Tag: terrorism

The Answer is 200 Million Kilograms

Sohaib Athar2 Comments

Keep Calm
Since we usually have a bomb blast or two every other week in one of the major cities of Pakistan, and as there is nothing happening right now to hope for things to change in the near future, so I think that it is about time that we started some research on how to cope with the FUD in our “Land of the Pure”.

We can begin by looking back a few decades and learning from how our ex-rulers (that would be the British, for those who have forgotten/never knew) did it, and try to “Keep Calm and Carry On”. Meanwhile, we do need to ask some questions and gather statistics to help us survive the next few days, weeks, months or years, depending on how far ahead you usually plan.

This is probably the real reason why one of the “Breaking News” headlines after today’s Peshawar bomb blast (which claimed 20ish lives) was:

“The explosives weighed 15-20 kilograms.”

I doubt that the people who died in the blast would have given a damn about HOW they died, but the question that popped up in my mind was, how many kilograms of similar explosives will it take to kill us all – and by us, I mean Pakistanis.

As the 20Kg. killed 20 people , so 1Kg. of explosives kill approximately 1 person – by simplifying our model and ignoring most variables like population densities, people’s tendency to run away from hazards etc. etc., and as the population of Pakistan is roughly 200,000,000 (We are the 6th largest nation of the world by population) – so we can safely say that around 200,000,000 kilograms of explosives are needed to blow away the entire Pakistani population.

While I do not have any visualization aids or images handy that would help you imagine what they would look like, trust me when I say that it is a LOT of explosives.

If the current bombing patterns are the best that the terrorists can do, then Pakistan is not going anywhere soon. Sure, a few thousand people will die due to explosives, but when you ‘zoom out’ and adjust your focus (at the risk of being called insensitive/inhuman), it is not much, statistically speaking.

And so, there is one less answer that is blowin’ in the wind…

Pakistan Problems Propaganda and Prejudice

ReallyVirtual6 Comments

Two months ago, this Urdu + English “sponsored link” ad for a website worstnation.com started showing up in my Gmail every day. I will not link to it for obvious reasons, but here’s what is says:

دنیا کی سب سے بدترین قوم

www.WorstNation.com

پاکستان سے زندہ بھاگ آپ یقیناً اتفاق کریں گے۔

The Urdu text translates roughly to “World’s Worst Nation“, “You will surely agree” and “Get out of Pakistan Alive” – the later is a wordplay on “Pakistan Zindabad“, which means “Long Live Pakistan“, and has been in use to ridicule Pakistan for atleast a decade. On the site, there is an almost exhaustive list of the many things wrong with Pakistan, in Urdu.

The first time I saw the ad, I checked the whois information out of curiosity and found out that the domain was registered to some guy in Faisalabad. I assumed that the owner was just another Pakistani frustrated at being born with brown skin, and that he was just utilizing the free adword credit that some hosts offer. The ad and the website were mildly irritating, but so is 90% 99% of the world, so I moved on.

Two months have passed since I first saw this ad – many bombs have exploded and hundreds of people have been killed in all four of our provinces – by terrorists, by our army, by the Americans and recently – by our ordinary(?) citizens – in the name of nationalism, peace, honor, ethnic cleansing, and various variants of God as well. The killings are still going on in Karachi as I write this.

The worstnation.com website, meanwhile, is still advertising relentlessly – I see its targeted message more than a dozen times a day, with its cryptic “About us” page that says “our identities really don’t matter, just listen to our message or go do something else”, and the owners of the website are still spending money to make their voices heard. A Google search tells me that atleast one other person noticed this last month and rightly recognized the demoralizing effect of such propaganda material, but blamed it on “international efforts to demoralize our nation”. He also mentioned seeing an indian flag favicon on the domain, a domain that is registered under a false name – after all, Indians are the real enemy, right?

After two months, the owners of worstnation have learnt from their mistakes, there is no indian flag and the whois information has disappeared from the database behind a privacy protection service though the clocktowercity website is still alive and clicking.

If you check the server for worstnation.com on http://www.myipneighbors.com/ , you will notice half a dozen websites that can have a relationship with Pakistan and are hosted on the same server – a few of them are:

http://oururdu.com/forums/index.php

http://irfan-ul-quran.com/quran/index.php?tid=12

http://www.minhajforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29

The irfan-ul-quran website has this favicon that was mistaken for an Indian flag. The forums page on the last link lists 40 websites that they run, and mentions with a smile that they have (created and are running)

..and a lot more that cannot be listed here smile.gif

So, My dear brethren in Islam (who are stuck-in-the-worst-nation-of-the-world through no fault of your own), I respect your opinions regarding the state of our nation and even agree with many of the points on your website, but hiding behind private websites and talking about revolutions is no way to start a revolution!

When you say we are the worst nation, please speak for yourself, not me – and please publish your identities on your website, don’t just hit and hide… who knows, you might get lucky and start a revolution by mistake – or you might get lucky and get the death penalty (read ‘heaven’) for disrupting national harmony in cyberspace – at least that is what the new cybercrime law asks for. Either way, it is a win-win situation for you, you lucky guys! So please don’t be shy and reveal yourselves to the public. You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

I love your bitterness and sarcasm, but after identifying all the problems of this nation in a couple of months, I was expecting to hear the solution to those problems from your own anonymous-yet-expert beaks. If getting out of Pakistan alive (Hijrat to Canada perhaps?) is your thing, then let me know if I can help you in any way. But whatever you do, for Allah’s sake, please stop the frigging advertising on GMail – it is irritating!

PS. and change your flag – it does resemble the indian flag.

Rumor of a Bomb Found at National University / FAST Lahore

Sohaib Athar5 Comments

I was just told that a bomb (or something that looked like a bomb) was found at the reception of National University (aka FAST) Lahore a couple of hours ago, and they will keep the university closed for four days. I haven't verified the news from another source yet, but if this is true, then at this rate, this generation of kids will either graduate a few years late, or will have a degree that does not actually cover the required years of study. On the other hand, the distant learning market looks like an attractive business option.

UPDATE: I just got the verification from two more people – there were phonecalls about two bombs, and apparently the institute has been receiving threat calls the whole week.Surprisingly, there is no news yet about the incident online (its been three or four hours now). The calling party demanded to close the college for a week – I do hope it is an early April's fool joke.