Despite All Reports to the Contrary, We Are Not Winning

BBC recently reported that the Afghan Army will be taking full control of Afghanistan’s security as early as June this year. The report shows the ANA using maps, briefings and computers, apparently showing that the Afghan National Army is professional and, despite its over 15 per cent desertion rate, is probably ready to take charge.

Paktia may be a world away from Helmand, where a recent three-part VIC documentary offers a timely reality check on otherwise mostly polished reports of security transition.

Here is a summary of the part-2 of the documentary:

Taliban: You have all the watches; we have all the time. We have endured, and we are here to stay.

ANP: Everything is smoke. We are stoned.

ANA: Shoot Rambo style. Retreat to the base. Appeal to the locals to fight the Taliban without appearing as the potential winning side and without offering much incentive. We can’t do the job a national army is supposed to do.

ALP: Who is it that is paying us again?

ISAF: We know you are not ready, but take full responsibility already. We really need to leave. We are not leaving you weapons like we did the last time around. Also, we don’t know when and which one of these ANP/ANA bastards will turn on us.

Major Steuber: This whole effort is pointless. We know the ANP commander is “kidnapping boys and sexually molesting them, robbing the people.” Also, the police shot three “chai boys” dead after keeping them as servants and sex slaves.

Acting Police Chief: “If they don’t fuck the asses of these boys, what should they fuck?” Something about their grandmothers. The 13-14 year old boys wanted it. I probably did/do it myself.

Sangin Shura: “When they came to Afghanistan, they came here for a purpose. They couldn’t fulfill their purpose and now they are trying to release themselves. We know this very well.” We are merely hedging our bets.

US/UK Diplomats: We do not recall saying we were going to get rid of the Taliban. The ridiculously exaggerated military briefing in the heavily fortified base shows that things are headed in the right direction. Rosy glowy reports – check. PR stunt complete.

Head of the Afghanistan High Peace Council Salahuddin Rabbani, Helmand Provincial Governor Mohammad Naeem, and U.S. Ambassador James B. Cunningham meet in Helmand Province following the Sangin Peace Jirga on Nov. 20, 2012.

Moral: We are NOT winning in Afghanistan, unless we modify the term “winning” to mean whatever it is that we are doing in Helmand. And even then, we are probably not winning.

Shi’a Talibanism On the Rise in Jaghori

Ghazni’s Jaghori district has traditionally been known for the people’s relatively liberal attitude towards education and the role of women. During the Taliban years, it was one of the few districts in Afghanistan where schools, including those for young girls, did not close. In the post-Taliban years it punched above its weight in population in producing a large number of girls and boys to successfully enroll into Afghanistan’s universities. Among the people to have called Jaghori home are the chairperson of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission and Nobel Prize nominee Seema Samar, and Maoist leader and founder of the Progressive Youth Movement Akram Yari. People from other parts of the Hazarajat generally mock the people of Jaghori saying – Mardoom-e Jaghori Aql Dara, Imaan Nadara – the people of Jaghori have wisdom but no religious faith.

However, the recent history of the district has been bloodier and more shameful than it appears to be on the surface. In the 1980s, the Islamist parties led by the Nasr, Harakat and Nahzat parties enforced Shari’a across the Hazarajat region including Jaghori. During this period, hundreds of people were summarily tried and punished on charges ranging from blasphemy to sodomy. Among the many cases are the stoning of a young boy and girl in the village of Dawoud after they attempted to elope and runaway to Pakistan. A teenager was burned alive in the middle of the Sang-e Masha bazar after he was accused of having had a sexual relationship with the one of the shop-keepers. Jihadis attacked the residence of Ali Madad Khan, Jaghori’s aging tribal elder, and killed him and many other male members of his family. Ali Madad Khan, accused of apostasy by the mullahs, was summarily executed and his body was fed to the wolves and jackals. Female members of his family were sexually assaulted. Mullahs issued fatwa terming opposition to the ruling theocrats as equivalent to apostasy and therefore punishable by death. Hundreds of teachers, engineers, poets, public servants and educated youth were either imprisoned or forced to run for their lives after being accused of apostasy. In their sermons, the mullahs preached against enrolling children into the mainstream schools, accusing the schools of spreading atheism and communism. Well-to-do families bribed the teachers to keep their children out of school and instead enrolled them into Islamic madrassas. These were not isolated incidents but a systematic and organized attempt at changing the very structure of the society in pursuit of religious goals set forward and exported by Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran. Religious sermons included a session where participants chanted slogans against the United States, The Soviet Union and Israel. Other mullahs had convinced many people that Khomeini’s face in fact appeared on the moon, and that the true believers could witness this miracle.

