Word: pakistani
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When a young, illiterate housewife named Zafran Bibi went to Pakistani police last year, pregnant and claiming a fellow villager had raped her, she didn't expect that she'd be the one punished. But a judge in the ultraconservative Northwest Frontier province exonerated the man and last month convicted Zafran Bibi of adultery. Her sentence: death by public stoning. In Pakistan, victims of sex crimes are subject to harsh Islamic laws known as the Hudood ordinances. For a rapist to be found guilty, four adult male Muslims have to witness the crime, or the rapist must confess...
...misleading. Still, it's hard to avoid the similarity between Musharraf's domestic political situation and Arafat's - even in the tactics adopted by their domestic opponents. Musharraf's strategic choice to align with the U.S. against al-Qaeda involved a wrenching 180-degree turnabout for the Pakistani security establishment that is his power base. Pakistan's intelligence service and military had nurtured the Taliban, helped it win power and fight off its enemies. The camps run by al-Qaeda had also been used, with the connivance of Pakistani intelligence officers, to train Pakistani and Kashmiri militants for the "jihad...
...While Musharraf could sell the decision to support the war in Afghanistan as an existential imperative for Pakistan, Kashmir was different. The battle to wrest that territory from Indian control is an article of faith of Pakistani nationalism, and nowhere more so than in the military. Moreover, the almost permanent brink-of-war-with-India condition that derives from the unresolved conflict over Kashmir has long been the centerpiece of the military's claim to govern Pakistan. And Musharraf, of course, is not an elected politician, but simply the latest in the parade of generals that have ruled Pakistan...
...India charges that despite his declarations, Musharraf is continuing to sanction terror attacks from Pakistani-controlled territory. Indian commentators suggest that the general may be trying to divert hostility to his support for the Americans in Afghanistan by channeling the extremists' energies towards India. But even if he were doing his level best to stop such attacks, Pakistan's militant Islamists may well learn from the experience of their Palestinian cousins. Hamas and Islamic Jihad long ago learned that attacking Yasser Arafat directly would earn them the ire of the Palestinian people, and that the best way to challenge Arafat...
...archaeologists worry that an excavated statue could become a target of a restored Taliban-like regime. Says Paul Bucherer-Dietschi of the Afghan Museum in Exile, near Basel: "There's no way we could possibly protect the site." Bucherer-Dietschi worries about looters as well. At the bidding of Pakistani antiquities smugglers, he says, the Taliban trucked off chunks of the two standing Buddhas and sold them "like pieces of the Berlin Wall...