Meet Somalia's New President!

[Nur]

Ayoub bro.

 

You write:

 

"^ Any explanation for this? I can't think of one"

 

 

Akhi, haddaad ula jeeddo qoraalka ku saabsan Dagaal-Sokeeye-abaabulaha Qaybdiid, waa mid muujineysa in ay talo fiican aheyn in abeeso lala seexdo.

 

Nur

[Shankarooni]

I have 2 Q to you dear Nur:

 

Do you agree or disagree with the prophet (PBUH) when he made peace deal and handshake directly with the Jews?

 

The prophet life and message had two stages( Mecca and Madina)..which are totally different in terms of dealing with the enemy...

 

Do you think the Mecca period and all the policy the prophet followed (PBUH) can be followed if the same situation of Mecca arises any time? Can you see the wisdom of Islam in having and teaching us these two different polices?

[Kashafa]

Do you agree or disagree with the prophet (PBUH) when he made peace deal and handshake directly with the Jews?

Shankaroon,

 

How can somebody "agree or disagree" with the Prophet ?

 

Do you know what happens if you "disagree" with the Prophet ? Thats right, you just left the fold of Islam.

 

In other words: Gaal baa noqotay.

 

I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, laakin wording-ga aa kaa haleysan ee soo sax. What you mean to say is: Can you help me understand the peace deal made by the Prophet with the Jews of Madeenah ?"

[Nur]

Shankarooni

 

InshAllah will come back with answers soon, sorry for delay, I was away for few days.

 

Nur

[Nur]

Shankaroni walaal

 

You ask:

 

Do you agree or disagree with the prophet (PBUH) when he made peace deal and handshake directly with the Jews?

 

"The prophet life and message had two stages( Mecca and Madina)..which are totally different in terms of dealing with the enemy.."

 

Answer:

 

After the defeat of the Warlords and their Ethiopian sponsors, does this place Somalia on Makka or Madina Period?

 

You ask

 

Do you think the Mecca period and all the policy the prophet followed (PBUH) can be followed if the same situation of Mecca arises any time?

 

Answer:

 

Yes.

 

 

You Ask.

 

 

"Can you see the wisdom of Islam in having and teaching us these two different polices?"

 

 

Yes, I do,

 

Please Note: In no time did the Prophet SAWS ever accept to share power with Qureish, his rivals, nor did he accept to suspend the Sharia, nor Tawheed.

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

^ Any explanation for this? I can't think of one

 

Somalia under Shareef will be an Ethiopian Protectorate, and Warlord Qaybdid and his ilk are the real trustees for the task of bringing Somalia's last troublesome real estate piece under Ethiopian Protectorate for foreign invstors.

 

Here is the Inorganic Chemistry of a similar government to that of Sharif and Sharmarke, Complete with warlords, drugs, corruption and of course, American Media and Military Support.

 

 

Karzai and Warlords Mount Massive Vote Fraud Scheme

 

"The biggest fear is Karzai ends up as an incredibly illegitimate figure, and we end up owning Afghanistan and propping up an illegitimate government." >>>>Australian counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen

 

By Gareth Porter

 

August 19, 2009 -- WASHINGTON, Aug 19 (IPS) - Afghanistan's presidential election has long been viewed by U.S. officials as a key to conferring legitimacy on the Afghan government, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his powerful warlord allies have planned to commit large-scale electoral fraud that could have the opposite effect.

 

Two U.S.-financed polls published during the past week showed support for Karzai falls well short of the 51 percent of the vote necessary to avoid a runoff election. A poll by Glevum Associates showed Karzai at 36 percent, and a survey by the International Republican Institute had him at 44 percent of the vote.

 

Those polls suggest that Karzai might have to pad his legitimate vote total by much as 40 percent to be certain of being elected in the first round.

 

But Karzai has been laying the groundwork for just such a contingency for many months. By all accounts, he has forged political alliances with leading Afghan warlords who control informal militias and tribal networks in the provinces to carry out a vote fraud scheme accounting for a very large proportion of the votes.

 

Karzai chose Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the ethnic Tajik warlord who had been vice-president and defence minister in his government until the 2004 elections, as his running mate. In return for their support, he promised Hazara warlords Haji Muhammad Moheqiq and Karim Khalili that new provinces would be carved out from largely Hazara districts in Ghazni and Wardak provinces, as reported by Richard Oppel of the New York Times.

