Pakistani men gather at the site of a suicide attack in Charsadda, a day after the attack in a Mosque, Dec. 15.

There are only two words to describe the suicide attack in a Pakistani mosque on one of Islam’s holiest days--utterly depraved. The 56 worshippers who perished in the blast at Charsadda in the North West Frontier Province had gone to the mosque to celebrate Eid.
They stepped from a violent and troubled world outside into a building where they rightly expected to be at peace with each other in the worship of God. It was a time of hope and prayer. It was a time of happiness, of families coming together for the feast.
In a split second, the sanctity of the mosque was shattered with bodies and bits of bodies being strewn and scattered all around what suddenly became a bloodstained chamber.
Why? What possible purpose could be served by the slaughter and maiming of so many innocent people who were at prayer? The individuals who planned this terrible crime claim to be acting in the name of Islam, but who, but madmen could possibly believe that a deed of such barbarity could in any way whatsoever be justified by Islam?
The terrorists proved by their action just how untrue they are to the ideas they claim to be promoting. They also demonstrated what it is that they are really about, which is power and money.
Their agenda has nothing to do with Islam. If it did, the awful slaughter at the mosque in Charsadda would never have happened. Indeed, they would be seeking to protect Muslims, rather than blowing them apart.
Organizations such as Al-Qaeda draw their power from threats, not doctrine. They terrorize the communities in which they move and they butcher those who oppose them.
No one’s life is sacred, not even the lives of children as the blasts two weeks ago on a school bus and at a road checkpoint demonstrate.
Where terrorist organizations hold sway, there are few who dare to challenge them. In other areas where terrorists sneak in to mount their attacks, there is a dignified resignation toward the mindless violence.
Indeed, the strength with which assailed communities in Pakistan are coping with the terrorist mayhem is by itself a victory over the terrorists.
Whatever justification the like of Al-Qaeda may have originally had has been blown apart--all too literally--by appalling crimes that completely contradict any claim to be acting in the name of Islam.
These terrorists have nothing to offer the world save misery and bloodshed. If it can be said that there was anything good about this latest crime, it is that it provides proof positive that they are morally bankrupt and a total contradiction to the cause they pretend to uphold.
Decent people must not lose heart in the face of this terrifying onslaught. The seeds of terrorists’ destruction are growing through their own savage lust for power and domination. With every new enormity, the resistance to the bigotry stiffens and the revulsion deepens. The deviants offer neither hope nor promise, neither justice nor solutions.
Arabnews.com

In Africa, a hard-fought but fair election in a pivotal country is an example-setting event. No, this is not South Africa, where the election of Jacob Zuma as president of the ruling African National Congress on December 18th dealt a shattering blow to his rival, Thabo Mbeki.
Although this puts Mr Zuma in a strong position to lead South Africa when Mr Mbeki’s second term as president ends in April 2009, his succession is far from certain. In Kenya on December 27th, however, power may very well change hands after the tightest electoral contest in the country’s history.
Kenya is a haven of stability and prosperity in eastern Africa the quality of its democracy matters.
Its northern and western neighbours--Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Somalia--suffer in various degrees from war, tribal conflict, government repression, separatism and all that follows. From the countries of the war-ravaged Great Lakes region, such as Congo and Rwanda, Nairobi appears an oasis of calm. But this success is relative.
Kenya itself has long been beset by bad governance, corruption and tribalism. Despite receiving billions of dollars of aid, most of its 35m people remain poor.
True, few countries have had to contend with the ethnic complexity of Kenya, which has more than 40 recognised tribes.
Nor does erratic weather help a largely rural economy. But the main culprit is a system of politics in which a ruling class has hogged most of the cake for itself.

Unusual Sharpness
That is why the unusual sharpness of this election campaign is so encouraging. Mwai Kibaki, the 76-year-old president seeking a second term, has presided over economic growth of about 6% this year.
Having tolerated greater political and press freedom than his kleptocratic predecessor, Daniel arap Moi, he promises to extend free schooling and fix a decrepit infrastructure. But he has failed to attack corruption in high places with any vigour; indeed, he has let some of the worst crooks stay in government.
His leading opponent, Raila Odinga, who is 14 years younger, is a more energetic figure who now disavows his past socialism and East German education while still appealing to the poor and to some of the marginal tribes, particularly his own Luo in the west and the country’s Muslims in the east.
Mr Kibaki, by contrast, has long been at the heart of the Kenyan business establishment which his own Kikuyu tribe, the country’s largest and richest, dominates.
Although polls give Mr Odinga the edge, the president’s media machine may help him catch up by the vote on December 27th. Both candidates have flaws: Mr Kibaki’s departure is overdue, but the more energetic Mr Odinga’s campaign carries a divisive flavour.