That was then, and fast forward to 2012/13, the venomous tentacles of the Shi’a Talibanism appears to have returned to the district as well as to the Hazarajat. This is the result of a decade of gradual downfall as thousands upon thousands of mullahs returned to Jaghori and Hazarajat after years and decades of religious training in Qom, Iran. Today, religious fundamentalism and extremism are on the rise and so is the madness that goes along with it. In 2010/11 the female singer in the following video, her husband and family were forced to flee Jaghori overnight after the local mullahs accused them of violating Shari’a and mobilized an angry to have them punished at the hands of vigilantes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctMJnT0VouA

In the same year, the mullas issued a fatwa forbidding a music concert from taking place in Sang-e Masha. Their fatwa was later hailed by the Taliban in a letter addressed to the people of the district.

This from September 2012:

The girl was whipped with 80 lashes under the mullahs’ edict, and the young man – whose age was not disclosed – was ordered to pay around 80,000 Afs ($1,600) as a punishment, according to Ghazni provincial head of women’s affairs Shukria Wali.

The whipping happened two weeks ago in the girl’s home in the Hout Qoul area of Ghazni’s Jaghori district, Wali said.

However, it is not clear what was the nature of the relationship or whether it was consensual because local officials declined to discuss the matter in detail.

“The girl was freed after 80 lashes at her house and she is still in the district. The man was fined nearly 80,000 Afghani by the religious leaders,” Wali told TOLOnews.

And more recently:

Two Afghan singers, Mohammad Anwar Azad and Abass Neshat, were to perform at the concert in Ghazni’s Jaghori district to celebrate the Persian new year, but the district government and Ulema council forbade it, forcing it to be cancelled.

The district council and the religious Ulema said in a statement said that music is prohibited in Islam, calling it “haram” – forbidden.

 

One of leading mullahs behind this madness goes by the name Mirzayee. He is a member of Sheikh Asif Mohsini’s (the mullah with the grand madrassa in West Kabul) Harakat Party. Mulla Mirzayee returned to Jaghori following the overthrow of the Taliban and the arrival of the NATO/US forces. He has since established a madrassa, he has been distributing extremist religious books imported from Iran, he has opened an Islamic library, and has been active in organizing large group prayers and sermons. Despite spouting extraordinarily heavy dose of West-bashing in his sermons, he has made many trips to the West, including Australia, and has raised a lot of money.

Like those of his peers, Mirzayee’s resume is very self-explanatory and tells volumes about where he comes from and what he is very probably up to. He has lived and trained in Qom for over two decades. While living and training in the religious seminaries in Iran, his assignments include work as Shi’a preacher in Iran’s Sunni dominated areas of Zahedan & Chabahar, where the theocratic regime has been trying to convert locals. He is widely rumored to be working in Jaghori in behalf on Irani intelligence agencies. He is but one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of mullas actively promoting a Shi’a version of Talibanism in Afghanistan’s central highlands. The sooner the Afghan government acts to stop this madness from spreading, the better.

The larger and more important issue here is not that of particular mullahs, not even the instances of summary trials and punishments by Shari’a freaks. What is significant is that despite the bloody history of violence between adherents of Shi’a and Sunni branches of Islam, when it comes of curtailing basic rights and liberties, suppressing and oppressing minority groups, opposing the hard-earned but limited freedoms of the last decade, opposing the limited liberation of women, supporting religious dictatorship, vigilante in-justice, and blindly blaming others for their own madness and corruption, the Shi’a and Sunni mullahs are on the same page.

 

Pakistan Turns A Blind Eye To Genocide

Pakistani Hazaras are murdered every week on the streets of Quetta. If the international community took international law seriously, they would by crying genocide, writes Hadi Zaher

So far in 2013, more than 200 Hazaras have been killed in two massive bomb attacks targeting their enclaves in the city of Quetta, Pakistan. On 10 January, more than 120 people were killed in suicide and car bomb attack on a snooker club on Alamdar Road. First a suicide bomber targeted club goers. Ten minutes later an explosive-laden ambulance blew up at the scene, killing scores of rescuers, policemen, journalists and ordinary civilians.