 

The socio-political structure of Afghanistan remains so hierarchical that warlords can deliver very large blocs of votes to Karzai by telling their followers to vote for him, and in some provinces - especially in the Pashtun south - by forcing local tribal elders to cooperate in voter fraud schemes.

 

The system in which warlords pressure tribal elders to deliver the vote for Karzai was illustrated by a village elder in Herat province who said he had been threatened by a local commander with "very unpleasant consequences" if the residents of his village did not vote for Karzai, according to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

 

As early as last May, the country's independent election monitoring organisation, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), had documented a suite of voter registration practices that laid the groundwork for massive voter fraud.

 

FEFA observers, who observed voter registration in 194 of 400 voting registration centres in four provinces during one stage of the process, found that nearly 20 percent of the voters registered, on average, were under age – in many cases as young as 12 years old.

 

It is now estimated that 17 million voter registration cards have been issued, which means that nearly 3.5 million cards may have been issued to children.

 

FEFA observers also found rampant distribution of multiple voting cards. During the third phase of registration, they observed at least four incidents of such abuses in 85 percent of the centres. The voter registration staff was seen handing out cards even before applicants had been registered.

 

In one case, the FEFA observers saw about 500 voting cards being given to a single individual.

 

Another element in the Karzai scheme involves the registration of women without their actually being physically present, often on the basis of lists of names given to the registration officials. The list system for registering women was found in 99 percent of registration stations in Paktika province and 90 percent of those in Zabul and Khost provinces.

 

During the final phase of the registration, many centres were found to be allowing males to take the registration books home, where they supposedly obtained the fingerprints of the women.

 

In some of the most insecure and traditional provinces, such as Logar and in Nuristan, more than twice as many cards were issued to women as to men in 2009, and in Paktika, Paktia and Khost, 30 percent more women were registered than were men.

 

In Kandahar women represent 44 percent of those with voting cards. The young female MP Fawzia Koofi told The Australian that such levels of women registered could not be genuine.

 

The result has been to create a vast pool of voting cards, very few of which will be used by women to vote.

 

Reports by journalists about the acquisition of voting cards by the local strongmen indicate that this distribution of voting cards to people who would not vote was part of a plan to stuff the ballot boxes to increase the vote for Karzai.

 

The Times of London quoted a tribal elder in Marja district of Helmand province last week as saying that the warlord and former governor Sher Mohammad Akhudzada was organising the vote for Karzai in the province, and that he and other tribal elders were responsible for buying voting cards from voters who had registered.

 

Independent analyst Alex Strick van Linschoten, who is based in Kandahar, has reported schemes using police to purchase voter registration cards in several districts in the province.

 

Writing in the New York Times magazine Aug. 9, Elizabeth Rubin reported that an unnamed political figure in Kandahar told her in June he had manufactured 8,000 voter "fake" registration cards that had sold for 20 dollars each.

 

Some observers believe that various factors may constrain Karzai's effort to use warlords to swing the election. Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald E. Neumann told IPS he is counting on the use of indelible ink on the voters' fingers to make it impossible for people to vote more than once.

 

He recalls, however, that the "indelible" ink used in the 2005 election turned out to be washable after all.

 

Neumann also hopes the existence of the Election Complaints Commission, an independent body with three international members nominated by the United Nations, will be a check on massive vote fraud.

 

That body investigates complaints of voter fraud and has the right under Afghan election law to order the invalidation or recounting of votes or even the conducting of new polling where it finds evidence of fraud. But it has no sub-national presence and will be heavily dependent on the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), which handles all the documentary evidence pertaining to such complaints.

 

More problematic is the fact that the IEC is not "independent" of the Karzai regime at all. Its seven members were all appointed by Karzai, and its chairman has made no secret of his partisan support for the president.

 

The IEC will likely seek to cover up complaints of major fraud, and the complaints body may not be able to do much about it.

 

Neumann put the odds of an election that would be "good enough" in the eyes of the Afghans at "50-50".

 

But counterinsurgency specialists are more pessimistic. Larry Goodson of the U.S. Army College, who was on the U.S. Central Command team that worked on a detailed plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year, told IPS, "The reality is there is going to be a lot of cheating and fraud."

 

Goodson said the danger for the United States in the Karzai election plan is that it "could be perceived by Afghans as promoting the legitimisation of someone who is widely perceived as illegitimate."

