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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Obama’s world and Pakistan’s war on terror, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad
Obama’s world and Pakistan’s war on terror
By Praveen Swami

Even as the Second World War raged on, the General Officer-Commanding of Imperial Britain’s Indian Army Eastern Command had begun work on the making of a new nation. Hindu-majority India, Sir Francis Tucker had come to believe, was dangerously mired in “superstition and formalism;” ripe to be seized by “a material philosophy such as Communism.” For this calamity to be averted, he argued, it was “very necessary to place Islam between Russ ian Communism and Hindustan.”

By 1944, Tucker was advocating the need for “a new Muslim power supported by the science of Britain.” “If such a power could be produced,” he wrote in his memoirs, India’s Partition and Human Debasement, “and if we could orient the Muslim strip from North Africa through Islamia Deserta [sic.], Persia and Afghanistan to the Himalayas, upon such a Muslim power in northern India, then it had some chance of halting the filtration of Russia towards the Persian Gulf.”

Pakistan lived up to Tucker’s hopes, allying itself with the anti-Communist powers during the Cold War and offering its services to the United States of America’s war-by-proxy against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Now, the enemy flies the stark, black-and-white banners of the al-Qaeda and the Taliban but Tucker’s vision of Pakistan continues to influence the geo-strategic imagination of the U.S. policy establishment.

http://newageislam.com/obama%E2%80%99s-world-and-pakistan%E2%80%99s-war-on-terror--/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1450



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