The attack was designed to kill a maximum number of people. Among those killed was Irfan Khudi Ali, a tireless human rights activist who had dedicated his life to raising awareness about the plight of his people.

A month later, a water tanker filled with one ton of explosives was blown up in the middle of a crowded market in the Hazara enclave of Hazara Town. More than 100 people were killed and the death toll continues to grow. At least half of the victims were women, and another quarter of them were young children. The blast destroyed a nearby school and killed two teachers and 17 young students. The shockwave shattered windows many kilometres away.

On both occasions the responsibility of these attacks have been accepted by Lashkar-e Jhangvi, an Islamic extremist outfit that considers Shi’as to be infidels and has openly vowed to kill them. These attacks are only the latest in a series of attacks in which civil servants, politicians, doctors, teachers, students, traders and professionals from the Hazara community have been killed.

Hazara men, women and children are mercilessly butchered on the streets of Quetta by hit squads, bombs and suicide bombers. Not a single perpetrator of these attacks has been brought to justice. Each attack is deadlier than the last. Every day the Hazaras have to dig more graves.

The Hazaras are an ethnic group with distinct Asiatic appearance, unique among Pakistan’s various ethnic communities. A majority of Hazaras adhere to the Shi’a branch of Islam, a sect considered heretical by Pakistani’s Sunni extremists. This ethnicity-faith mix has turned Hazaras into sitting ducks for Pakistan’s Islamic extremists.

Read the rest on NewMatilda…

 

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

For Shame! Government’s Asylum Seeker Policy Sinking to New Lows

The Gillard government’s latest attempt at stopping asylum seekers from coming to Australia to seek protection appears to have sunk the already disgraceful policy to new lows. Judging by where Australia’s asylum seeker policy stands, it appears that:

For those who’ve come across the seas,

We have indefinite detention and desolation to share!

This fall from grace started with the reintroduction of the Howard era’s draconian Pacific Solution. At least four hundred people have now been sent to the desolation of Nauru, where the conditions can at best be described as inhumane and tough. Dozens, including women and children have been sent to Manus Island. In effect, despite all the sloganeering over people smugglers, it is the asylum seekers who are being subject to harsh treatments and punished for the “crime” of seeking asylum – an act perfectly legal under international law.

The Gillard government strategy does not merely stop at punishing asylum seekers, but a new report by the Globe and Mail shows that we are involved in playing a “deadly game” with the lives and safety of communities under siege at the hands of the Taliban and AlQaeda affiliated religious extremists – the same people we have fought against for over a decade and have spent precious lives and money while doing so. Members of the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation are reportedly pressurising and assisting the Pakistan authorities in ethnic profiling of Hazaras travelling via Pakistani airports. It is worth a reminder that for more than a decade now Pakistan’s Hazara community have born the brunt of target killings, suicide attacks and targeted bombings at the hands of sectarian extremists aligned with the Taliban.

“…the pressure applied by Australian authorities has resulted in Pakistan using ethnic profiling to try to seal off its borders to Hazaras trying to escape.”

For a government that is persistently vocal on the issues of human rights violation in South and South-East Asia, it is scandalous to be a party to strategy that plays right into the hands of the killers of the Hazara people, and to co-ordinate ethnic profiling with the Pakistani state,which has miserably failed to stop a genocide-in-the-making or is complicit in the murder of over a thousand Hazaras.

This is in spite of the shameful tax-payer funded ads aimed at discouraging potential asylum seekers from embarking on a journey to Australia.  

Circled in black is one of these ads juxtaposed with the aftermath of a suicide attack targeting a religious rally by members of Pakistan’s Hazara community, whose members are amongst the asylum seekers fleeing Pakistan. The attack killed 54 people and injured more than 150. The supposedly dissuasive Australian advertisement and the plumes of fire and smoke amidst dead bodies and spats of blood tell a lot about the disparity between the concerns of the Labor government and the fears of the communities from which asylum seekers originate.

______

Edit: News circulating on Facebook and Twitter report that today, a further 2 to 3 Hazaras have been target killed in Quetta.

