Robert Fisk: Bombs make no moral distinctions where they fall

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

To Mannheim for its annual film festival and I am gripped by Armadillo, a documentary on a Danish NATO unit in Afghanistan, real bullets whizzing past one of the bravest directors of photography in the world, real soldiers falling wounded, one with a Wilfred Owen pallour of death on his face.

But he survives. Others don't. After storming a Taliban position, the Danes find at least three Afghans, apparently still alive. There is a crack of gunfire and they are dead. "We eliminated them in the most humane way possible," one of the Danes says afterwards, right there on the soundtrack.

I am stunned. The words "war crimes" are in my mind. Then I stumble out into the cold afternoon to walk back to my hotel past the back of the 19th-century Kunstalle and there are shrapnel gashes up the red stone walls, deep wounds in the brickwork of the school next door, a slash in the basement window casing. Was this from the British fire raid of 1940, or the first attempt to raze the city on 16 April 1943, or the American raids of 1944? Well protected with underground bunkers, only 1,700 Germans were killed here, a mere 0.6 per cent of its residents. War crimes?

I find a small bookshop in a bleak, freezing street – the 1950s block architecture proves how much of this city much we destroyed – and I ask for a history of Mannheim in the Second World War. My request is received without emotion by a stooped, middle-aged man who brings me two beautifully produced volumes – "the last we have," he says – and I buy them at once: Mannheim under the Dictator and Mannheim in the Second World War, both produced with photographs and documents from state and city archives. I flip open the second book and there is a nurse bending over a carbonised corpse. Three women lie on their backs, all in coats; obviously caught in the open, perhaps during the great raid of 5-6 September 1943, in which 414 residents were killed. Two of them are elderly, one of them a much younger woman with high cheekbones and closed eyes.

Opposite is a page of death notices in the Neue Mannheimer Zeitung – like all papers in Germany, controlled by the Nazi party – printed a few days after the raid. Heinz Laubenstein was five when he was killed, his sister Ruth was 17, their father and mother, Hans and Bienchen, were 36 and 35. Katherina Witwe was 68, Berta Werle was 29. Anna Schindler was 56, her husband Anton eight years older. A victim of the 1944 bombing, a gaunt woman – her face like a skull – staring wildly, helped by a civil defence worker and a man who may be her husband clutching a ragged child, stands amid rubble. The Nazis liked to emphasise their own civilian suffering; and they gloated over their enemies. An amateur photograph shows two captured Allied fliers hiding their faces from the camera, trailed by two grinning schoolboys on bicycles; another shows a smouldering British Hereford bomber that has crashed plumb into the middle of a street across the Rhine in Ludwigshafen.

I prowl through the pages, searching for the faces of wartime Mannheim. I try to guess whether they are Nazi party members or not before reading the captions and – amazingly – I always get it right. The smug, fat, dark – yes, sinister – faces all turn out to be Nazis. The gentler, more intelligent faces are always those of old Social Democrats, of Jews and Communists. But I almost make one mistake. There is a photo of a young schoolboy in the 1920s, Gustav Adolf Scheel, again with bicycle, a pleasant but unsmiling face, harmless enough,dressed in a double-breasted jacket. Then I flip the page, add 20 years, and sitting in front of me is a mean-faced bully of a man in uniform, eagle and death's head on his cap, high leather boots. Pleasant young Gustav has turned into an SS officer in the Alpenland.

Hour after hour I read these books, and this has a strange effect. There is Hitler arriving at the small Mannheim airport that I passed in the tram yesterday. There is Goebbels in the opera house near the water tower where I have coffee every morning. There is the very same tower draped with a mighty Swastika. And there is a photograph of a dignified Jewish businessman confronting a bespectacled Nazi officer, whole family pictures of doomed Jews, sitting round a table, many of the pictures horribly torn and crushed. The Mannheim history books duck nothing. There is a whole chapter on the Holocaust.

There was even a baby resistance in Mannheim. A Gestapo photograph shows the tiled wall of a public lavatory on which someone has scribbled in a plaster join the words: "Hitler Shuft" – "Hitler is a gangster." And there is one, most moving letter from a Mannheim communist, whose childish roneo-published anti-Nazi tracts earned him a death sentence. Thirty-six year old Jakob Faulhaber was allowed a last letter, hitherto untranslated into English, to his wife Emma at their home at No 34 Hubenstrasse. "My loved ones," he writes on 14 September 1942, "now the decision has been taken, and everything we tried to do has failed. Our appeal has been denied and all our hope is at an end. When I think back on my life, it was a little too short – but it was worth it to have lived such a life. You all know that I always lived for my ideals and I'm a strong enough person to die for them ... Last greetings to all who were close to me in my life. What is it to live?" Jakob Faulhaber was hanged next day in Stuttgart.

Were some of the other Mannheimers "just like us", decent men and women who risked life for freedom, who responded to daily bombing in a way remarkably similar to that of Londoners in the 1940-41 Blitz, who wrote "Business as usual" on their shops? There is a snapshot of massive ruins in Mannheim and a hoarding which says: "...and despite all! Mannheim is a still a living city." But it was put there by the Nazis. The people, the Volk – and you can see them walking to work between smashed tenements – did not erect posters; they wrote their names and addresses on their ruined homes so that when their husbands and brothers and lovers came back from the front – if they did come back – they could find their families. Some of these men were war criminals in a most deliberate way, decimating entire peoples. But they also killed wounded soldiers, just as we did in Normandy. And in Afghanistan. And we knew, of course, when we bombed Mannheim, that we would kill a Heinz, a Ruth, a Berta and an Anna amid the destruction of the city's factories.

War crimes? Of course, we can all make moral assessments. Eliminated in the most humane way... The Taliban are not as bad as the Nazis. But they are much worse than the Danes. Isn't that right? What is this life?

Robert Fisk: How Lebanon can't escape the shadow of Hariri's murder

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

Five years after the former prime minister was killed, rising sectarian tensions and a teetering government are threatening a new conflict

I guess that you have to live here to feel the vibrations. Take last week, when I instinctively ducked on my balcony – so did the strollers on the Corniche – at the supersonic sound of an F-16 fighter aircraft flashing over the seafront and the streets of Beirut.

What message were the Israelis sending this time? That they do not fear the Hezbollah?

That they can humiliate Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri?

Heaven knows, they hardly need to do that, when Hariri has several times taken the desolate road to Damascus for a friendly chat with the man he believes murdered his father Rafiq, President Bashar al-Assad.

But who cares about the Israeli plane? Supposing a Syrian MiG had buzzed Tel Aviv during a busy shopping day last week? Hillary Clinton would be shrieking condemnation from the State Department, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon would have solemnly warned Syria of the consequences and the Israelis would be pondering an air strike on Syria to teach President Assad a lesson. But no.

The Israeli overflight was a clear contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 – Israel breaks 1701 every day with overflights, but not at this low level – and I could find not a single report of the incident in the American press. The Israelis are the good guys. The rest are bad.

Then came the story of the priest who died at the Maronite archdiocese at Sarba last week, overcome by smoke. Poor Father Pierre Khoueiry had fallen two floors off a balcony after his building caught fire – two other priests had made it safely out of the house – and the church explained that the cause was an electrical fault.

It was obviously true: I saw the junction box that had burned out.

But OTV brazenly led its nightly local news by suggesting that this could be the continuation of fundamentalist attacks on churches in Iraq and Egypt. Beirut's outraged information minister, Tark Mitri, complained bitterly of the "irresponsible coverage" of the church tragedy.

In Lebanon these days, just a hint of sectarianism can set the political petrol alight. Of course, we can dismiss this nonsense. Didn't 20,000 young Beirutis run a marathon round the entire city on Sunday, beating drums and clashing symbols and dancing the "dabka" in the streets? Sure. But why has my landlord welded a new steel door over his French windows? And why has he installed a security light at the back which illuminates my kitchen all night?

Maybe it's the sulphurous language of Lebanon's hopeless politicians. Ever since Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Shia Muslim Hezbollah chairman who handed over an Israeli assault rifle to Iran's president in Beirut, urged Lebanese to reject the Hague Tribunal investigating Rafiq Hariri's death – Nasrallah believes leading Hezbollah members will be accused – we've been waiting for the cabinet to fall.

The French ambassador believes Prime Minister Hariri will not last this week. I think he's wrong, but I worried about my predications when Hezbollah and the largely Shiite opposition refused to join President Michel Sleiman's reconciliation conference nine days ago. Under a crafty arrangement engineered by the Emir of Qatar, the Christian-Sunni majority in the Lebanese cabinet can make decisions. But the opposition and the Hezbollah have veto rights. Yet when the opposition won't come to the president for talks with the rest of the government, it seems they don't even care about their veto.

Christian politicians flocked up to their Patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, thus once again turning the Maronite Church into a political party – though that's not surprising when the other Nasrallah (the Hezbollah one) has turned the Shiites into proxies for the Iranians.

Others (please read Hezbollah, the Shiites and Iran) were trying "to impose on the Lebanese an impossible and unjust formula – deny justice in order to preserve civil peace, or sacrifice civil peace for the sake of justice".

