A Malaysian model, who was set to become the first woman to be caned in the southeast Asian country for drinking beer in public, had her sentence postponed Monday until the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. An Islamic, or sharia, court in Pahang had fined Kartika — a Muslim — $1,400 (5,000 Malaysian ringgit) and sentenced her to six strokes with a rattan cane for drinking at a hotel bar two years ago.

The caning would have been carried out within seven days of that, making her the first woman to be caned in Malaysia under sharia law. The moderate Muslim country has a dual-track justice system, in which Islamic courts operate alongside civil courts. But the country’s civil system also cannot overrule a sharia court sentence.

Such a punishment, caning, for drinking alcohol, seems very harsh. Further, the fact that a country’s civil courts cannot over-rule a religious court seems even stranger.

Afghanistan has enacted a new legislation empowering men of Shia sect of Islam to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands’ sexual demands, a media report said on Saturday. The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work, The Guardian reported.

According to the report, the new law has been backed by the hardline Shia cleric Ayatollah Mohseni, who is thought to have influence over the voting intentions of some Shias, who make up around 20 per cent of the population. Karzai has assiduously courted such minority leaders in the run up to next Thursday’s election, which is likely to be close, a poll indicated.

Given that the President is now contesting for re-election as the President of Afghanistan, and Shia votes will also be important, it is doubtful whether this legislation will be so easily reversed; would be so ironic that a state supported by the West enshrines a massive gender bias.

In radio broadcasts and sermons, Taliban militants have been promoting themselves as Islamic Robin Hoods, defending Pakistan’s rural poor from a ruling elite that they describe as corrupt and oppressive. That message has been resonating throughout the Pakistani countryside, where the culture is deeply conservative and the people are desperately poor. “Justice [in Pakistan] is only for people who have money,” Daoud said, while slicing through handfuls of grass with a small scythe. “We are illiterate,” he added, “but we are hoping that with Islamic sharia law, our lives will get better.”
Enforcement of sharia law is the platform the Taliban have been using to justify recent land-grabs, such as last week’s armed occupation of the district of Buner, some 60 miles from the Pakistani capital. Militants have slowly taken over territory in northwestern Pakistan by first targeting unpopular landlords and bureaucrats, according to Amnesty International, the human rights watchdog. “Its systematic. The Taliban move into an area, they use local existing resentments. They often go in with the guise of being Robin Hoods,” said Amnesty International representative Sam Zarifi. “They scare away some local thieves, they impose very, very quick justice, very harsh justice, and initially in some places they are even welcomed.”

And how are the Taliban fought ? Attempts to reform society to make it more even and less corrupt do not go anywhere (or are not even made); the military has fought the Taliban in parts, but the battle is a battle in which innocents are affected and make them resentment of the efforts of the military; the presence of the US drones that make frequent bombing runs of villages in order to eliminate terrorists are seen as invasions of Pakistani sovereignty, and killing of innocents only serves to inflame the population even more.
What can be done ? The effort has to be bring down the Robin Hood image of the Taliban by reducing corruption levels, by making more development in these regions, and at the same time, confronting them militarily. One wonders whether Pakistan can do all this ?

This aerial and ground campaign by Israel has now laster for 18 days, during which Israel seems to have learned from its previous such conflicts. It has withstood pressure from all around to stop this campaign (and taken heart from the Bush administration’s unwillingness to criticize Israel for these actions), taking the campaign deep inside Gaza. There have been a huge number of civilian casualties in this campaign, but Israel is stone-walling all such pressures. Inside Israel, the realization that Hamas controls a territory from where it can keep on attacking Israel through rockets that are steadily increasing in range (and from where it can soon reach crucial parts of Israel) would be part of the calculations to try and stop Hamas. This is a risky effort, and will not win Israel too many friends (although if the campaign succeeds and Hamas is weakened, there will be a weakening of the push by Iran and Syria to take leadership of the anti-Israeli campaign; something that will make many of the Governments of many of the Islamic countries of the region happy).

Israel says it attacked more than 60 targets overnight in Gaza as its offensive against Hamas entered its 18th day. The air assault came as Israeli troops advanced in the southern and eastern suburbs of Gaza City. The Israeli military also announced another three-hour ceasefire, starting at 0900 local time (0700 GMT), to allow aid lorries into Gaza.
Meanwhile, reports suggest diplomatic efforts between Egypt and Hamas in Cairo are progressing. After meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair said the elements were in place for a ceasefire agreement. “I am hopeful we can put an agreement together but it’s going to have to be worked on very hard and it’s got to be credible,” he told journalists. Israel hopes the scale of its operation will greatly reduce the number of missiles fired from Gaza into southern Israel, while eroding support for Hamas.

There are no easy solutions to the problem. The people of Gaza voted Hamas into a leading position, and pretty soon Hamas had evicted Fatah militarily from the strip of land, and taken command of the small strip of land abandoned by Israel in 2005. Hamas sees a long term aim as the eviction of Israel from the region, and does not recognize its right to exist. Israel is hoping that it will be able to destroy the top leadership of Hamas and scare it enough that Hamas will stop firing rockets into Israel, and one does not know whether that can ever be achieved.

A lot of this is also due to wrong US policies in the past. The US treated Afghanistan as only a military campaign, with the amount of effort required to reconstruct the country and ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the populations slackening soon after the Taleban were routed; with the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan slipped even further in priority for the US. This was the period that saw a lack of effective governance in many of the provinces of Afghanistan, accompanied by a rule of the warlords with all the corruption and other ills that such a rule bring on. The Taleban and Al-Qaeda have used this time to regroup and become an effective force again, threatening the stability of Afghanistan again, and the US would be paranoid about the terrorist supporters coming back into influence again. So, now the US is taking on the troubled areas in Pakistan directly:

Pakistan’s military chief said Wednesday that no foreign forces will be allowed to conduct operations inside Pakistan in light of last week’s “reckless” U.S. military ground operation. Pakistan’s “territorial integrity … will be defended at all cost and no external force is allowed to conduct operations … inside Pakistan,” according to a military statement attributed to Chief of Army Staff Gen. Parvez Kayani, who succeeded Pervez Musharraf after he stepped down as Pakistan’s army chief last year.
A ground incursion last week by U.S. forces into Pakistan strained relations between the two countries. Pakistan summoned the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad to complain about the incident, which it said killed 15 civilians. The Pentagon has not confirmed the raid, but a senior U.S. official who declined to be named told CNN’s Barbara Starr that U.S. helicopters dropped troops into the village of Angoor Adda in South Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan. The official said there was no evidence of any civilian deaths.

Such operations however cause huge problems in Pakistan. After all, no country would like to see foreign troops invading your country, and killing people (including innocents). And specially in the border areas, there is huge sympathy for the Taleban. As a result, there is less sympathy and support for the actions of the United States, and of any Government that is seen to be supporting them. Actions by the Pakistani army also meets disapproval, and given the increase in Islamic tendencies among the rank and file of the Pakistani army, there is a buildup of resentment against such military actions.

Hezbollah handed the bodies of two Israeli soldiers to the Red Cross on Wednesday to be exchanged for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel in a deal viewed as a triumph by the Lebanese Shi’ite guerrilla group. Many Israelis see it as a painful necessity, two years after the soldiers’ capture sparked a 34-day war with Hezbollah that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis.

The fathers of the two Israelis soldiers spoke of their pain at watching the television pictures of their sons’ coffins. “It is not easy to see this, although there was not much surprise to it. But … confronting this reality was difficult, yes,” Shlomo Goldwasser told Israel radio. Zvi Regev said on Army Radio: “It was very moving when we saw it. We couldn’t watch too long. It was a terrible thing to see, really terrible. I was always optimistic, and I hoped all the time that I would meet Eldad and hug him.” Hezbollah’s Safa said Israel had later handed over via the ICRC the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters slain in the 2006 war, and those of four Palestinians, including Dalal Mughrabi, a woman guerrilla who led a bloody 1978 raid on Israel.

These prisoner exchanges somehow give further belief to the terrorist groups that Israel is weak and will submit to more such exchanges; it has been proved in the past that these groups have taken the policy of kidnapping in order to get their own prisoners released.

The Pakistani military has launched an offensive against militants near the main north-western city of Peshawar, security officials said. Militants have become more active in and around Peshawar in recent months, say correspondents. Pakistani militant leader Baitullah Mehsud said he was suspending peace talks with the government.
The government has been in talks with him in an effort to pacify the tribal areas. The militants the government is acting against are not part of the wider Taleban movement in Pakistan, but are still Islamists who wish to enforce their brand of Islam, says the BBC’s Haroon Rashid in Islamabad. When it took power two months ago, the government said it would negotiate with the tribes of the north-west to curb cross-border raids into Afghanistan and end the domestic militancy that caused havoc in Pakistan last year. But now the government has authorised the army to back the talks with a credible threat of force. The Afghan government and the coalition forces in Afghanistan have complained that Taleban militants are finding safe haven in Pakistan. Increasing activity from militants around Peshawar lately has prompted the military to act.

It is very difficult for the Pakistani Government to strike a peace deal with the militants; they are inspired by the urge to establish a state based on Islamic ideals; the last time such a state was established, it lead to a brutal reign under the Taleban in Afghanistan. Unless the Pakistani Government recognizes the need to take action, it will keep on losing control of the country.

WASHINGTON, April 22 (UPI) — U.S. State Department officials disputed comments made by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter about Hamas’ views about Israel and peace. Hamas leaders, meanwhile, said they could accept a Palestinian state, but contradicted Carter’s statements about accepting Israel’s right to exist if approved by the Palestinian people, The Washington Times reported Tuesday.

“We accept a state on the (1967) line with Jerusalem as capital, real sovereignty and full right of return for refugees but without recognizing Israel,” al-Jazeera quoted Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal, who met with Carter, as saying.

And of course, no party in Israel will ever accept any of these terms. Israel has always disputed that Jerusalem will be the basis of a Palestinian state (a part maybe, but will never give up Jerusalem), Israel will never accept the full right of the refugees to return (that would be a demographic disaster that Israel would consider as a threat to its concept of majority Jewish rule; and Israel will never accept a negotiating partner who does not accept the right of Israel to exist.
The first 2 points can have multiple view points, but no person should accept a terrorist organization that has committed all sorts of atrocities, that teaches children how to hold weapons, and that refuses to accept the right of Israel to exist.