______

Edit2: Dawn News:

“Three separate shooting incidents in the span of an hour claimed two lives and injured three other people in Quetta, the provincial capital.”

For those familiar with Quetta’s main streets and considering the time-span between the consecutive attacks, there appears to be a pattern in today’s attacks. First, the killers carry out an attack in the city hub in Qandhari Bazar, they then ride down a kilometer to Saleem Medical Complex and shoot up the next Hazara man they spot, and then they ride down the Double Road and shoot up another Hazara man. All of today’s attack took place in the commercial zone of the city, a busy area with heavy traffic and a large number of security personnel roaming around. In most other places in the world, the killers will have to be wearing invisibility cloaks to carry out such brazen attacks and then disappear without a trace. In Pakistan, it’s just another footnote in the events of the day.

While insecurity and lawlessness has increasingly become the norm across Pakistan, and minority groups particularly the adherents of Shi’ism are being persecuted and targeted mercilessly, the attacks on Hazaras are especially concerning. They are particularly vulnerable as they live in a country where they are different and distinct in their appearance, their language and their political vulnerability, all topped by their adherence to Shi’ism. In essence, they don’t have a territory to run way to; they can neither blend in, nor become invisible but run away to seek protection in places they are not wanted. Those in positions of power and authority are not doing anything to stop the killings, and they are increasingly refusing to open their doors to those fleeing the massacre – - such is the tragedy of living in a society governed by false sense of morality, corrupt ideals and failed institutions!

Why The Hazaras Are Fleeing

Pakistan’s ethnic Hazaras, a community who are easily distinguishable because of their Asiatic appearance, have for over a decade born the brunt of ferocious massacres at the hands of religious extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They also constitute the largest segment of asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat.

Although the Afghanistan-Pakistan region is a consistent source of bad news, very little of the everyday mass murder of the Hazaras and other minority communities makes its way into the Australian news.

Members of the community are the target of execution style killings and massacres by Taliban and Al-Qaida affiliated militants who have vowed to rid Pakistan of the presence of minorities such as Hazaras. The frequency of these attacks has gone from a few attacks a month to multiple attacks per week.

The first victims of the attacks were lawyers, doctors, teachers, and public servants. Today, it’s the vegetable vendors, taxi drivers and passengers, students, laborers and the ordinary men, women and children who bear the brunt of the latest atrocities. In light of the recent changes to Australia’s offshore immigration regime and the mass following of SBS’s Go Back to Where You Come From, it is essential for Australian politicians and the wider community to know what the so-called boat people are fleeing and the circumstances that force people to flee their ancestral lands, leave behind their families and board rickety boats not knowing if they will ever make to our shores.

On the morning of 20 September 2011 a passenger bus carrying more than 60 people left the Pakistan city of Quetta, headed for the Iranian border. Among those on board were men of various backgrounds and ages. Some were pilgrims travelling to Iran to visit the shrines of various Shi’a saints. Most were traders and labourers hoping to perform manual jobs in Iran and provide for their families back home.

Some were teenagers and young men in their 20s who were fleeing the growing spate of killings and insecurity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Men who hoped to go to Iran and eventually make their way to Europe and seek asylum. At around midday, some 30 kilometres south of Quetta, their buses were stopped by masked men armed with rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs.

Hazara passengers were forced off the buses at gunpoint, lined up and then shot. The wounded were then shot again and again as they lay bleeding on the ground, breathing their last breath, not knowing the crime for which they were being killed. The masked men then chanted, “Allah is great’ Shi’as are infidels”.

Continued on New Matilda…

Australia’s Pacific Quandary

“Stay where you are, don’t move”, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard warned the asylum seekers in Indonesia and Malaysia waiting to board boats to come to Australia as she introduced a new legislation to deter asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boats.

The legislation, Migration Legislation Amendment Bill passed from the upper house of the parliament on 17 August and has the backing of the ruling Australian Labor Party and the opposition Liberal-National Coalition. Asylum seekers arriving by boat will now be deported to the remote Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for offshore detention.