Michel Aoun, a cracked Christian ex-general whose own party supports the Hezbollah in the vain hope they will make him president – Nasrallah enjoys telling the world this alliance gives him cross-sectarian support – would also be happy to see the tribunal abandoned. Even Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, whose politics perform a windmill cycle every three or four years, now says that its existence is not as important as "the serenity of Lebanon". Needless to say, Madame Clinton has been on the phone to Hariri, nagging him to disarm Hezbollah and to stick to the tribunal. In Washington, this makes sense. In Lebanon, she sounds as if she is mad.

Why? Shiites are the largest community in Lebanon, yet their sons and brothers make up a majority of the Lebanese national army.

It's not that the Hezbollah have infiltrated the ranks. It's just that since the Christian and Sunni elites have maintained the Shiites in comparative poverty, the youngest sons need a job and are sent off to the army. Think Manchester or Glasgow between the wars.

Furthermore, the Lebanese army is top heavy with generals and colonels. As Carnegie scholar Nadim Hasbani pointed out, the minister of national defence tried vainly to open an account with the Central Bank, to which private citizens could donate money to support the army's weapons procurements. There is, in reality, no account because by law the cabinet must organise any such budgetary arrangement. Anyway, how can a national army organise its weapons purchases on the basis of charitable donations?

But back to the Shiite soldiers. If they were indeed ordered to march south Grand Old Duke of York-style, does anyone believe that these young men are going to bash their way into their own Shiite homes to shoot their Hezbollah brothers, fathers and cousins to a chorus of White House cheers?

No, they would refuse and the Christian-Sunni soldiers would be tasked to attack the armed Shiites. The army would split. That's how the civil war started in 1975.

Does Madame Clinton – and France's foppish foreign minister, the saintly Bernard Kouchner who has turned up in Beirut to support the tribunal – want another civil war in Lebanon?

There's another problem. Given their numbers, the Shiites are grossly under-represented in the Lebanese parliament and government. And there's been an unspoken – certainly unwritten – agreement in Beirut that to compensate for their lack of political power, the Shiites can have a militia.

If God was to tell Nasrallah to disarm the Hezbollah – he would surely obey, for no-one else in the region would dare to make such a request – then Nasrallah would immediately demand an increase in Shiite numbers in government, commensurate with his perhaps 42 per cent of the population.

There would, therefore, in effect, be a Shiite government in Lebanon.

Is that what Clinton and poor old Obama want? Another Shiite Arab state to add to the creation of the Shiite Iraqi state which they have bestowed upon the Saudis and the rest of the Arab Sunnis as a neighbour?

Hezbollah risk, of course, getting what the Lebanese call "big noses". In other words, if the Hezbollah's noses get too big, someone will cut them off.

It's one thing for Nasrallah and his armed militia – along with the gentleman from Tehran – to spit at the Americans. But the UN is a legitimate international body; the place of recourse – however hopelessly – of the oppressed and benighted of the world.

Indeed, there was a time when the Hezbollah hung religiously – or almost religiously – on every UN resolution remotely critical of Israel.

Yet does Mr Ban really want to take on the Hezbollah? For he knows all too well that if the Hezbollah have "big noses", the Hezbollah have the UN, so to speak, by the balls (always supposing the UN has any).

For down along the Lebanese border are 13,000 UN soldiers, including NATO armoured units from France, Germany and Belgium – and China, while we're at it – with a clutch of NATO generals in command. They are supposed to be keeping Hezbollah weapons out of the area between the Litani river and the border, but for the first time last week the UN commander admitted that without the power of entering civilian homes – he needs Lebanese military permission for that (no laughter) – he cannot be sure there are no arms in his operational area.

All this goes back to a massive explosion earlier this year when a vast store of weapons exploded east of Tyre. A slightly unhinged French UN colonel – mercifully now back in Paris – ordered French and German soldiers to go pushing through front doors of the locals to look for guns. He had been warned by Lebanese army intelligence officers not to insult civilians. He paid no attention.

Then French peacekeepers on patrol in southern Lebanon found themselves pelted with stones. The Hezbollah said that the explosion was of old Israeli munitions left over from the 2006 war. (Hollow laughter here).

The Israelis then cashed in on the whole affair, producing aerial photographs – taken from a pilot-less drone, the principal weapon in the next Hezbollah-Israel war – with a claim that they showed an unexploded missile being loaded onto the back of a truck in the same village, watched by three Hezbollah gunmen. Quick as a flash, the Hezbollah came up with a videotape showing the same truck. But the "missile" was a damaged roll-up garage door and – alas for Israel – the three "gunmen" were clearly identifiable as members of the UN's French battalion.

Then last week came further humiliation, when a gang of unarmed Hezbollah housewives grabbed a briefcase of secret documents from two hapless UN tribunal investigators as they tried to find telephone records in a south Beirut gynaecological clinic.

Even several anti-Nasrallah and pro-government supporters in Beirut could scarcely suppress their laughter when the Hezbollah duly paraded two donkeys through the streets, each bearing a perfect replica of the blue UN shield beneath their furry necks. But again, do not laugh too easily. In the Arab world, the donkey is regarded as the most humiliating of beasts, worthy of execution. So watch out the UN. And back to the Israelis, who roar as much about "world terror" as Nasrallah does about the inevitable doom of Israel. This time it was the head of Israeli military intelligence Amos Yaldin – never regarded in Lebanon as the brightest of men – who told the Knesset foreign affairs committee in Jerusalem that Hezbollah could take over the whole of Lebanon "in a few hours".

Israeli defences were being undermined by Hezbollah's missiles and increasing the likelihood of conflict, he said – he was right there – but then he went into the same apocalyptic mode as all the other Israeli generals who have come to grief in Lebanon.

The next war, he said, will be far more devastating than any other in Lebanon – this is difficult to imagine – and "it will not be similar to anything we have grown accustomed to during the Second Lebanon War or (the) Cast Lead (operation in Gaza)."

Now this is very odd stuff, because the third Lebanon war – which Yaldin was predicting – took place in 1993, a massive bombardment that emptied southern Lebanon of almost a million people.

The first Israel-Lebanon war was the invasion of 1978 – Operation Litani, which Yaldin obviously forgot – and then came the second Lebanon war in 1982 (Operation Peace for Galilee), which Yaldin weirdly thinks was the first conflagration.

Then came the 1993 conflict, and then the 1996 war (Operation Grapes of Wrath) and then the 2006 Hezbollah war. So the next war – after the past five failures – will be Israel's sixth.

So what does all this mean?

Well, what we are seeing is an horizon of foreign powers all longing to interfere in Lebanon as they did during the country's merciless 1975-90 civil war. Washington is ranting about the tribunal's importance, so is France – the Brits, whose diplomats talk to the Hezbollah, are quietly and wisely asking if there might be a postponement of the tribunal's accusation – while the Syrians and Iranians are crowing at the UN's crisis.

The Israelis are, as usual, threatening semi-Armageddon.

The Saudis, who back the Sunnis – Hariri holds a Saudi passport – have been trying to mediate.

So, in a backward way, have the Syrians. A week ago, Syria's ambassador to Lebanon, Ali Abdul-Karim Ali, invited to lunch both the Saudi ambassador, Ali Awad al-Assiri, and his opposite number in the Iranian embassy, Ghadanfar Rokon Abadi, an old Beirut hand who was here during the 1996 war. All of which suggests the Muslim nations of the region don't particularly want a civil war.

And the Lebanese? My driver Abed, as good a weather vane as any, used to have a small black sticker attached to his car mirror. "Haqiqa", it said.

The Truth. He expected the tribunal would tell him the truth about who killed Rafiq Hariri.

While I was away this summer, with great sadness, he tore it down.

Robert Fisk’s World: Malaya 1948: another shameful episode in Britain's colonial past

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

Some 24 innocent villagers were killed by Scots Guards in a pre-Vietnam My Lai

Tham Yong died 11 days ago. I bet there's not a single reader who remembers that name, unless they happen to live in Malaysia or, like me this week, happened to be in Kuala Lumpur and to read the disgracefully weak-kneed report of Tham Yong's demise in the capital's equally disgraceful daily newspapers.

A more grovelling, politically neutered, slovenly form of journalism outside Malaysia it would be difficult to discover, and it was typical that The Straits Times, once a serious journal of record (albeit of the colonial variety) decided to report the 78-year-old woman's death from advanced cancer on page 18.

A bit odd. Because Tham Yong was the only surviving adult witness to the massacre of 24 innocent Chinese Malay villagers by 14 soldiers of the Scots Guards during what the British called the "Malayan Emergency". This was when, in one of their very few successes in a guerrilla campaign, the British crushed the fighters of the Communist Party of Malaya who were struggling for 12 years to win what they called the "Anti-British War".

The slaughter at the village of Batang Kali – the victims were rubber tappers and tin mine labourers – took place on 12 December 1948. Our colonial authorities insisted that the unarmed Chinese Malayan men were guerrillas who had tried to escape their captors and, in the giveaway words of a British police officer in Singapore, "the Scots Guards had been well placed, and the bandits just ran into their guns. Everyone was killed".

Not quite. One villager played dead and escaped the massacre, which was described by The Daily Telegraph's staff correspondent at the time as "the biggest success in any one day's operation in one area since the declaration of the emergency". In fact, one villager was executed the night before the murders; on the following morning, the Scots Guards soldiers shot the rest in the back at close range. This little pre-Vietnam My Lai has long been acknowledged. The People broke the story in Britain in 1970. Several soldiers admitted they lied under oath at the original British inquiry – which had dismissed all charges against the Scots Guards.