In place of strife
Whoever wins, what matters next is that the result should be accepted by the loser and Kenyans should be seen to endorse the principle of peaceful competition. Most of Africa has left behind the era of the one-party state, but its people have yet to be fully persuaded that multi-party politics need not be chaotic.
South Africa’s ruling party seems unhappy to have submitted itself to an internal contest that has humiliated President Mbeki, who himself seems loth to badger neighbouring Zimbabwe’s dictatorial Robert Mugabe into holding fair elections. But if a country as complex and poor as Kenya can hold genuine elections without civil strife, then any country in Africa can. This is its chance to set an example.
ECONOMIST.COM

Indian opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) activists celebrate their party's victory in elections of the western Indian state of Gujarat, at the party headquarters in New Delhi, Dec. 22.

For the fourth time running, the Bharatiya Janata Party has vanquished its adversary in Gujarat, comprehensively beating it in every department--popular appeal, propaganda, strategy, and tactics--and establishing its supremacy in three of the four regions of the State.
Among other things, the Assembly election outcome exposed the limitations of exit polls and journalistic attempts to divine the mood of the electorate at a highly sensitive juncture in State and national politics.
But defying the odds imposed by long incumbency as well as by a falling out with sections of the party and the parivar to win 117 seats against the adversary’s 62 in a house of 182 is hardly the most significant part of the triumph of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, way and ahead India’s most controversial and divisive political figure.
He set the ideological and political terms of the contest--and the response from the Congress camp turned out to be reactive, weak, and pathetically inept. It had no answer to the Modi campaign, which did launch itself with a focus on ’development and governance’ but quickly transited to shrill and shriller communalism, the culmination of which would be a demagogic, if implicit, defence of the police killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh in what the State government itself has admitted in the Supreme Court of India to be a fake encounter.
Thematically, 2007 was not very different from 2002.
It is well known that the Congress leaders and party organisation in Gujarat failed to make a clear, forthright, and effective stand against what happened in 2002 or, at a more general level, against aggressive Hindutva as an ideology and political mobilisation strategy.
In fact, sections of the media have taken to labelling the tamely reactive Congress stand in Gujarat as ’soft Hindutva’.
Some spirited campaign remarks aimed at ’merchants of fear and death’ by Congress president Sonia Gandhi and at Hindutva extremism and communal politics by Digvijay Singh, which ironically attracted the displeasure of the Election Commission of India, seemed to make little difference to the nature of the response.
Damagingly for the secular image of the Congress, and, as it turned out, for the credibility of its electoral politics, discredited elements of the Sangh parivar that had fallen out with Mr. Modi were allowed to join its campaign.
In Saurashtra, anti-Modi BJP rebels campaigned for the Congress, some of them even contesting on its ticket. With enemies like these, Mr. Modi was hardly in need of allies.
The Congress, which fared impressively in Gujarat in the 2004 general election--winning 12 of the 26 Lok Sabha seats and taking 91 Assembly segments against the BJP’s 89--squandered the 2007 opportunity thanks to the leadership’s failure to initiate and sustain a campaign on secularism and basic livelihood issues in a developmentally advanced State. Congress gains in central Gujarat, the epicentre of communal violence in 2002, where the BJP’s attempt to shut out normal issues seems to have failed, offered an insight into what might have been.
But they could not rescue what was, strategically as much as tactically, a botched campaign--which failed to understand that formidable campaigners and ’doers’ like Mr. Modi must be fought ideologically, in a principled and sustained manner, before they can be taken on electorally.
Whatever be the post-mortem analysis and the excuses proferred, there is no getting away from the larger political truth that Congress hopes of doing well on its own in a prospective early general election have now suffered a devastating setback.
The high-stake Assembly contest was supposed to usher in a new phase of Congress ascendancy in national politics.
A series of opinion polls seemed to motivate the party along in this direction.
That the opposite has happened is not merely demoralising for the party. It has far-going political effects in that it sends out damaging political signals to allies, potential allies, and adversaries that the party heading the central government could be in serious trouble. Journalists and political pundits have already begun speculating that, in policy terms, the Manmohan Singh government’s nuclear deal with the United States could be the first casualty.
The government has been allowed by the Left parties, upon whose support its survival depends, to go to the secretariat of the International Atomic Energy Agency and negotiate the draft of an
India-specific safeguards agreement.
This must then be brought to the UPA-Left committee, the joint mechanism looking into various aspects of the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, for consideration. What is politically clear is that, while time may have been bought, the Left parties will not allow the deal to go beyond this first stage.
It is surely significant that it has taken the Gujarat electoral debacle for enlightenment to dawn on a Congress spokesperson, Abhishek Singhvi--who, maintaining lamely on national television that his party was keen on operationalising the nuclear deal, conceded that it would not survive the downfall of the UPA government and indeed that “death without martyrdom“ was not an attractive prospect.
With another defeat in prospect in Himachal Pradesh, the Congress will be in no hurry to face the 15th general election.
HINDU.COM