The new policy, dubbed Pacific Solution 2.0, will come into effect less than five years after the Labor Party led by the then incumbent Kevin Rudd, dismantled an infamously similar immigration regime. The current Prime Minister had described the previous plan as inhumane and ineffective but has now taken a U-turn on her previous stance. The backflip has come about after a panel of government appointed so-called experts, specifically tasked to come up with a plan to deter asylum seekers, recommended that the processing centres on Nauru and PNG’s Manus Island be reopened.

The new measures, described by the former Australia Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser as racist and even harsher than the previous plan, also includes recommendations to increase Australia’s annual humanitarian refugee intake from 13750 to 20000, and a so-called no-advantage-test where those processed in the centres would be detained for the same period of time as they would have been processed through a proper United Nations channel. Retired Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, the head of the so-called expert panel termed the recommendations as “hard-headed but not hard-hearted”.

 

Credit: http://www.inkcinct.com.au/web-pages/australian/political/2012–political.htm

 

The Prime Minister and the Immigration Minister echoed Houston’s comments. The opposition termed the new approach a vindication of their long argued view that only a return to the punitive terms of the original Pacific Solution could destroy the so-called business model of the people smugglers and deter the asylum seekers from boarding the boats.

The Greens, the only major party to have consistently opposed offshore processing of asylum seekers, said the policy would dump asylum seekers out of sight, out of mind:  ”This is about a policy that strips out legal protections in Australian law”. The new policy drew the immediate ire of eminent Australian human rights experts and refugee advocacy groups. Refugee advocate Pamela Curr rejected government’s claims that the new legislation was about saving people’s lives: “They don’t give a damn about people’s rights or people’s health”.

Former Australian diplomat and refugee advocate Bruce Haigh says that the new legislation has everything to do with the political desperation of the government and the opposition, and nothing to do about the asylum seekers or the people smugglers: “If they were serious about preventing asylum seekers from boarding unseaworthy boats, they would open processing centres in Indonesia, in Peshawar and in Quetta in Pakistan.”

The passage of the bill through the House of Representatives ends years of political deadlock over the issue of asylum seekers. As small as the percentage of people arriving by boat may be, the major parties have always maintained a position of exaggerating and exploiting the issue for political gains. With the next elections just around the corner, the incumbent Prime Minister and the Australian Labor Party have historically low approval ratings and all projections show that they will lose the next elections due to be held in 2013.

The scale of ALP’s backflip on the issue of asylum seekers and the speed with which legislation has been drafted and pushed through the parliament, shows that the government is desperate to regain lost ground by one upping the opposition on a deeply controversial issue.

Intensive misinformation campaigns and xenophobia have led some in the community to believe that the country is being swarmed by boat people, although air travel has for long been the preferred mode of travel for a overwhelming majority of the asylum seekers.

Continued on The Daily Outlook Afghanistan

those who perished at sea

those who perished at sea, a photo by Hadi Zaher on Flickr.

SIEV X

19TH OCTOBER, 2001

In memory of the 146 children, 142 women and 65 men who drowned on their way to Christmas Island in search of freedom and a better life.

AS YOU READ THIS PLEASE REMEMBER ALL ASYLUM SEEKERS WHO HAVE ATTEMPTED THIS TREACHEROUS JOURNEY

SIEV 221

15 December 2010

We will reflect on this day with sadness. The loss of each person’s life diminishes our own because we are part of humankind.

AS YOU READ THIS PLEASE REMEMBER ALL ASYLUM SEEKERS WHO HAVE ATTEMPTED THIS TREACHEROUS JOURNEY

Afghan-Aussies Divided Over Withdrawal

On Tuesday Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that most Australian troops would leave Afghanistan by the end of 2013, a year earlier than expected. On the same day about 150 Afghan schoolgirls were hospitalised after drinking poisoned water at a high school in northern Afghanistan, probably by elements opposed to female education, possibly Taliban. An Afghan National Army soldier was shot dead one day prior after opening fire at NATO soldiers in a military base in Kandahar. Last weekend Taliban assailants launched coordinated attacks across Eastern Afghanistan and the most secure area of Kabul, the Wazir Akbar Khan district — the largest attack on Kabul since 2001.

The unprecedented increase in the number and intensity of violent incidents in Afghanistan, of which these are only a few examples, has eroded the Western public’s support for the war. At least 64 per cent of Australians favour withdrawal. Similar numbers of Americans think the war is not worth its cost in money and lives.

