US endorses Taliban headquarters in Qatar

The United States has endorsed plans for the Taliban to open political headquarters in the Gulf state of Qatar by the end of the year, British newspaper The Times reported on Monday. The move is designed to allow the West to begin formal peace talks with the Taliban, Western diplomats told the paper. The office of the self-styled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan would be the first internationally recognised representation for the Taliban since it was ousted from power by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Western diplomats told The Times it was hoped that opening a Taliban office in Qatar would push forward the prospect of talks intended to reconcile insurgents with the Afghan government and bring an end to the decade-long war.

Washington is believed to have insisted that the office be located “outside Pakistan s sphere of influence”, the report said.

“It will be an address where they have a political office,” one Western diplomatic source, who was not named, told The Times. “It will not be an embassy or a consulate but a residence where they can be treated like a political party.”

 

The diplomat stressed that the Taliban would not be allowed to use the office in the Qatari capital, Doha, to raise funds.

The Times reported that the Taliban was seeking assurances that its representatives would be free from the threat of harassment or arrest. Britain, which has the second largest contingent of troops in Afghanistan, declined to say whether it supported the creation of a Taliban office in Qatar. “This is a matter for the United States,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.

The US ambassador to Kabul said last week that the Taliban must feel “more pain” from increased military pressure before progress can be made in peace talks.

“The Taliban needs to feel more pain before you get to a real readiness to reconcile,” Ryan Crocker said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Iran ready to continue talks with IAEA

Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Director Fereydoun Abbasi has said that Tehran is ready to continue talks on the issues or questions raised recently by the International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA) about Iran’s nuclear programme if the agency takes a serious step to resolve dispute over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear issue.

“We have asked them to submit a number of their claims and provide supporting evidence and documentation so that we examine the matter,” Abbasi said.

He insisted Iran will address new questions on the condition that the IAEA takes a serious step and shows it has the authority to resolve the issue.

He added, “The IAEA should change the language of its reports on Iran because the Islamic Republic sees this language as unacceptable.”

Moreover, Abbasi said Iran will only examine a limited number of questions about its nuclear programme.

“During our negotiations with IAEA officials, we made it clear that if talks are to be held on this issue, there should be a limit on their claims… because if new claims are put forward, certain member countries, which are opposed to our peaceful nuclear activities, will find an opportunity to raise news issues and fabricate new documents,” the nuclear chief explained.

Pakistani rocker: bin Laden death great for Muslims

WASHINGTON: Top Pakistani musician Salman Ahmad has hailed Osama bin Laden’s death as a victory for the Islamic world and demanded accountability over how the Al-Qaeda chief lived in his country for years.

The rock star, whose band Junoon is one of the most popular acts in South Asia with more than 30 million albums sold, said Pakistanis felt “humiliated” that the world’s most-wanted man resided in the garrison town of Abbottabad.

“In the last 1,400 years of Islamic history, there has rarely been a man or woman — Muslim or non-Muslim — who has caused more damage to Muslims around the world than Osama bin Laden,” Ahmad, who recently performed in Washington, told AFP.

“On 9/11, those terrorists who flew the planes into the buildings overnight hijacked Islam so that anything that has to do with Islam, anything that has to do with Muslim culture, would be equated now with the face of Osama bin Laden.

“So he being taken out in a military operation I think is a great thing for the Muslim world as well as the planet,” he said.

A team of elite US Navy SEALs swooped secretly into Abbottabad on May 2, shooting dead bin Laden nearly 10 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Ahmad said he had “massive questions” — including how bin Laden lived a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s top military academy and why he apparently felt safe enough to maintain minimum protection.

He also asked how the military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) did not detect a US operation deep into Pakistani territory.

“Are you saying that everybody is so incompetent, everybody was asleep?” he said. “This was Osama bin Laden, man.”

“If there was any other country where this happened — the intelligence failure on Osama and the intelligence failure on the US operation — the first thing the president would do is ask for the resignation of the intelligence chief and ask many questions of the army chief,” he said.