Ironically, one of the best accounts of the killings comes from Chin Peng, the still living communist Chinese Malay guerrilla commander, who went to London to research British government documents at Kew. In his huge memoirs (My Side of History, published in Singapore), he recalls the extraordinary Second World War resistance movement he ran with British agents – one of them was Spencer Chapman of The Jungle Is Neutral fame – and of how he was turned into the "Butcher of Malaya" by the Brits the moment he turned against his wartime colonial masters.

In Kew, Chin – real name, Ong Boon Hua – diligently unearthed the records of Malcolm MacDonald, Britain's former colonial secretary and son of Ramsay, who turned out to have been quite an unpleasant man, stabbing successive British officials in the back after he became commissioner general for the Malayan Union and Singapore. I interviewed old MacDonald in 1978 – four years before his death – about his pre-Second World War handover of the Irish treaty ports to De Valera, and he seemed a gentle old man (they often do) as he fussed with a large teapot in his Sevenoaks sitting room. Churchill never forgave MacDonald for giving back the ports to the Irish three years before the start of the Battle of the Atlantic, and hated him almost as much for his Arab sympathies in Palestine before the war. At one point, MacDonald glowered at me, waved his finger, and said: "But you are living now in Beirut because I failed."

MacDonald's nemesis in Malaya, it turns out – and Chin's, too, by his own account – was General Sir Gerald Templer, the ruthless, communist-hating British hero of the Second World War – he was wounded in the 6th Armoured Division -- who was appointed to run the anti-insurgency war in Malaya. He was one of the supporters of Britain's outrageous security laws – inherited from his days oppressing the Jews and Arabs of Palestine as the War Office's 1946-48 director of military intelligence. Templer's legacy is Kuala Lumpur's Internal Security Act, which continues to neuter all Malaysian political life to this day.

I was delighted to discover from Chin that one of Templer's greatest hates was Louis Heren, South-east Asia correspondent of The Times, whom Templer slanderously described as "typical of all communist muck" after the brilliant Heren had exposed the humiliating failure of a British military operation in Malaya. Under Templer's poisonous influence, the British government tried to persuade Sir William Haley, editor of The Times, to move Heren – which Haley refused to do. And thank God for that – because more than a quarter of a century later, it was Heren – now foreign editor of The Times – who gave Master Fisk the job of Middle East correspondent on the same paper, encouraging me to accept the post because it would be "a splendid opportunity for you, with good stories, lots of travel and sunshine". I still sometimes tell the ghost of the Great Louis that he was right – especially about the sunshine.

Yes, the shade of Palestine – or "Palestine" as we must call it now – darkens so many of our lives, including, indirectly, Chin Peng. Now 85, he originally fled to China and lives today in exile in Thailand because the Malaysian government, with whom he signed a peace treaty, refuses to allow him home on the grounds that he can't produce his certificate of birth in Malaysia's Perak state; impossible, of course, because – as the Malaysian government well knows – the state's documentation was destroyed in the Second World War. The Internal Security Act, from Palestine to Templer's Malaya to Malaysia, allows the structure of occupation to continue to operate.

Up to 10,000 died in the Malayan "emergency", but even the Brits are still frightened of it. After the BBC took statements in 1992 from British soldiers who acknowledged the massacre at Batang Kali, there were calls for another public inquiry. No hope, of course. When the 15 surviving families of the dead sent the Queen a submission in 2008 – pointing out that the British soldiers' evidence of the massacre has never been disputed – the British high commissioner to Malaysia, Boyd McCleary, replied to them with Blair-like oiliness. "In view of the findings of two previous investigations ... and in the absence of any new (sic) evidence, regrettably we see no reason to reopen or start a fresh investigation." Not much point in Boyd trotting off to chat to old Tham Yong, of course, because she's now in her grave. "Regrettably", indeed!

Child kidnap boom that shames Pakistan

by Robert Fisk

Herald.ie

Thousands die from bombs but now, says Robert Fisk, the young are targets

Pakistan ambushes you. The midday heat is also beginning to ambush all who live in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province.

Canyons of fumes grey out the vast ramparts of the Bala Hisar fort. "Headquarters Frontier Force" is written on the ancient gateway. I notice the old British cannon on the heights -- and the spanking new anti-aircraft gun beside it, barrels deflected to point at us, at all who enter this vast metropolis of pain.

There are troops at every intersection, bullets draped in belts over their shoulders, machine guns on tripods erected behind piles of sandbags, the sights of AK-47s brushing across rickshaws, and rubbish trucks and buses with men clinging to the sides. There are beards that reach to the waist. The soldiers have beards, too, sometimes just as long.

I am sitting in a modest downstairs apartment. A young Peshawar journalist sits beside me, talking in a subdued but angry way, as if someone is listening to us, about the pilotless American aircraft which now slaughter by the score -- or the four score -- along the Afghanistan border.

GUNSHIPS

"I was in Damadola when the drones came. They killed more than 80 teenagers -- all students -- and, yes they were learning the Koran, and the madrasah, the Islamic school, was run by a Taliban commander. But 80! Many of them came from Bajaur, which would be attacked later. Their parents came afterwards, all their mothers were there, but the bodies were in pieces. There were so many children, some as young as 12. We didn't know how to fit them together."

The reporter -- no name, of course, because he still has to work in Peshawar -- was in part of the Bajaur tribal area, to cover negotiations between the government and the Taliban.

"The drones stayed around for about half an hour, watching," he says. "Then two Pakistani helicopter gunships came over. Later, the government said the helicopters did the attack. But it was the drones."

An Islamabad garden now, light with bright oak trees and big birds that bark at us from the branches, beneath which sit two humanitarian workers, both Europeans who have spent weeks in the Swat valley during and after the Pakistani army's offensive against the Taliban.

"There were dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- executed by the army. They were revenge killings by the soldiers, no doubt about it. A number of people we had reported to us as arrested -- they were later found dead. What does that mean? The Americans and the Brits were aware of this, of course they were, and they intervened with the government. But what does this say about the army? In one village, two bodies lay in the street for two days -- it was a way of showing the local people what would happen to them if they supported the Taliban. What does this say about the army? Can they control Pakistan like this?"

The drones dominate the tribal lands.

They killed 14 men in just one night last month, at Datta Khel in north Waziristan. The drones come in flocks, and five of them settled over the village, firing a missile each at a pick-up truck, splitting it in two and dismembering six men aboard.

When local residents as well as Taliban arrived to help the wounded, the drones attacked again, killing all eight of them. The drones usually return to shoot at the rescuers.

But where do the drones come from?

When Afghan President Hamid Karzai flew into Islamabad last month, what struck Pakistanis was his astonishing statement that the devastating missile attacks by pilotless US drone aircraft were not being launched from inside Afghanistan. Karzai was (for once) telling the truth. The drones attacking Pakistan come from -- Pakistan.

POOR

The Institute for Peace Studies in Pakistan has been recording every act of violence in the country since the 2001 attack on America, and concludes that just in 2009 12,632 men and women -- civilians, soldiers, Taliban militants, even victims of inter- tribal battles -- were killed. But perhaps it is Pakistan's ability to do harm to itself that most struck me -- symbolised, I fear, by the latest and most terrible affliction to strike it: child-kidnapping. Steal a little boy or a little girl, ask the parents for money, and kill the infant if they don't pay.

When Sahil Saeed, the British-Pakistani boy, was taken, the police and the British embassy helped to bring him home. But journalists covering the story found that the family home was sometimes overwhelmed with other parents, like those of six-year-old Mahnoor Fatima, who was stolen from his family in October of last year and never seen again.

"This shows the difference between rich and poor," Mahnoor's mother said. "No one even came to my house to console me. Everything is done here for the rich, but nothing for Pakistanis and the poor."

Near Peshawar, a three-year old girl called Fariha was taken from a wedding party last month, her kidnappers demanding £8,000 (€9,100) for her life. The parents couldn't pay. So Fariha was killed and thrown into a canal.

In Faisalabad two days later, another kidnapped child, seven-year-old Samina Ali, was found dead in a drain after her parents failed to pay a ransom for her. They complained that the police later demanded £120 for handing over her body.

A kidnapped boy, a six-year-old identified only as Sharjeel, was also found dead in a drain a few hours earlier.

In the first two months of this year, 240 people -- almost all of them children -- have been kidnapped in Pakistan. Only 74 have been recovered alive.

There -- not in the suicide attacks and the venality of politicians-- lies the worst statistic in Pakistan.

hnews@herald.ie

Robert Fisk’s World: Spare me the academics who only want a 'safe, positive space'

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

I put my medium bomber squadron on alert to defend the English language

I'm all for talking to students. I try to tell the "truth" about the Middle East – calling a wall a wall, if you like – and to follow The Independent's line: tell it like it is, however many ill-spelt, ranting emails, blogopops, mugbooks and other ephemera turn up at head office. Friends who are currently abandoning the hate-hell of the internet tell me that the only good button is the one called "delete". But back to universities – and that little matter of free speech.

The University of Ottawa – an institution I had the pleasure of addressing only last year – is currently sinking into a slough of despond over a lady called Ann Coulter, a right-wing ranter of the Fox News/internet-raver/hate variety that now dominates the Republican party in America. After the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, she said that the West should invade all Muslim countries and force their inhabitants to become Christians. In other words, she's a pretty nasty piece of work. Not long ago, she even suggested that Muslims should not be allowed to fly – because they could always travel by magic carpet or camel. Cute, sensitive, childlike humour. Got it?