But opinion is diverse among Afghan-Australians. Some oppose the planned withdrawal of foreign forces because they believe it will push the country toward an all out civil war and the return of the Taliban. Others see the continued presence of foreign forces as the main catalyst for the prolonged conflict. It may simply be beyond the power and capacity of the western forces to resolve a conflict that is lengthy, messy and very complex.

… Read the rest on New Matilda.

The Worst Illiterate

Afghan Ministry of Truth Sidesteps History

Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education recently announced that high school textbooks introduced from the next year will induce students with selective historical amnesia; that is, as a means of avoiding a clash among the competing version of “glorious” histories upheld and cherished by the stakeholders of power in Kabul, the new books will “not mention the Soviet invasion, the country’s devastating civil war, the reign of the extremist Taliban regime, the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, and the international presence that continues today” or any history that really matters. The step is disgraceful and the ministry’s chosen path is disgusting.

 

The Ministry of Education is led by Hezb-e Islami’s Ghulam Farooq Wardak, who other than being blatantly and unapolegitically archaic in his worldview, also, as reported by Wikipedia, holds a Masters degree in Administration from Preston University in Peshawar. This blog claims no expertise on the matters of higher education in Pakistan, but Preston University is an unaccredited institution, and as those who have lived in Pakistan are well aware, it is very infamous for selling degrees in exchange for a few hundred dollars or less. Since his office has set out to “modify” the course of history, perhaps, the modification should start with a better scrutiny of the honourable Minister’s qualifications.

Perhaps, those engineering Afghanistan’s history are operating under the assumption that if one ignores the recent history, it will go away and those with “dubious” track records will be forgotten and forgiven. Afterall, it’s only four decades and a few hundred thousand murders that are being censored. Additionally, the Ministry is offering students with a better fairytale alternative: there was a King, then came Prince Daoud and then the glorious nation of Afghanistan had a long and deep rest. When they woke up, BAM! It’s 2012! Every|||||thing ||||||||||||||||| is ||||||||||||||||||||| O||||K.

Unlike any civilized countries, Afghanistan hasn’t or doesn’t just cover up its recent past, but has had a tradition of ignoring and overlooking everything that is “non-glorious” about its past. An average Afghan troll, there are plenty on the internet, can hardly move beyond claiming titles of beasts (Exhibit A) , claiming rule over X & Y empires, archaic religious perversions, and bubbles of racial superiority. Afterall, a shallow sense of nationhood and identity feeds on fabrications and myths and perpetuates a cycle of intellectual disaster. The medium to long term consequences of this can be at best, very dangerous. (Exhibits: Pakistan & Iran)

While we are on this topic, let’s dig deeper into the less-told aspects of Afghanistan’s history. Perhaps, visit the origins of an actual Afghan state, in the late ninteenth century:

During the course of twenty-one years, Abd al-Rahman Khan probably had as many as 100,000 persons judiciously executed, whilst hundreds of thousands more perished form hunger, forced migrations, epidemics, or died as a result of the numerous campaigns which the Amir conducted … The fear that the Ami’s atrocities engendered was a shadow which fell across the lives of everyone in Afghanistan.

- Lee, J L 1996, The ‘Anicent Supremacy’, p.xxvi

 

There’s more:

Slavery among non-Pashtun groups increased dramatically under Abdur Rahman, especially affecting Hazara. It has been estimated that in the second half of the 1890s slaves accounted for five to ten percent of Afghanistan’s population.

- Quoted in Saikal, A 2004, Modern Afghanistan, p.255

 

And then there’s the man credited for founding Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Abdali. Abdali invaded India multiple times, and following the footsteps of Mahmood Ghaznavi (the regular theif of Somnat) and Nadir Shah Afshar (the butcher of Delhi), laid waste to the areas he conquered, sacked cities and towns, murdered hundreds of thousands and took away with him everything he could.

Khahda peeta lahe da, te baqi Ahmad Shahe da
(Consume as much as you can because the rest is going to be taken away by Ahmad Shah anyway)

- Abdali’s looting of Punjab summarised by 17th century Indian Sufi poet, Bulleh Shah

 

And so it goes. The censorship of history won’t alter or modify history but will in turn raise a generation of ignorants who will live on poisonous doses of myths and will have learned nothing from the past experiences.