Pak Taliban turn to Face book, YouTube to recruit militants, Islamic World News, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic World News

Pak Taliban turn to Face book, YouTube to recruit militants

Imagine the popular Internet sites of YouTube and Facebook being tapped by a fundamentalist outfit like the Pakistani Taliban to recruit and correspond with would-be militants.

Reports in the American media speak of a Pakistani Taliban recruiter who contacted the recently-arrested group of American Muslim youths on YouTube and exchanged coded e-mails to invite them to Pakistan and guide them on arrival.

It is another matter that the five prospective American jihadists failed to reach the appointed place and eventually ended up in police custody during a raid on the home of a Jaish-e-Mohammad activist in Sargodha.

“Online recruiting has exponentially increased, with Facebook, YouTube and the increasing sophistication of people online,” a high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official told The Washington Post.

It is unclear how widespread this ‘online recruitment’ is, but Evan Kohlmann, nior analyst with a private group that monitors extremist websites, has been quoted as saying: “Increasingly, recruiters are taking less prominent roles in mosques and community centers because places like that are under scrutiny. So what these guys are doing is turning to the Internet.”

Other reports from Islamabad, citing sources close to the FBI and Pakistani police investigators, also confirmed that the Pak Taliban recruiter, identified as ‘Saifullah’, connected with the five youths belonging to a Washington suburb on the YouTube and Facebook.

http://newageislam.com/pak-taliban-turn-to-face-book,-youtube-to-recruit-militants/islamic-world-news/d/2217

Understanding contemporary India through Mahabharat’s moral dilemmas, Spiritual Meditations, NewAgeIslam.com

Spiritual Meditations

Understanding contemporary India through Mahabharat’s moral dilemmas

Welcome to Hastinapur- The Mahabharata's timeless appeal

On the subtle art of dharma

Gurcharan Das

What blacken our days are the insistent reminders of governance failure, hanging over us like Delhi’s smog. What kind of answers can be found in the Mahabharata, which is obsessed with questions of right and wrong?

In the spring of 2002 I decided to take an academic holiday. My wife thought it a strange resolve. She was familiar with our usual holidays, when we armed ourselves with hats and blue guides and green guides and trudged up and down over piles of temple stones in places like Khajuraho and Angkor Wat. As she moved to get up from her chair, I explained that I had studied the great books of the West during college but I had never read the Indian classics. The closest I had come was to take Daniel Ingalls’ Sanskrit classes at Harvard as an undergraduate. Now, 40 years later, I yearned to go back and read the texts of classical India, if not in the original, at least with a scholar of Sanskrit nearby. My wife gave me a sceptical look, and after a pause, she said, ‘It’s a little late in the day for a mid-life crisis, isn’t it?’

In the 1990s I travelled widely across the country and from these travels emerged a book, India Unbound. In it I wrote about India’s economic rise and concluded that it was increasingly possible to believe that for the first time in history Indians would emerge from a struggle against want into an age when the large majority would be at ease.

http://newageislam.com/understanding-contemporary-india-through-mahabharats-moral-dilemmas/spiritual-meditations/d/1774

Turbulent Times in Pakistan: Price of Swat Peace,

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Turbulent Times in Pakistan: Price of Swat Peace

By Najam Sethi

A CLUTCH of important Pakistani leaders visited Saudi Arabia last week — General Tariq Majeed, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Ashfaq Kayani, COAS, and Mr Nawaz Sharif. The latter’s visit to Riyadh has set tongues wagging, given his close links to the Saudi monarchy which is singularly responsible for his rising political fortune. Mr Sharif, interestingly, stopped over in Dubai for a day exactly when President Asif Zardari detoured to the same city for a mysterious stopover and meeting, before turning around and flying off to Japan for the critical moot of the “ Friends of Pakistan” consortium. The FOP is deliberating how much economic assistance to give Pakistan over the next few years and Saudi Arabia may turn out to be the biggest single donor in it.

Are these meetings, therefore, all about propping up Mr Zardari’s government and Pakistan’s economy? Is Mr Sharif hoisting the national interest above his party’s political interest by putting in a good word with the Saudis on behalf of Mr Zardari? Is General Kayani also backing up Mr Zardari for the grand sake of democracy? Not at all. None of the political players is doing anything without a core vested interest. Indeed, there is a seamlessness about political developments in Pakistan since that fateful day of March 16 when Mr Zardari was outmanoeuvred by a combination of Army and America, and Mr Sharif was raised as a smart alternative to Mr Zardari who has increasingly come to be perceived in Washington as “ not such a good option” in the prevailing domestic and international crisis facing the country. The fact that visiting American, British and EU bigwigs have probably met Mr Sharif as many times as they have President Zardari, says it all.

http://newageislam.com/turbulent-times-in-pakistan--price-of-swat-peace---/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1336

US legacy in Afghanistan: What 11 Years of War has Accomplished, War on Terror, NewAgeIslam.com

War on Terror

US legacy in Afghanistan: What 11 Years of War has Accomplished

By Scott Baldauf

June 10, 2012

The lives of four Afghans provide a lens on how America's longest conflict has changed a nation – and the divisions and dangers that persist.

It has become the longest war in US history – nearly 11 years. It has consumed $57 billion in American development aid. The US military has spent more than $517 billion trying to subdue and secure one of the most invaded countries in human history. What, in the end, has the United States achieved after all this time and treasury spent in Afghanistan?

It's a valid question to ask, especially in an election year. And it's a question that many Afghans themselves are asking in earnest, as the US considers withdrawing troops by 2014.

Answering this question is tricky. US military spokesmen point to the dismantling of Al Qaeda and the build-up of an Afghan National Army increasingly capable of protecting the country from its internal and external enemies. Aid donors point to increased political freedoms, improved economic opportunities, thousands of newly built girls' schools, and rising survival rates for newborn infants and their mothers.

Add all this up, though, and the whole is a bit less than the sum of its parts. Security is faltering, as support for insurgent groups like the Taliban grows in rural areas. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civil servants have received world-class training from the West, but corruption within government remains a huge problem. Women and girls have far more access to education, health care, and political rights than during Taliban times, but those rights could be diminished if the Taliban enter a coalition government with President Hamid Karzai.

http://newageislam.com/war-on-terror/scott-baldauf/us-legacy-in-afghanistan--what-11-years-of-war-has-accomplished/d/7665