“Pakistan, for its own in-house accountability, needs to ask these questions of its leaders,” he said. “You have a military chief, an ISI chief — all of these people are at the end of the day supposed to be answerable to the people.”

Ahmad is not a newcomer to the issue. In the 1990s, Pakistani television banned Junoon’s song “Ehtesaab” (“Accountability”), whose accompanying video mercilessly mocked corruption by the country’s leaders.

Ahmad, 47, left a medical career to lead “Junoon,” which means “passion” in Urdu. He now teaches music at the City University of New York’s Queens College but returns regularly to Pakistan to perform and lead humanitarian efforts.

He teamed up with Peter Gabriel for the song “Open Your Eyes,” with each download contributing funds for survivors of the floods that devastated Pakistan last year.

In a recent autobiography entitled “Rock ‘n’ Roll Jihad,” Ahmad counted Led Zeppelin among his influences but saw himself in the tradition of Sufism — the mystical movement in Islam. The book’s title, he said, was part of his effort to take back the word “jihad,” or struggle, from extremists.

Sufi shrines have faced a wave of attacks in recent years in Pakistan, part of the violence that has left thousands dead.

Ahmad dismissed the significance of the violence and recalled Baba Bulleh Shah, the Punjabi Sufi poet who was branded a heretic and denied an Islamic burial when he died in 1757.

“But hundred of years later there are hundreds of thousands of people who go to Baba Bulleh Shah’s shrine” in the Pakistani city of Kasur, he said.

“They can blow up a shrine and get on the media radar,” he said. “But despite their disruption, society has a resilience that is shown throughout the centuries.”

Ahmad traveled to Washington for a recent concert by Sufis from the Indian city of Ajmer who performed qawwali, the voice-bending devotional music popularized overseas by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Ahmad joined in with his guitar, jamming with the Ajmer Sufis for his rendition of Baba Bulleh Shah’s celebrated poem, “I Know Not Who I Am,” which criticized doctrinairism.

“Sufism is not some sort of trend. It’s been there for centuries and it’s the glue of this region,” he said.

“You have these snapshots of political turmoil and extremism, but at the end of the day what keeps society together is this sort of deep cultural unity.” AGENCIES

Ban condemns burning of the Quran, calls for tolerance

NEW YORK: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon on Tuesday condemned the recent burning of a copy of the Muslim holy book Quran in a U.S. church in Florida, adding that ” such actions cannot be condoned by any religion,” UN spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters.

Ban issued the statement in a meeting on Tuesday with a group of ambassadors representing countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the spokesman said.

The secretary-general said “such actions contradict the efforts of the United Nations and many people around the world to promote tolerance, intercultural understanding and mutual respect between cultures and religions.”

Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Florida, oversaw the burning of a copy of the Islamic holy book on March 20. The church had threatened to burn multiple copies of the Quran last year to mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Reiterating the UN high representative of the Alliance of Civilizations’ statement on the desecration of any holy text, Ban said “no religion tolerates the slaughter of innocent people.”

Meanwhile, protests erupted throughout Afghanistan following news of the Quran burning that resulted in deadly violence.

On April 1, protesters in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan overran a UN compound and killed seven international staff working with the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

Ban added that such an attack cannot be justified under any circumstance, the UN spokesman said. AGENCIES

Raymonds acquittal according to Islamic law, says Aitzaz

Speaking on the occasion of an exhibition of art work, Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan said that families of Faheem and Faizan forgave Raymond Davis after receiving the blood money according to Islamic law in the presence of the court, after which Raymond was released.

Aitzaz further said that it was beyond understanding that why the people who favour Islamic law, were criticising the decision which was made according to Islamic law.
If Raymond was released on the basis of some special immunity, then the objection was right, Aitzaz concluded.