Anyway, Coulter was booked to talk at Ottawa but received an email of such pomposity from the university's provost, M. François Houle, that students took their cue to protest at her presence; her "security" men decided she should cancel her appearance. When I left Ottawa this week, she was still pushing up the headlines.

So let's take a look at the preposterous M. Houle. In an email to Coulter – why he couldn't write a proper letter, I have no idea – he quoth: "I hereby encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada and to do so before your planned visit here. Promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges." Note here the linguistic giveaways. "Hereby" – indeed! Houle, the legalistic town crier. Then "to educate yourself" – the implication, of course, is that Coulter is a drop-out. "Inappropriate." Oh my God, yes, we've got to behave in an "appropriate" way, haven't we, in our nice happy-clappy liberal society? And then the killer: "criminal charges". Yup, M. Houle is a thought-policeman. "'Criminal", mark you. Wow!

Worse was to come. While the abominable Coulter grabbed the headlines by saying nothing – how Canada's political ragbag would love to do that – a second-year sociology and women's studies student, Rita Valerino, was widely – and rightly – quoted for the following jargon-based nonsense. "I was just worried that things were going to be said about certain groups of people that were going to make them feel very unsafe and very uncomfortable and we promise our students here at the University of Ottawa a safe, positive space."

Aaaaagh! Talk about an anthropological pit, this was as twee as you could get. "Certain groups", eh? Muslims, perhaps? So why not say so? "Unsafe"? "Uncomfortable"? You mean that Muslims can't stand up for themselves? And then there is the clincher: "a safe, positive space". Yes, we all want to live in a "positive space", don't we? Time and space. Private space. Political space. I read this twaddle over and over again. And when I hear the word '"space", I put my medium bomber squadron on alert to defend the English language – just as I do when academics "posit" ideas.

Not that I don't get the same treatment from time to time. Not long ago, the University of Concordia in Montreal invited me to talk about journalism and the Middle East. But a week before I was to give my lecture, Benjamin Netanyahu had been prevented from giving a lecture of his own at the same university. Students had gathered outside the lecture hall, a glass door had been smashed and Netanyahu – who was charging, by the way, $100,000 a gig (Mr Bob was charging nothing) – was outrageously gagged.

I have to add that the organisers were vetting which students could attend this iniquitous man's lecture – a good way of insuring soft questions for a hard man – but the university reacted true to form: no more lectures on the Middle East for the foreseeable future. But whoops! They had forgotten that Mr Bob was due to speak a week later.

So on the morning of the day I was to talk, they sent two academic spies to listen to my address to the press club of Canada, both of whom scuttled off to a pay phone afterwards to report back on my "appropriateness" to speak. I, of course, then became the "spy", standing behind their booth, listening. By afternoon – once they realised my talk was going ahead – a Jewish group at the university plastered the sides of the escalator to the lecture theatre with bright red posters claiming that I would upset the harmony of Concordia University – and cause racial unrest – if I was allowed to talk. A Canadian television station even asked me for my reaction. I said nothing, but invited them to film me as I took the escalator and tore all the posters off the wall. Which I did. They showed this scene on television – but not a second of my lecture.

But there you go. Over the past week, the Canadian press, while piously rejecting Coulter's ravings, has been asking whether Muslims are the only protected species on planet Canada. And, more to the point, questioning the provisions of human rights legislation in Canada's provinces which dispense with the presumption of innocence and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. As one Ontario professor complained, "To human rights types, the political right has no right... What you say might cause offence, and we can't have that."

In the hateful National Post (founder, one Conrad Black, currently in a US penitentiary), Lorne Gunter announced: "The fact of the matter is, they protect only those individuals who are members of groups currently in favour with the political, bureaucratic, cultural, academic and media establishments – such as gays, feminists, Muslims, francophones and immigrants – while relegating to the back of the rights bus men, Christians, Jews, English-speakers and those of European descent."

O lordy, lordy. Weasel words – and universities are full of weasels – have sharp teeth. They bring out the wolves. And wolves have sharp teeth, too. I think I'm safer back in the Middle East.

Robert Fisk: Glossy new front in battle for hearts and minds

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

Once it was grainy video footage on websites. Now the Taliban believes its best chance of winning the propaganda war lies in a magazine

It's sleek, it's glossy, it's in eloquent Arabic, Pashto and Dari, and it pours derision on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan; it is the brand new propaganda wing of the Taliban: not just internet video of attacks on the western armies in Helmand and Kandahar, but professionally produced magazines, carrying stories of the Taliban's own "martyrdom" operations and the names of its dead fighters. For once, the cliché "well-oiled publicity machine" is correct.

Nureddin – or Abu Ahmed, as he preferred to be called, to denote that he is Ahmed's father – is one of the creators of Al-Samoud, which roughly translates as "Resistance" or "Stay Put!" The latest front page of the Taliban's monthly Arabic-language house magazine is adorned with photographs of a grim-faced General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, and the headline: "A surprise is awaiting the enemy in Helmand." Inside, an editorial asks: "Is the battle of Marja as decisive as they claim?" while an article on casualties is accompanied by a coloured photograph of a British military cortège passing through the village of Wootton Basset.

Abu Ahmed is from Logar province in Afghanistan but his Arabic is fluent and his arguments straightforward. "In the West," he says to me, "they say they have freedom of speech – so why shouldn't we have freedom of speech?" We are talking over lunch in the weird company of three pink storks and a peacock that prowl the Afghan-Tajik-Uzbek restaurant in Islamabad where he has chosen to meet me, wearing a white robe, a white cap and a carefully combed beard.

His spectacles give him a student's complexion, his arguments are exceptionally dry. When I ask him why he doesn't produce an English edition of Al-Samoud and sell it to the 150,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan, he shakes his head with the words: "They are seeing everything live and they would have no time to read it – they are too busy fighting for their lives."

Al-Samoud and the Taliban's three other magazines in Pashto and Dari – the bi-monthly Morchel ("Trench"), Saraq ("Flame") and Shahamak ("Dignity") – are obviously produced on modern presses, although Abu Ahmed will not reveal their location. I suspect they are in Pakistan and receive a sharp look by way of reply. But they reveal two new characteristics: an almost obsessive attention to detail, and the new name of the Taliban. The group now calls itself the "Islamic Emirate". That's the original name of the country the Taliban governed until 2001, and its readoption is an attempt to free itself from the thieves and mafiosi in Afghanistan who call themselves "Taliban" but who have nothing to do with Islam or hostility to the Western forces in the country. Al-Samoud describes itself as "the Islamic monthly magazine published by the media centre of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan". The Taliban distribute it across the Arab Gulf.

Abu Ahmed believes that the "Islamic Emirate's" magazines will continue in their own right after Western forces leave Afghanistan. "Whenever we get news, we do not rush it into print," he says. "We are checking this news with our sources in different provinces. Most of us are young people, doing different jobs – for the political as well as the military side of our organisation, although we are not fighters. As you know, the media is controlled by the West – so we decided to try and counter their propaganda. Of course, we also follow what their military says: details of their operations, attacks, and details of what they are going to do next – this is very interesting to us."

The "Islamic Emirate's" internet "Shariah radio" is also part of Abu Ahmed's remit: tough, hard-edged programmes intended to appeal to rural Afghans. "We have proved that Afghans can adjust themselves to learning about the situation," he says. "Most of our websites are run by professionals. That's why the Americans have tried to block them so many times, using different "gates" in Afghanistan and other areas – but we have been able to unblock them every time."

Abu Ahmed admits that illiteracy presents a major problem – he doesn't mention, of course, that the Taliban made a major contribution to this by banning female education – but says that Afghans who can read pass on the information in the magazines to all members of their families. He says that women are now involved in the magazines' production and in the military struggle. "From our point of view, a woman is the property of one person – if she is my wife, she is mine. But our women are cleaning the Kalashnikovs, carrying ammunition. In Kandahar, they are carrying mines under their burqas because that way they cannot be checked."

Al-Samoud in many ways mimics Western propaganda. The "military commander" in Helmand, for example, is quoted as saying that "the mujahedin (holy warriors) are fighting the enemy in Marja with high spirits". The latest issue carries special features on the 20th anniversary of the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, an interview with the rebel commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, and America's use of dogs to torture prisoners (a practice employed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison). One story claims that US servicewomen are used to abuse and humiliate Taliban prisoners. There are even profiles of hundreds of Taliban "martyrs" – identifying, for the very first time, with names and photographs, those who have died fighting Nato. Saad al-Haq (code-named "Jenaan"), for example, died in a follow-up attack against the Kandahar Nato base on 20 March 2008. Mullah Abdel Manon was killed on 14 September of the same year "in a martyrdom attack" against the same "Crusader fort". Maulawi Abdul Salam died last year during an attack on the fort of Zaal in Moudiriya.

Oddly, Al-Samoud even names its editorial board – Hamidullah Amin is the "president of the board of publishing", and Ahmed Shah Halim is the chief editor, assisted by three journalists, Ikram Maiwandi, Salahedin Momand and Arfan Balchi. Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai keeps a keen eye on the Taliban's propaganda. "Their magazines and websites are targeted at different audiences," he says. "They are keen to tell of their battlefield achievements – that is how they will impress their donors. Their articles didn't used to be so good, but they've improved tremendously. Now they are very well written, though of course one-sided. Nowadays, the magazines even contain poetry."

