with Pakistan. Now that they are no longer in power and a new Govt. is in place, how do you bring them to the negotiating table ? First “some murders”:http://www.abc.net.au/ra/newstories/RANewsStories_1141246.htm, “some throat slitting”:http://www.paifamily.com/opinion/archives/2004_06.html#000901, “murder of security forces”:https://varnam.org/archives/000394.html, and some taking of “women as hostages”:http://news.newkerala.com/india-news/?action=fullnews&id=25453. As “Kuldeep Nayar”:https://varnam.org/archives/000199.html of “I-forgot-to-buy-the-candle”:https://varnam.org/archives/000199.html fame writes
bq. The army on the Indian side of Kashmir says that infiltration from Pakistan has increased. The home ministry reports in a 30-page document that training camps have been reopened on the Pakistani side of Kashmir and some 500 militants are undergoing training. This is nothing unusual. Militants’ camps have never been completely wound up and infiltration takes place after the melting of snow at the passes straddling over the mountains.
bq. The quantum of infiltration is still small. One cannot say for certain whether it would reach the proportion which it had in the past decade. Nor can one be sure about how far Pakistan was behind it. There are some jihadis who, even Musharraf admits, cannot be checked since they are like a loose gun beyond anybody’s control. But if infiltration is beginning in the same old way, it is an unfortunate development.

It will be a clear message from Islamabad that it is not happy over the content of talks. The Pakistan spokesman in his last week’s briefing dropped a hint: “There are some differences. Pakistan has its own position and India its own. We have been talking about it for quite some time without reaching any conclusion.”[“Dawn”:http://www.dawn.com/2004/06/26/op.htm#2, (via “Acorn”:http://www.paifamily.com/opinion/archives/2004_06.html#000901)]

bq. Seoul, South Korea, Jun. 20 (UPI) — Renegade Pakistani scientists may be helping North Korea develop nuclear weapons, the South Korean Yonhap news agency reported Sunday. Quoting a report from the state-run Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, the agency said the north might have achieved a higher level of technology for enriched uranium with the help of foreign scientists. “Nine Pakistani nuclear scientists have been missing since they left their country six years ago and we cannot rule out the possibility that some of them are in North Korea,” institute officials said. [“Washington Times”:http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040620-095240-2742r.htm]
A decade after Pakistan created Taliban, a commision investigating the 9/11 disaster “discovered the link”:https://varnam.org/archives/000428.html. Many years down the line, the connection between Pakistan and North Korea will also be admitted by American Officials.

The “main story”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-alqaeda20jun20,1,440629.story?coll=la-home-headlines in today’s Los Angeles Times is that both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan aided terrorists in return for not attacking their country.
bq. Saudi Arabia provided funds and equipment to the Taliban and probably directly to Bin Laden, and didn’t interfere with Al Qaeda’s efforts to raise money, recruit and train operatives, and establish cells throughout the kingdom, commission and U.S. officials said. Pakistan provided even more direct assistance, its military and intelligence agencies often coordinating efforts with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, they said.
bq. “There’s no question the Taliban was getting money from the Saudis ? and there’s no question they got much more than that from the Pakistani government,” said former Sen. Bob Kerrey, one of the congressionally appointed commission’s 10 members. “Their motive is a secondary issue for us.” “Whether there was quid pro quo with the Saudis, we don’t know. But certainly the Pakistanis believed that there was. They benefited enormously from their relationship with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”
bq. Pakistanis, meanwhile, were in with the Taliban and Al Qaeda “up to their eyeballs,” said the senior commission staff member. He said Bin Laden, for instance, negotiated his 1996 move to Afghanistan with Pakistan’s powerful military-intelligence leadership, which held considerable influence over the various warlords struggling for control of Afghanistan at the time. “He wouldn’t go back there without Pakistan’s approval and support, and had to comply with their rules and regulations,” the official said. He said Pakistan opened its airspace to Bin Laden and his flying flotilla of operatives.
bq. Pakistani intelligence officers also allegedly brought Bin Laden to meet Mullah Omar soon after his arrival in Afghanistan, and then helped forge an alliance between the men that enabled the Taliban to trample competing factions and take over much of Afghanistan. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, also was instrumental in helping Al Qaeda set up an infrastructure in its own country and in Afghanistan, and the two outfits jointly operated training camps along the border where militants were taught guerrilla warfare, the official said. “It started day one,” the official said of Pakistan’s involvement. “They controlled the Taliban; they controlled the border.” [“LA Times”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-alqaeda20jun20,1,440629.story?coll=la-home-headlines]
Why did this become news now ? Didn’t anyone know about this or is this article a reminder to someone who forgot that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were two of the three nations who recognized the Taliban Government in Afghanistan ? If the 9/11 Commision had read Ahmed Rashid’s book “Taliban”:https://varnam.org/archives/000266.html, they would have found most of this information.

bq. Abdelwahed Belkeziz – Secretary General of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) – made the stinging attack at meeting in Turkey. He blamed the rise of Muslim extremism on the feeling of “powerlessness” felt by members of the Islamic world.
bq. Mr Belkeziz told the foreign ministers from the 57-member states that their countries had a poor record on issues ranging from education and health to economic development. “The aggregate gross domestic product of all our member states remains lower than that of one single advanced country such as France or Britain,” he said. Mr Belkeziz concentrated on the failures of the Islamic umma or community. There was, he said, a sharp contrast between its present and past. Today, he said, the community was dispersed, divided, diminished and debased, overwhelmed by a debilitating feeling of impotence. “The powerlessness that the Muslim world is experiencing today and the difficulty of finding solutions to our just causes have been the reason behind the rise of extremism,” he said [“BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3805649.stm]
Finally, an analysis without blaming America.

When an act of terrorism happens in your country, you can use that to your advantage to make a social reform. When 9/11 happened, the US Govt could have used that to formulate a national energy plan to get us out of the dependence from foregin oil. But now, out of all the places, Saudi Arabia is now allowing women to work as a way fighting _homegrown terrorism_
bq. The Saudi cabinet, chaired by King Fahd, last week took a landmark decision allowing women to obtain commercial licenses. “This decision will certainly reduce social and economic pressures on men, who are no longer capable of meeting family needs due to a drop in personal income,” said Nahid Tahir, a senior economist at National Commercial Bank. She told AFP that creating employment had become a way of fighting “homegrown terrorism”. “It also has an important security aspect in fighting terrorists in the kingdom, as the solution to this problem is no longer of a purely security nature.”
bq. The head of the Jeddah-based Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies, Anwar Eshki, said the steps highlight the role the economy can play in “fighting extremism”. “The cost of living has gone up and women must share the burden with their husbands. If this is not done, it will negatively affect the security situation. It will only breed further complications,” Eshki said. Unemployment in Saudi Arabia is estimated at more than 20% “We cannot separate terrorism from the economy … The security solution is essential, but it is not the decisive one. The cabinet’s decision is a response to this understanding,” he told AFP. [“Al Jazeera”:http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/839B7B03-16B2-410B-8098-660A4CF6C010.htm]