Ahmadinejad slapped by top Revolutionary Guard: WikiLeaks

The chief of the Revolutionary Guard angrily slapped Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in early 2010, as Tehran was still dealing with the fallout from last year”s election, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The cable, written in February, said Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari blamed Ahmadinejad for the post-election “mess” in 2009, which saw the country roundly criticized by the West amid allegations of fraud and tough crackdowns on large-scale protests in Tehran.

The guard was founded after the Islamic revolution in 1979 to prevent dissident activity and is a strong internal force within the country, with economic and military wings.

Jafari is seen as close to the most conservative Iranian elements, but Ahmedinejad himself is also deemed a stalwart hawk.

The cable, titled “He who got slapped,” quotes an Iran watcher in Baku, Azerbaijan, who related that Ahmedinejad felt that in the aftermath of the post-election street protests, which turned violent, “people feel suffocated.”

In a meeting with his national security council, the president “mused that to defuse the situation it may be necessary to allow more personal and social freedoms, including more freedom of the press,” according to the source.

This provoked an angry retort from Jafari, according to the cable:

“You are wrong! (In fact) it is YOU who created this mess! And now you say give more freedom to the press?!”

The top guard then slapped the president in the face “causing an uproar and an immediate call for a break in the meeting” which did not resume for another two weeks, the cable said.

It took the intervention of Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, a senior member of the top oversight body, the Guardian Council, to get Jafari and Ahmedinejad back to the table, according to the cable.

The source cited in the cable released by WikiLeaks “predicted that events are trending towards major developments and a new phases” during 2010.

Al-Qaeda suspect killed by Saudi police in shootout

Saudi security forces shot dead a suspected Al-Qaeda militant and arrested another after one of them opened fire at agents at a checkpoint on Friday, the interior ministry said.

One of the two men, who was disguised as a woman, opened fire after their car was stopped at the checkpoint in the central town of Wadi al-Dawasir. We have a strong suspicion it is Al-Qaeda, but we are still trying to identify the dead man and questioning the detained suspect, a spokesman said. Saudi security forces have stepped up their campaign against Al-Qaeda after the Islamic militant groups’s Yemeni and Saudi wings merged in 2009 into a regional organisation, which claimed responsibility for the failed bombing of a US-bound passenger plane last Christmas.

Iranian president fires foreign minister Mottaki

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has fired Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, the official IRNA news agency reported on Monday. Ahmadinejad appointed head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi, a close ally to the president, as the caretaker for the ministry.

I thank you and appreciate the work and the services you have rendered during your tenure in the foreign ministry, Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying in the directive carried by IRNA.

I hope your efforts receive a praise by God and you will be successful in the rest of your life at the service of people of our Islamic nation, he added.

Mottaki, a career diplomat, was appointed to the post of foreign minister in August 2005. He is currently in Senegal on an official visit.

Amitabh is my younger brother, claims Jaffar Hussain

FAISALABAD: One Jaffar Hussain, hailing from Faisalabad, has claimed that Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan is his younger brother, trendpk.com reported.

Jaffar Hussain resident of Nawanpind, Faisalabad asserted that Amitabh had runaway to Karachi with Amir Badsha, and later to Mumbai at the age of 14, adding that his Islamic name was Subh Sadiq.

He said that Amitabh Bachchan was keen to work in movies since childhood. He said his father Abdul Haq was a goldsmith, who had registered a case against Amir Badshah in 1963.

Hussain also stated that one of their sisters namely Sardaran Bibi (late) had great affection with Amitabh.

Iran agrees to discuss its nuclear program

TEHRAN: Iran has agreed to discuss its nuclear program at a meeting next week in Geneva, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the Islamic Republic won’t make “one iota” of concessions about its nuclear rights.

The European Union says Saeed Jalili, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, will meet with EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton on Dec. 6 and 7 — the first talks in a year after negotiations bogged down.

Ashton’s office says she will act “on behalf” of the U.S., China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany.

Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that his country is ready to enter nuclear talks with the world powers under “equal” conditions.

The United States and its allies say Iran is seeking to build a nuclear bomb. Tehran denies that.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is

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