The propaganda wing of the Taliban calls itself the "Information and Cultural Department" which is run by Abdul Hai Mutmain from Zabul. He was once head of the Taliban's "information department" in Kandahar where, though not a minister, he was close to the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. "The Americans say they came to save Afghanistan from war," Abu Ahmed continues. "But this war is only harvesting our civilians. The Americans are coming with their war planes and killing civilians. The Americans see everything from the sky – surely they can tell the difference between two or three cars of civilians and military targets? So this means they are either doing it deliberately or they do not know how to fight."

And as the peacock on the lawn tries to attack the remains of our food, Abu Ahmed adds his own personal warning. "My father and grandfather told me: 'You have to fight the Russians'. Now I tell my son: 'You must fight the Americans'. The first thing we teach our children is 'Allah'. The second is fighting the Americans. As for the British, they are making the same mistakes they made before – they will experience a second Maiwand."

Afghan forces routed a British army at Maiwand in the Second Afghan War. Only later, however, does Abu Ahmed tell me that his son is just three years old. By the time he grows up, I ask him, doesn't he think the Nato forces will have left Afghanistan? In return, I get a thin-lipped smile and a raising of eyebrows. I suspect that means they will be staying.

Robert Fisk: Pakistan's advocates of justice

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

The top judge is again on a collision course with the country's political leaders, this time over corruption. Robert Fisk reports from Islamabad on the judiciary's battle to uphold due process and the rule of law

Three years ago, Pakistan's dethroned chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry was portrayed in the American press as a nationalist firebrand, intent on destroying the Washington-friendly Dictator-General-President Pervez Musharraf.

And today – a year after he was restored to his Supreme Court post – Mr Chaudhry is being condemned by some as a closet fundamentalist, a pseudo-Taliban anxious to overthrow his country's dodgy democracy.

Mr Chaudhry once again became the most prominent man in Pakistan this week when he pursued the civilian government of Asif Ali Zardari over allegations of corruption. As a result of his threats, officials in Islamabad took the surprising step yesterday of asking the Swiss authorities to reopen a series of old money-laundering allegations against Mr Zardari, a move which opens the prospect of the sitting President facing a criminal investigation.

But you only have to sit in the book-lined office of Aitzaz Ahsan to realise that the West got it wrong about Pakistan's judiciary. The senior advocate at Pakistan's Supreme Court, honorary fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, Benazir Bhutto's former lawyer and leader of Mr Chaudhry's "long march" – a 2007 epic in which the marchers all travelled comfortably by bus, truck and limousine – speaks softly, like a cat controlling its anger. And he flourishes a legal folio which explains why the Chief Justice's recent decision to overturn Pakistan's dubious amnesty law – the National Reconciliation Ordinance – which pardons corrupt politicians, including President Zardari, has nothing to do with Islam.

"What we have now is a set of judges who are independent by conviction," Mr Ahsan says. "They resisted the military regime. They suffered detention and made sacrifices. They were reinstated by an energetic and frenzied mass movement. But they are now being maligned on two counts: that the chief justice is an Islamist and that he is trying to destabilise the democratic system ... The purpose? To contain Chaudhry, to put him on the defensive, the back foot. But the assumptions behind the attacks on Chaudhry are false."

Mr Chaudhry's dismissal followed his opposition to the privatisation of Pakistan Steel Mills in Karachi, bought by three companies, one of which was rumoured to be a front for the then prime minister, and another on close terms with Mr Musharraf himself. Mr Chaudhry's three targets are the same now as they were in 2007: corruption, corruption and corruption. But Mr Ahsan himself likes telling the story of his finest hour. He tells it well.

"Musharraf, fearing that the judges would rule against him continuing to wear his uniform as chief of staff through an election for a second term, arrested the Chief Justice on November 3rd. I was myself arrested from this very room in my home. I was holding a press conference, condemning the imposition of the emergency and the suspension of the constitution, when the guy from downstairs called me, and said: 'The police have surrounded the house – they are going to come and get you.' I asked: 'Is there an escape route?' There was a road behind the house. He said, 'It's surrounded on every side.' I said: 'Be calm and let them come up.' I continued with the press conference. Then the police barged in."

"This was an electrifying event for the people, particularly because the chief justice had resisted the general's demand for his own resignation and had contested his dismissal before his own supreme court, where I represented him. And he had also energised the entire public by his travels in Pakistan earlier in the year. Chaudhry drove from here to Lahore – I drove him – and he stopped at every village. It should have taken four hours and it took 26 hours. There were millions of people, tens of thousands every couple of miles. Because of this, the 13 judges reinstated the chief justice on 20 July 2007 ..."

Much good did it do him. Mr Chaudhry was detained at his official residence, along with his children. "They were padlocked in," Ahsan says, still with a sense of shock. "They couldn't even go out to the back yard or the front garden for five months. He was forbidden cell-phones and television. I was myself detained all that time. We used servants with grocery baskets to pass messages. We put cellphone chips in the baskets. A one-minute call was all we could get from them before the police jammed the line."

And at this point, a palpable sense of rage almost overwhelms the bespectacled and slightly long-haired Mr Ahsan and he raises his finger in front of his face. "And during all this time, not a syllable or decibel was heard from either London or Washington or their representatives in Pakistan. There was not even a statement of concern about the children. The British and the Americans wouldn't touch us with a barge pole. All the time, they were negotiating between Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf."

Mr Ahsan shakes his head. The lawyers' movement was, he explains, non-violent, pluralistic and in favour of "moderate" values. "It was the only one of its kind in the history of the Islamic world. And the West treated us like pariahs. They embraced Musharraf, they were angry at us."

In a sense, the Pakistani judiciary had become an equivalent to the press in Britain after Tony Blair's decision to go to war in Iraq: they were the real opposition party; they – and not the politicians – represented the people.

"The fact is that until the chief justice refused to resign, there was no challenge to Pervez Musharraf," Mr Ahsan goes on. "He had had a tame judiciary – which included Chaudhry at that time – which was totally subservient. He [Musharraf] was the army chief and the military did his bidding entirely; and the popular opposition leaders – Benazir and Nawaz Sharif – were both in self-exile. It was at this point that the lawyers picked up the standard of revolt and challenged the authority of Musharraf in the face of brutal repression. The people responded and the rallies got bigger and bigger by the day."

Mr Ahsan has no doubt that America and Britain came to be regarded as adversaries rather than friends. "I kept telling them: 'Look, there's no likelihood of a suicide bomber starting his trek from Tora Bora and blowing himself up in Chicago or Manchester – it's your own citizens from Manchester of Pakistani origin who may do you damage. All they want is that you are friendly to their home country – you should espouse the rule-of-law movement.

"It was a historical opportunity missed – to embrace the people of Pakistan. For two years this opportunity was available to the West, particularly to Britain and the US. And for two years, they kicked it away."

Robert Fisk’s World: On the streets of Pakistan, it's as if the sun hasn't set on the Raj

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

Like everything else here, the bigger your cortège, the more important you are

I cruise the streets of Lahore and Rawalpindi in a rather shabby white car, me sitting next to the driver.

In the North West Frontier province, I put my Pushtu translator in the front, a good Pathan face to greet the checkpoint cops who anyway pay little attention to us, or anyone else for that matter. After all, if they stop the "right" car – the one with the bombers inside – they are likely to get "suicided" for their loyalty to Pakistan's corrupt government. Better a little flick of the hand and the comforting roar of my departing hackney.

There's a pecking order in all this, of course. Like everything in Pakistan, the bigger your cortège, the more important you are. In that order. Unlike The Independent's humble correspondent, these nabobs live in residence-fortresses, air-conditioned bunkers, seals of security which cut them off from the 150 million people of Pakistan as surely as the razor wire around their electrified gates. As Mohamed Jamil of Islamabad's Daily Times points out, this profligacy, along with the usual perks and privileges, is one of the reasons for the perpetual increase in Pakistan's fiscal deficit. "They move around with multiple-layered security escorts, equipped with the most sophisticated weapons and equipment. Exorbitantly expensive bulletproof cars and vehicles are being imported and provided to them." They are often guarded, I need hardly say, by gun-happy and brutal Western mercenaries, in some cases the direct descendants of the Brits who guarded governors general, chiefs of staff and humble district commissioners of the Raj. How typical, you might say, of the high and mighty in what we used to call the Third World – after which we called it, even more patronisingly, the developing world – but which we shall now just call Pakistan.

But hold on a moment. So much of this sad, intelligent, brave but deeply corrupted country has its roots in imperial history that you have to remember a basic tenet of all de-colonised nations – albeit that the Muslims of India were struggling for a new country called Pakistan rather than the nationalist Indian battle for an end to the Raj. And the most prominent characteristic of all post-colonial independent states is their ability, willingness and even desire to imitate their oppressors.

One of the most important features of feudal culture was that it was regarded as below the dignity of aristocrats to walk on foot like ordinary folk. I'm obliged to the perspicacious Mubarak Ali, writing in Dawn – "Qaid" Jinnah's old newspaper which, incidentally, wisely reprints articles from The Independent – for pointing out that "rich, influential and high officials always used some conveyance suitable to their status in order to impress people by showing their power and wealth. The British officials also adopted this tradition to maintain their status in the eyes of the local population".

