"The People Must Defend Themselves": Adeyzai Must Not Fall.

Farhat Taj: The Adeyzai lashkar was organised in 2008 in the face of a complete collapse of the state writ in the village due to Taliban incursion from Darra Adam Khel. The police could not come out of the police station. People, including policemen, were publicly killed and kidnapped. Girls’ schools were bombed. Fear of the Taliban had engulfed village life.

Disappointed in the state, the people of Adeyzai decided to combat the Taliban on their own and formed the anti-Taliban lashkar consisting of local volunteers. The lashkar has successfully countered the Taliban. Law and order was restored and girls’ schools started functioning again. But to do so, the lashkar people had to render many sacrifices, including the assassination of its leaders Haji Malik and Israr Khan, and many other lashkar volunteers. “Without the Adeyzai lashkars, the Taliban would have been controlling Peshawar,” the assassinated lashkar leader, Haji Malik once told me. . .

This day in history: "The people must defend themselves." - Chilean president Salvador Allende, Santiago de Chile, September 11, 1973. He killed himself shortly afterwards, as soldiers were pouring into the presidential palace in an American-orchestrated coup that ushered in a reign of terror, slaughter and tyranny that lasted 17 years.

September 11, 1942: Stalingrad must not fall. On this day, Lt. Gen. Vasiliy Chuikov is given command of the newly-formed 62nd Army. Its mission is to defend Stalingrad at all costs.

UPDATE:

1.Directly related to the anniversary of the slaughter of September 11, 2001, Melissa Roddy's Correcting the Record on Bibi Ayesha is a must: "Many so-called peace activists have distorted the facts of her story and pretzeled out of shape her straightforward message. Whether or not they realize it, opponents of the NATO military mission in Afghanistan are promoting a holocaust agenda for Afghans." See also Melissa's earlier essay in MS Magazine: The Face We Can't Ignore: Women in Afghanistan.

2. The latest savage escapades in Afghanistan, touched off by a certain vulgar and illiterate Quran-burning Floridian hillbilly, are put in some proper context by Imam Afroz Ali in an important essay on the history of libricide that revolves around the 14th-century Sarajevo Haggadah, a treasure Bosnian Muslims saved from Nazi book-burners.

I was particularly struck by the imam's passing mention of the great scholar Ibn Sina and his unsuccessful attempt to save manuscripts from the burning library of the Islamic Samanids, put to the torch by the Turks in the 11th century. Ibn Sina, who has been called the father of modern medicine, established a critique of Aristotelean metaphysics that provided a key influence on Thomas Aquinas, the great Catholic philosopher. Ibn Sina came from an Ismaili family, from Balkh, Afghanistan.

A page from the Sarajevo Haggadah, showing Moses receiving the law on Mount Sinai: