Price Of A Deal
Musharraf may have bent backwards in a bid to make his country the standard bearer of the US in the region. Of course, there are financial rewards for Pakistan, but the fear of a fundamentalist backlash continues to keep the nation on tenterhooks.

Circle Of Death
Violence fuelled by bigotry and foreign money brought the Taliban to power. Now as things come full circle the Islamic militia may meet an equally brutal end.

Afghanistan 1978-2001
Its women once enjoyed social freedom, and there was joy and peace. It is now a country perverted by the missionaries of a grim utopia. A social history in pictures.

EDITORIALS

Look Who Is Wailing

The question: whose war is it anyway? Answer: America's. And whose life? The wretched Afghans', the poor Muslims'. So goes the left-liberal position. This pulp rage against the "unjust" war is the outcome of intellectual insobriety, for this moral minority, the pathological photocopies of the antiquated Noam Chomsky, is drunk on a spuriously mixed cocktail of anti-Americanism and Islamic victimhood. Their anti-Americanism is more visceral than cerebral, and it lies orphaned outside history. In their rusty weltanschauung, America, or the Evil Imperium, is the world's most obnoxious terrorist state, whose global policing system divides the world between domestically suitable rogues and internationally deplorable rogues. They may even go to the ludicrous extent of calling New York a punishment for Saigon-or even Baghdad.

This anti-imperialism goes along with a sentimental solidarity with the Other, a favourite word for the anti-imperialists and post-colonialists. The other is the victim, and the most qualified in this category today is the Islamic freedom fighter who can be sighted in places as varied, and familiar, as Kabul, Kashmir, Islamabad, Gaza ... The new terror, in the left-liberal view, is an inevitable social response to the oppressor-in-chief in Washington, and the new terrorist, no matter whether he is Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, is a hero worth a rally. As their super heroes are mere members of the Discredited Prophets Society, the new conscientious objectors are desperately in search of new icons, even if they are found only in the wanted lists of terrorists. And this celebration of the victimhood betrays another trait: anti-Semitism.

These self-chosen industrialists of conscience-keeping could not have asked for anything better: an American war, and O Brother, after Vietnam, here comes Afghanistan! The issue here is not an academic definition of Islam or the past sins of America. It is not Islam versus the West, and it is not the crusade of the 21st century either. The issue for those who think nations and civilisation are at stake is the right to be the citizen of a world where life is not subordinated to scripturally manipulated gods. That is why this war is pro-life. That is why the contrived rage against the just war is not civilisationally acceptable. The dissenter has nothing at stake but his frozen mind.

MetroScape

Fort Of Arms
In the 16th century, a Portuguese governor fortified a strategically located house to defend ships in the harbour of an island on the west coast of India acquired from the Sultan of Gujarat. Mumbai grew first into a fort and then into a city from here.
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Looking Glass

Delhi Photography:
Pradeep Bhatia

Delhi Music Concert: Pandit Ram Chatur Mallick Dhrupad Foundation

Delhi Sculpture: Sculpter Hemi Bawa