When the president of the company of Madras went out, he took with him 400 native personal guards, his arrival presaged by the beating of kettledrums, his flag decorated with shining stars; his council members might be protected with aftabgir (umbrellas) while British officers would normally be accompanied by 20 horsemen, usually preceded by four servants carrying a silver staff (an asa) as a symbol of authority. As Mubarak Ali puts it rather quaintly, "Every English officer had elephants, horses and palanquins for his conveyance." Check palanquins in your dictionaries, Oh Readers ignorant of the Raj.

Some Brits, of course, went too far the other way – learning Persian and Urdu, the language of the nobility, as well as the Indian "natives" who learned English. In fact, some of these Brits almost forgot how to speak English. Thomas George dictated his own biography in broken English, so brilliant had become his knowledge of Persian and Urdu. Another British dignitary actually wrote his biography in Persian and sent it to London for translation into English. And the Brits also held their own versions of Mughal courts where they received an offering (nazr) from loyal servants. Mughal emperors gave their British interlocutors robes of honour – a form of jagir – and an awful lot of money. The Resident of Delhi, so Ali discovered, was awarded the title "Muntazimud-dola" – "administrator of the state".

But this was before the days of the East India Company, when fashionable integration – and the resultant Anglo-Indian families that came with it – turned into Raj rule. I have a wonderful Victorian volume at home which recounts how the British indulged themselves even when at war on the North West Frontier, one officer advancing with the Army of the Indus around the hills south-west of Peshawar with three camels to carry his personal supplies of cigars and wine. In 1842, in what was then the greatest disaster in British military history, the Army of the Indus was annihilated in the Kabul Gorge by predecessors of the Taliban.

In Peshawar last week, I was a little more circumspect. I dined on the floor at an old friend's home, talked to the North West Frontier's courageous Pakistani journalists in their press club, attacked last year by a suicide bomber – noting the unsmiling intelligence officer in the front row and the length of beards in the back row – before joining all of them for a group photograph. Ah, the pleasure of leaving Peshawar with 400 uniformed guards, 20 horsemen and servants carrying silver staffs. "Bahadur" Fisk with elephants and horses conveyed on his personal palanquin, preceded by the beating of kettledrums and flags bearing The Independent's aggressive eagle. Alas, at dusk I snuggled rabbit-like into the back seat of my little white car and trundled out of Peshawar through canyons of traffic, past mules and trucks of animal intestines that slopped on to the road, and beggars and motorcycle rickshaws and heavily bearded, armed men. I leave it to the new nabobs of Pakistan to uphold the standards of the Raj. I'm just a representative of scaredy-cat Britain, sneaking out of the North West Frontier as the sun set on the empire upon which the sun was never supposed to set.

Robert Fisk's World: As things get worse in Pakistan, the optimism continues to soar

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

Civilians have paid the price in revenge attacks that usually target the army

A few days ago, I was driving around Lahore, its population still shattered by the suicide bombers who blew themselves up next to two army trucks, killing 18 Pakistani soldiers and 48 civilians. The civilians, of course, were the usual "collateral damage" – the bad guys have even adopted our own obscene expression for unintended casualties – and they paid the price for Pakistan's continuing war against the Taliban in Swat and South Waziristan on behalf of America's "war on terror". Indeed, the conflict here is primarily between the army and the Taliban. I couldn't help noticing that the street where the bombs exploded is in the RA Barracks area of Lahore – and it took a time before I discovered that RA stands for Royal Artillery. Yes, our imperial ghosts continue to stalk this place while America's more recent empire ensures that its people suffer as they did under the Raj. Will freedom at midnight never come?

Yet far more outrageous was Richard Holbrooke's cocky, overconfident performance on CNN just three days later. Things are getting better on the "Af-Pak" scene, he told the world – how I hate these infantile expressions ("Af-Pak", "strategic depth", "spikes" and "surges") and al-Qa'ida is "under great pressure after losing key members of its leadership". Ten to 12 al-Qa'ida leaders had been "eliminated" over the past year – mostly in pilotless drone attacks on Pakistani territory, it should be added, which cost 667 lives in 2009 alone . Pakistan's civilians have paid the price in revenge attacks that usually target the Pakistani army: 322 Pakistanis killed and more than 500 wounded in 15 suicide bombings in the first 70 days of this year. The Pakistani army now has two divisions in Swat and several more in south Waziristan and Mr Holbrooke would like to see them move into north Waziristan as well, although – he generously agrees – that will be up to the commander of the Pakistani army.

So that's it, folks. Just like Bushy and Blair of Kut-al-Amara on Iraq, it's the same old story. The worse things get, the greater the optimism. If it's bad, it's getting better. By last year, Pakistan's dead since 2001 – from suicide bombers, Pakistani army operations, inter-tribal battles and Nato drone attacks – reached a total of 12,632 (with 12,815 wounded). Not bad, huh? And the overall political situation in Pakistan – where the Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif has just appealed to the Taliban to stop bombing Lahore on the grounds that residents hate the Americans (and ex-dictator Pervez Musharraf) just as much as they do – is "much better now", according to Dickie Holbrooke. After all, the Pakistani military is no longer in Pakistan's "complicated" politics. We shall see.

I can recall sitting on the lawn one evening this week with Imran Khan – among the most honest of Pakistan's politicians (there aren't many, I promise you) – as dusk fell over the Margalla mountains. And Imran was raging. "My God, these people in Waziristan, they are wonderful, beautiful people and what are we doing to them? The army fire their artillery 20km from their target, and they're told they are shooting at 11 Taliban people and then they fire and the army announce that 11 Taliban have been killed. We are killing our own people. This has to stop." But there's not much point in thinking that Obama and his dotty secretary of state care a damn. They are lost.

Why, only a few months ago, la Clinton was bitching about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's refusal to stop building settlements following Obama's "reach-out" – another of those bloody phrases – to Muslims. She meant all settlements, she said. Illegal settlements, "legal" settlements, outposts, whatever the Israelis liked to call it. And when Netanyahu offered his ridiculous "freeze" on just West Bank Jewish colonies for a mere six months – not in Jerusalem, mark you – off la Clinton trotted to the Arab League to publicise this extraordinary and "unprecedented" offer by the land-grabbers of the Netanyahu government.

Now she is huffing and puffing again. Joe Biden turns up in the land to which the United States has donated almost £200bn over the past decade in the hope of getting the Israelis and Palestinians to talk to each other again – and Netanyahu's government announces another 1,600 Jewish homes in East Jerusalem. Biden, of course, should have jumped back on his plane and flown back to America. Hasn't the US, after all, registered 39 vetoes to protect its little Middle Eastern Prussia in the UN? No way. The timing of the statement – the timing, mark you – was "unhelpful". Netanyahu said he didn't know about the announcement in advance – which, if true, suggests we should all believe in Father Christmas and fairies at the bottom of the garden.

But what does la Clinton do? Not appreciating that Biden and she and Obama have been treated by the Israelis with the contempt they deserve, she rants on the phone to Netanyahu about the "affront" and the "insult" of the timing of the announcement. But this is preposterous.

The affront and the insult were not caused to la Clinton or Obama. So self-regarding is this wretched woman that she could not grasp that the real affront and insult were being endured by the Palestinians – who are again being driven from their homes and dispossessed so that Netanyahu's Israeli colonists can move further into east Jerusalem. La Clinton should have asked Netanyahu how he could inflict such punishment on innocent Palestinians – but she thought that she and Obama were the victims.

My guess is that it's only a matter of time before Obama's pitiful envoy George Mitchell will be replaced by a tougher man – and who better than Dickie Holbrooke, the tough guy who knows how to handle "Af-Pak" and will know how to handle Netanyahu? Why, it's not so long ago that he produced "peace" in Bosnia at Dayton, Ohio – one S Milosevic being an honoured guest – while telling a pleading delegation of Kosovo Muslims to get lost. Nothing should get in the way of peace in Bosnia. So the Kosovars departed to endure their own ethnic cleansing when Nato went to war with Serbia. You may remember that we were fighting this war to get the Kosovo Albanians back into their homes – even though most of them were in their homes when our USAF and RAF warriors started their bombing campaign against Serbia.

But who cares? Things are getting better in Pakistan. It's only the Americans who are upset about Netanyahu. One thing at a time. That's what Holbrooke told the Kosovo Muslims. Al-Qa'ida are on the run. And they expect us to believe all this guff.

Robert Fisk: The mysterious case of the Grey Lady of Bagram

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

How does a neuroscientist and mother of three end up in jail as an al-Qa'ida agent?

Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. "I strongly doubt if the children are alive," he says. "Probably, they have expired." He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved. As a witness, supposedly, to the mysterious 2008 re-appearance of Aafia Siddiqui – the "most wanted woman in the world", according to former US attorney general John Ashcroft – I guess this 73-year-old Pakistani geologist is used to the limelight. But the children, I ask him again. What happened to the children?

Dr Faruqi is Aafia Siddiqui's uncle and he produces a photograph of his niece at the age of 13, picnicking in the Margalla hills above Islamabad, a smiling girl in a yellow shalwar khameez, half-leaning against a tree. She does not look like the stuff of which al-Qa'ida operatives are made. Yet she is now a semi-icon in Pakistan, a country which may well have been involved in her original kidnapping and which now oh-so-desperately wants her back from an American prison. Her children, weirdly, disconcertingly, have been forgotten.