 

Australian counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen, who will shortly become a senior adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, declared at the U.S. Institute of Peace Aug. 6, "The biggest fear is Karzai ends up as an incredibly illegitimate figure, and we end up owning Afghanistan and propping up an illegitimate government."

 

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

 

Copyright © 2009 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.

[Nur]

US Puppet Cuts His Strings

 

Thwarted by the American government on compromise with Taliban, Karzai has begun openly defying his patrons

 

By Eric Margolis

 

April 11, 2010 "Toronto Sun" -- Henry Kissinger once observed that it was more dangerous being America's ally than its enemy.

 

The latest example: the U.S.-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who is in serious hot water with his really angry patrons in Washington.

 

The Obama administration is blaming the largely powerless Karzai, a former CIA "asset," for America's failure to defeat the Taliban. Washington accused Karzai of rigging last year's elections. True enough, but the U.S. pre-rigged the Afghan elections by excluding all parties opposed to western occupation.

 

Washington, which supports dictators and phoney elections across the Muslim world, had the chutzpah to blast Karzai for corruption and rigging votes. This while the Pentagon was engineering a full military takeover of Pakistan.

 

The Obama administration made no secret it wanted to replace Karzai. You could almost hear Washington crying, "Bad puppet! Bad puppet!"

 

Karzai fired back, accusing the U.S. of vote-rigging. He has repeatedly demanded the U.S. military stop killing so many Afghan civilians.

 

Next, Karzai dropped a bombshell, asserting the U.S. was occupying Afghanistan to dominate the energy-rich Caspian Basin region, not because of the non-existent al-Qaida or Taliban. Karzai said Taliban was "resisting western occupation." The U.S. will soon have 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 dragooned NATO troops.

 

Karzai even half-jested he might join Taliban.

 

Washington had apoplexy. A vicious propaganda campaign was unleashed against Karzai. The New York Times, a mouthpiece for the Obama administration and ardent backer of the Afghan war, all but called for the overthrow of Karzai and his replacement by a compliant general.

 

An American self-promoter, Peter Galbraith, who had been fired from his job with the UN in Kabul, was trotted out to tell media that Karzai might be both a drug addict and crazy.

 

Behind this ugly, if also comical, spat lay a growing divergence between Afghans and Washington. After 31 years of conflict, nearly three million dead, millions more refugees and frightful poverty, Afghans yearn for peace.

 

For the past two years, Karzai and his warlord allies have been holding peace talks with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia.

 

Karzai knows the only way to end the Afghan conflict is to enfranchise the nation's Pashtun majority and its fighting arm, the Taliban. Political compromise with the Taliban is the only - and inevitable - solution.

 

But the Obama administration, misadvised by Washington neocons and other hardliners, is determined to "win" a military victory in Afghanistan (whatever that means) to save face as a great power and impose a settlement that leaves it in control of strategic Afghanistan.

 

Accordingly, the U.S. thwarted Karzai's peace talks by getting Pakistan, currently the recipient of $7 billion in U.S. cash, to arrest senior Taliban leaders sheltering there who had been part of the ongoing peace negotiations with Kabul.

 

It was Karzai's turn to be enraged. So he began openly defying his American patrons and adopting an independent position. The puppet was cutting his strings.

 

Karzai's newfound boldness was due to the fact that both India and China are eager to replace U.S./British/NATO domination of Afghanistan. India is pouring money, arms and agents into Afghanistan and training government forces. China, more discreetly, is moving in to exploit Afghanistan's recently discovered mineral wealth that, says Karzai, is worth $1 trillion, according to a U.S. government geological survey.

 

Russia, still smarting from its 1980s defeat in Afghanistan, is watching America's travails there with rich enjoyment and not a little yearning for revenge. Moscow has its own ambitions in Afghanistan.

 

This column has long suggested Karzai's best option is to distance himself from American tutelage and demand the withdrawal of all foreign occupation forces.

 

Risky business, of course. Remember Kissinger's warning. Karzai could end up dead. But he could also become a national hero and best candidate to lead an independent Afghanistan that all ethnic groups could accept.

 

Alas, the U.S. keeps making the same mistake of seeking obedient clients rather than democratic allies who are genuinely popular and legitimate.

 

© 2010 The Toronto Sun

[Nur]

Alas, the U.S. keeps making the same mistake of seeking obedient clients rather than democratic allies who are genuinely popular and legitimate.

 

Eric Margolis, The Toronto Sun