Aafia Siddiqui's story is now as famous in Pakistan as it is notorious in a New York City courtroom where her trial for trying to kill an American soldier in the Afghan city of Ghazni in 2008 – she was convicted this month and faces a minimum of 20 years in prison on just one of the charges against her – is regarded as a symbol of American injustice. "Shame on America," posters scream in all of Pakistan's major cities. She is known as the "grey lady of Bagram", supposedly tortured for five years in America's cruel Afghan prison. Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari has asked American envoy Richard Holbrooke to repatriate Siddiqui under the Pakistan-US prisoner exchange scheme, while the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has dubbed her a "daughter of the nation". Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif promises to demand her release. But none of them mention the children. Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam are their names.

Ahmed was returned to Pakistan from Afghanistan in 2008, but Dr Faruqi tells me he doesn't believe for a moment that it is Aafia Siddiqui's son. "He came here to stay with me, but he said he didn't know Aafia until he was taken to Ghazni. He said to me: 'I was in the big earthquake in Afghanistan and my brothers and sisters were killed in their home while I was out fetching water – that's what saved my life.' He told me that after the earthquake, he was put in an orphanage in Kabul. He was shown a photograph of my niece Aafia and said he did not know this lady, that he had never seen her before. Then he was taken to Ghazni and told to sit next to this woman – my niece. The boy is intelligent. He is simple. He is honest."

All such mysteries require a "story-so-far". It goes like this. Aafia Siddiqui, a 38-year-old neuroscientist, an MIT alumna and Brandeis university PhD, disappeared after leaving her sister's home for Karachi airport in 2003, taking Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam with her. The Americans say she was a leading al-Qa'ida operative. So does her ex-husband. She had re-married Ammar al-Baluchi, currently in Guantanamo Bay, a cousin of Ramzi Yousef who was convicted for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. Not, you might, say, a healthy curriculum vitae in the West's obsessive "war on terror". In 2004, the UN identified her as an al-Qa'ida operative.

But released inmates from the notorious American prison at Bagram near Kabul– where torture is commonplace and at least three prisoners have been murdered – have stated that there was a woman held there, a woman whose nightly screams prompted them to go on hunger strike. She was dubbed the "grey lady of Bagram". At her New York trial, Siddiqui demanded that Jewish members of the jury be dismissed, she fired her own defence lawyers who said she had become unbalanced after torture; Siddiqui blurted out that she had been tortured in secret prisons before her arrest. "If you were in a secret prison ... where children were murdered..." she said.

And so to the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul. It was here that Afghan police stopped her in 2008, carrying a handbag which supposedly contained details of chemical weapons and radiological agents, notes on mass casualty attacks on US targets and maps of Ghazni. American soldiers and FBI agents were summoned to question her and arrived in Ghazni without realising that Siddiqui was in the same room, sitting behind a curtain. According to their evidence, she managed to take one of their M-4 assault rifles and opened fire with the words, "Get the fuck of here. May the blood of [unintelligible] be on your [head or hands]." She missed but was cut down by two bullets from a 9mm pistol fired by one of the soldiers. Hence the charges. Hence the conviction.

She wasn't helped by an alleged statement by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – the man who supposedly planned 9/11 and who is the uncle of her second husband, Ammar al-Baluchi – who claimed that Aafia Siddiqui was a senior al-Qa'ida agent. But then, he'd just been waterboarded 183 times in a month – which hardly makes his evidence, to use a phrase, water-tight.

The questions are obvious. What on earth was a Pakistani American with a Brandeis degree doing in Ghazni with a handbag containing American targets? And why, if her family was so fearful for her, didn't they report her missing in 2003, go to the press and tell the story of the children? Ahmed – son of Siddiqui or Afghan orphan, depending on your point of view – is now staying with Siddiqui's sister, Fauzia, in Karachi; but she refuses to let him talk to journalists. The Americans have shown no interest in him – even less in the other two, younger children. Why not?

It's odd, to say the least, that Dr Faruqi also maintains that in 2008 – before the Ghazni incident – Aafia Siddiqui turned up at his home in the suburbs of Islamabad. "She was wearing a burqa and got out of the car, just outside here," he says, pointing to the tree-lined street outside his office window. "I only caught sight of her once, and I said 'You have changed your nose'. But it was her. We talked about the past, her memories, it was her voice. She said the ISI (the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) had let her come here. She wanted to get away, to go back to Afghanistan where she said the Taliban would protect her. She said that since her arrest, she knew nothing of her children. Someone told her they had been sent to Australia."

More questions. If Siddiqui was a "ghost prisoner" in Afghanistan, how come she turned up at Dr Faruqi's home in Islamabad? Why would she wear an Afghan "burqa" in the cosmopolitan capital of her own country? Why did she not talk more about her children? Why could she not show her face to her own uncle? Did she really come to Islamabad?

Fauzia Siddiqui is now touring Pakistan to publicise her sister's "unfair" trial, her torture at the hands of Americans. Most of the Pakistan press have taken up her story with little critical attention to the allegations against her. She has become a proto-martyr, a martyr-in-being; if her story is comprehensible, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief. But America's constant protestations of ignorance about her whereabouts before 2008 have an unhappy ring about them.

And the children? Rarely written about in Pakistan, they, too, in a sense, were "disappeared" from the story – until the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, paid an uneasy visit to Pakistan this week and, according to Fauzia, told the Interior minister, Rehman Malik, that "the children of Aafia Siddiqui will be sent home soon". Was Karzai referring to the other two children? Or to all three, including the "real" Ahmed? And if Aafia's two/three children are in Afghanistan, where have they been kept? In an orphanage? In a prison? And who kept them? The Afghans? The Americans?

Robert Fisk: Into the terrifying world of Pakistan's 'disappeared'

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

In the first of a series of reports from Pakistan, our correspondent meets the wife of one of 8,000 citizens who have gone 'missing' at the hands of the state

If you want to know how brutally Pakistan treats its people, you should meet Amina Janjua. An intelligent painter and interior designer, she sits on the vast sofa of her living room in Rawalpindi – a room that somehow accentuates her loneliness – scarf wound tightly round her head, serving tea and biscuits like the middle-class woman she is. And although neither a soldier nor a policeman has ever laid a hand on her, she is a victim of her country's cruel oppression. Because, five years ago, her husband Masood became one of Pakistan's "disappeared".

It is a scandal and a disgrace and, of course, a crime against humanity. Ask not where Masood Janjua has gone – Amina does ask, of course, all the way up to the President – for he has entered that dark world wherein dwell up to 8,000 of Pakistan's missing citizens, men, for the most part, seized from their homes or from the streets by cops and soldiers on the orders of spies and intelligence agents and Americans since 11 September, 2001. In Lahore alone, there are 120 "torture houses" just for the missing of the Punjab. Their shrieks of pain from the basements could be heard by residents – who complained only that the buildings might provoke bomb attacks. In Pakistan today, preservation counts for more than compassion.

Masood Janjua was 44 when he was "disappeared" on 30 July 2005. He ran an IT college and a travel agency, the father of two boys – Mohamed and Ali, and a girl, Aisha. He just never came home. Nobody saw what happened. Amina, who was 40 at the time, glows when she speaks of him. "We were so extremely close, so happy, our world was so heavenly – we were always visiting friends, having parties at home. He was so caring and kind to our children, so affectionate. That he should be taken from me! I think it was a very big mistake that they did. But when they do it – like this – they never say they were wrong."

"They". Everyone I talk to here talks about "they". Many refuse to talk in case it provokes "them" to undertake a quick execution. "They" is the Inter-Services Intelligence. "They" is military intelligence. "They" are the Americans, some of them present – according to the few "disappeared" who have been released – during torture sessions. The Defence of Human Rights Pakistan (DHRP), the movement which Amina founded with 25 other bereft families, has gathered evidence of English-speaking interrogators who calmly ask victims questions during their torment. Ironically, Amina lives in a military district of Rawalpindi, beside an old British barracks, where US soldiers are observed in Pakistani uniforms – sometimes female American soldiers dressed, so she says, in the uniforms of Pakistani military paramedics.

Even more ironic was the first word she had of her husband after he disappeared. "When I went to the Supreme Court to demand his return, witnesses came forward to say they saw Masood inside an army barracks here in Rawalpindi, very close to his family. Just think – it was within walking distance from our home! He was inside a cell at 111 Brigade barracks. It was so sad for me – it was as if they were being cynical, to keep him so close to his family."

Amina Janjua found that one of the court witnesses lived in Peshawar and she travelled to the North West Frontier Province to speak to him five months after her husband disappeared. "He had been in the army facility in Rawalpindi. The prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and only when they were taken to the lavatory did they come close to other prisoners. They were forced to wear big hoods – hoods that went right down and covered their shoulders – and the detainees would get no chance to talk to another human being. This man said my husband was there – he even heard the guard call him 'Janjua'."

There is evidence that Pakistan's "disappeared" are moved around, between barracks and interrogation centres and underground torture facilities in different towns and cities. There are also terrible rumours – fostered, some say, by the security authorities – that the army has thrown detainees from helicopters, that the cops dispose of bodies at night by dumping them in swamps or in open countryside so that decay and animal mutilation will cover the marks of torture before the bodies are found. But Amina Janjua believes most of them are alive. You might say she has to believe that.

"After 9/11, everyone was worried. People were ruthlessly disappeared after the New York attacks. No one knew why their loved ones were taken. The first few months were like hell for me. Then I regained my consciousness and said I could not accept all this. I said I would fight. I said I would get my husband back." Brave words. Brave lady.

So she turned to the only brave institution still fighting in Pakistan: the lawyers and the judges and the courts. So far, the Supreme Court in Islamabad and the Lahore High Court have squeezed around 200 detainees out of the maw of the country's security apparatus – those, that is, who were still in Pakistan. Many are known to have been freighted off to the tender mercies of the Americans at Bagram in Afghanistan, where Arab detainees have long ago testified to being beaten and sodomised with broom sticks. There have been prisoner murders, too, in Bagram, the jail that President Barack Obama refuses to close.

"At the beginning, I went to the International Red Cross about Masood," Amina Janjua says. "I saw them over several months. There was no progress. My father-in-law went to many people, he even went to President Musharraf – he trained in the military with Musharraf and they knew each other very well – and Musharraf said, 'I will do something for you'– but he never did. After that, when we called the President's house, they would start avoiding us. We wrote to all the Pakistan intelligence agencies. All said my husband could not be found."

Many families have been given false hopes. "In some villages way out in the country," Amina recalls, "families were told by the authorities that their sons were coming home. These were poor people but they were so happy, so delighted. They would hold a party and give out sweets and slaughter valuable animals to show their happiness. But then the sons didn't come home. Can you imagine treating people like this?"

Amina Janjua's fraudulent hope came in a phone call in 2006, a year after Masood's disappearance. "We had our first breakthrough when the military secretary of the President called Masood's father to say that his son was alive and that they had heard about him, though he had been ill – in a fever. That was our first sign of relief.

"Then he started avoiding us again. There was no message after that. Then we were told 'No, he is not with us, but we are making every effort because the President has made this request to help you.' I went on asking senior people in the army what had happened to my husband, and they – I put it like this – they started shivering. They would shudder. They could not disclose any information."

Teaching herself law and fighting her own case, Amina Janjua returned to the Supreme Court. "When I did this, I started hearing of many other cases and things that are happening. And that's when I realised. It's not about 'missing' people – this is about abduction. I started organising files on these abducted people and eventually I had 788 families on my list and I started conducting research. And we got about 200 prisoners released. The courts ordered this. They were all still in Pakistan. Others, we know, had been taken to Bagram, three or four to Guantanamo Bay where at least we knew they were alive."

But Amina's research could prove terrifying. She discovered not only that abducted men were alive. They were also dead. "I suspected some of them had died," she said. "I know of three prisoners who are dead. One was Mohamed Shafiq; he was a coach driver and they released his death certificate – it said he died of 'some illness'. He was in his 40s. One of the prisoners, a businessman called Said Menon, died shortly after he was released.

"All of the 200 we got released had been tortured. Initially, it was very ruthless – they were not allowed to sleep; there were beatings and thrashings; they were hanged upside down. There was loud music. There were actual torture rooms where the things were done to them. The prisoners told us they didn't think their torturers were human beings at all. The faces of the torturers, they said, were horrifying. It was no longer a real world for them. The torturers seemed so powerful, like monsters, so big."

The questions they were asked were repetitive, according to Amina Janjua. Where are the guns? Where are the weapons? Where is Mullah Omar? Two prisoners described to Amina's committee how they were made to wear orange jumpsuits, shaven till they were bald and taken for questioning to Islamabad. "They were interrogated by foreigners – they could see them. They were English-speaking. They didn't know if they were Americans or British."

The DHRP now holds public protests in all the cities of Pakistan where the prisoners have their homes – in Lahore, Sagoda, Quetta, Faisalabad, Karachi, Peshawar – but the families focus on Islamabad where they demonstrate their fury and their anguish outside the Supreme Court and the offices of President Asif Ali Zardari and the Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani. The DHRP files show that there are 1,700 missing from Baluchistan alone. At least 4,000 appear to be in the hands of the Pakistani interior ministry, while 2,000 have been handed over to what the DHRP describes as "foreign agencies" – usually, the Americans. Perhaps 750 of the missing Pakistanis are believed to have been taken by the Americans – illegally, of course – to Bagram, the Policharki prison outside Kabul, or to Herat in western Afghanistan.

Robert Fisk’s World: Try this reading list if you want to understand the Middle East

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

The greatest problem of writing historically is that the story has not ended

If you want to understand al-Qa'ida, try this for size:

"The desert dweller could not take credit for his belief ... He arrived at this intense condensation of himself in God by shutting his eyes to the world, and to all the complex possibilities latent in him which only contact with wealth and temptations could bring forth. He attained a sure trust and a powerful trust, but of how narrow a field! His sterile experience robbed him of compassion and perverted his human kindness to the image of the waste in which he hid... There followed a delight in pain, a cruelty which was more to him than goods ... He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self-restraint. He made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body. He saved his own soul, perhaps, and without danger, but in a hard selfishness."

That is from T E Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom – and what a cracker! I always think of this passage when I watch Bin Laden's videotapes. The narrow field. The abnegation. The cruelty. I don't necessarily agree with Lawrence, but with passages like this, I find myself reflecting on his words with ever deeper intensity.

I say this because several times a year, I'm asked by Independent readers for a recommended "reading list" of Middle East books in the English language. It's a tough one. The greatest problem of writing historically about the Middle East is that the story has not ended. The war goes on. And both "sides" – actually, there are rather a lot of sides – produce conflicting narratives. Yet I don't go along with the idea that you can produce a balance sheet of books. Here's the Israeli version. Here's the Arab version. Here's the madcap American version etc. The Middle East is about injustice. So who tells the story best?

When it comes to the Arab-Israeli dispute, the two incomparably finest books must be George Antonius's The Arab Awakening, and The Gun and the Olive Branch by my colleague and friend David Hirst. Antonius was writing in 1938, when Hitler had already been in power for five years – but 10 years before the dispossession of the Palestinians – when he stated: "The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilisation; but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilised world. It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland ..."

So here was the first truly eloquent warning of what was to come, and Hirst completed the narrative of Antonius's all too accurate predictions, the first author, I believe, to counter the trashy novel Exodus with which Leon Uris graced the Jewish state – much to Ben Gurion's delight, though he should have known better – by deconstructing "terrorism" without romanticising the Palestinian refugees and their "resistance" movements. In this same context, one must remember the work of Israel's "new historians", who created a complementary narrative. Benny Morris was the most prominent Israeli researcher to prove that it was indeed Israel's intention to evict the Palestinians from their homes in their tens of thousands in 1948 – the fact that Morris has since gone completely batty by claiming the Israelis didn't ethnically cleanse enough of them does not detract from his seminal work.

F R Leavis allegedly once began a sentence with the words: "As any fit reader of poetry will know ..." So I suppose we have to say that "any fit reader" of the Middle East must read Edward Said. One of his best books, by the way, is about music, although orientalism will always be on the set-book list. He did for the Middle East narrative philosophically – and historically – what Antonius did politically. I am not disparaging Said's political work when I say this, although doubts do creep upon me from time to time as critical scholars re-examine his work. I'm not talking of the loony condemnation by Al Dershowitz and his gang. But at least one of his supporters fears that Said did not take account of the vast "orientalist" literature of Italy, Germany and Russia.

The Soviet Union, of course, always had a problem with the Prophet, because Mohamed was a bourgeois merchant. At least Jesus was a worker's son, although just how much Stakhanovite endeavour his father Joseph actually performed we are not told. But I must say the fact that Joseph and Mary had to travel all the way to Jerusalem to be taxed is truly Ottoman in its bureaucracy. And that no hotel could find room for a pregnant woman has a special Middle Eastern flavour – but now I'm becoming an "orientalist".

And so to that brilliant Lebanese journalist and thinker, the late Samir Kassir – very late, for he was assassinated almost five years ago and the last I saw of him was the blood beside his blown-up car – whose monumental history of Beirut in English (I admit it, I am writing the preface) comes out this year. Everything you ever wanted to know about Beirut – and a lot, I fear, that you didn't want to know -- is here. He records how 100 years ago, a young Christian capo di capo – one Costa Paoli – had a habit of kissing the faces of newly murdered Lebanese Christians before they were buried. He was a well-dressed man – "a rose in his lapel and a perfumed handkerchief in his breast pocket", according to the scholar Edward Atiyah – and he was a qabaday, a gangster; who took his revenge on Muslims. In those days, there were militias and armed groups to support Christian and Muslim communities and there was sometimes street fighting. Just as my colleague David McKittrick discovered that 19th-century Belfast's first street riots occurred at exactly the same locations as the battles of the 1970s, so Beirut's 19th-century militia conflicts took place at the very spot where the Lebanese 1975 war would break out.

Kassir is the first author whose only human being is a city, in whose beautiful and gruesome history little men turned on their torture wheels. I never knew that the Hizbollah suburb of Ouzai took its name from the revered ancient divine Imam Ouzai; or that the Syrian Social Nationalist Party – a boring, pan-Arab society – was inspired to create its red, white and black banner (it enclosed crossed pens) from the Nazis; or that the present-day all-purpose Arab obscenity sharmut or sharmuta – meaning whore – was a derivation of the far gentler French word charmante. Lawrence and other authors, please note.

Robert Fisk is the author of The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East