Editor's note: Sharjeel Kashmir is an investment banker who works on financial derivatives and banking strategy in New York City. An alumnus of Harvard Business School, he also works with international microfinance institutions, developing their corporate and governance strategies.
It was Pakistan's birthday on August 14, and no one celebrated.
The monsoon floods that engulfed most of the country and affected 20 million people have added yet another burden of misery onto the shoulders of the average Pakistani. More than 4 million people are homeless. Livestock, crops and livelihoods were destroyed.
How far this once-proud nation has fallen.
In Urdu, Pakistan means the "land of the pure." It reflects the noble intentions of its creators to build a nation that enshrined the best of Islamic principles. Unfortunately, that nobility has given way to chaos because of bad luck, incompetent political leaders, corruption and religious extremism.
Pakistan may be a world away from the United States, but instability feeds the extremism that fuels terrorism, so we ignore this crisis at our peril. To find the path forward, we must look back to the past.
During the 1970s, my father packed up our family of five and moved us to Pakistan. He believed Pakistan had higher standards of early schooling and stronger social values than his adopted home of England. Soon after, Russian tanks rumbled into Afghanistan and then came wave after wave of Afghan refugees.
By the mid '80s, the full impact of the war waging next door came home to Pakistan. The U.S. priority was to evict the Russians from Afghanistan at any cost.
Instability feeds the extremism that fuels terrorism, so we ignore this crisis [in Pakistan] at our peril.
--Sharjeel Kashmir
Video: Scarce aid leads to panic
Video: Aiding Pakistan's flood victims
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Pakistan
Afghanistan
The Taliban
United States
Russia

Pakistan followed along. As a result, educating the masses, dealing with a sea of refugees, nurturing democracy, developing infrastructure and eradicating Afghan heroin all took second place.
The Pakistan my father brought us home to experience was disappearing before our eyes. This was a defining moment. Instead of focusing on its own problems, it chose instead to fight the war for the West, and 30 years later, Pakistan is still paying for this decision.
After Russia withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the Americans walked away. But Pakistan couldn't.
Growing unrest and infighting in Afghanistan gave the Taliban an opportunity to step in. The only thing that mattered to the Taliban was how quickly and crudely the practitioners could inflict their horrifying version of Islam on the Afghan people. Then, all hell broke loose on September 11, 2001.
Since 9/11, Pakistan has supported America's intervention in Afghanistan, the right decision but one fraught with controversy. It has torn Pakistan into factions and triggered suicide bombings. Even before the monsoon hit, the country was an economic, political and social disaster.

Can Pakistan be saved?
I believe it can, but the fortunes of this ailing nation can only be changed with America's help. America may not have intended to hurt Pakistan, but it's clear that Pakistan's support for U.S. policy contributed to its decline.
The good news is that today there is real opportunity for change. Pakistan needs America's help. America needs a stable Pakistan.
The United States was the first nation to offer aid after the flooding disaster, pledging $150 million. This is a positive first step in a much-needed long-term reconstruction plan for Pakistan. But as important as the money is, ensuring that it's spent on the right things is even more critical. The Pakistan government needs to focus on three things to stop the country's downward spiral: education, infrastructure and security.
Educating Pakistan is not a matter of choice, but of utmost necessity.
The literacy rate for men is 61 percent, and for women it's 32 percent. Ignorance breeds poverty and extremism. Education can help break that cycle. Funding must be in place to teach every child to read and write.

Educating the country's Muslim leaders is just as important. These mullahs interpret the Quran for the people, and often they do so in an uninformed, uneducated way that distorts the true teachings of Islam. A national program to certify these religious leaders is needed to address this most pressing challenge.

As for infrastructure, what little was there has been washed away.

The roads are a mess, electricity goes out most days and not enough food is produced. The failure of the government to deliver on the basics has demoralized the population and dampened the spirits of its entrepreneurs.

Pakistan has to fix the electrical grid and improve its agricultural sector. The United States could help by opening its doors to Pakistani exporters and embarking on programs to share knowledge and help Pakistani industrialists grow their companies.

In terms of security, with Afghanistan at war on one side and the barely held truce with India on the other, Pakistan needs to secure its borders, ignore the problems of its neighbors and focus internally.

This means militarizing its border on the Afghan side and closing it to all but legitimate trade traffic. The core source of strife with India is the 63-year-old dispute over Kashmir, where in the past two decades, more than 80,000 Kashmiris have been killed. If America were to assist both countries in solving this issue, it would go a long way to repairing the Pakistan-India relationship.

Education, infrastructure and security: Pakistan must focus on these areas with laser-like intensity and exhibit courage and vision to raise its people out of despair. I believe in Pakistan, as my father did. And with America's support and investment, someday Pakistan may even be able to dream again of achieving its noble destiny as the "land of the pure."

The opinions expressed in this commentary







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Editor's note: Peter Bergen, s national security analyst, is a fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank that promotes innovative thought from across the ideological spectrum, and at New York University's Center on Law and Security. He's the author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader."
Washington -- On May 1, 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, President George W. Bush announced "major combat operations" in Iraq had ended. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror."
For the umpteenth time, Bush bracketed Saddam and the 9/11 attack. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001, and still goes on."
The president went to describe the 9/11 attacks -- "the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble" -- as if this had any bearing on the Iraq War.
The president also made the definitive statement that Saddam was "an ally of al Qaeda," something that his own intelligence agencies had determined was not the case before the war.
Video: U.S. combat role comes to an end
Video: Iraq war never over for some
RELATED TOPICS
Iraq War
George W. Bush
Al Qaeda
Military and Defense Policy
Terrorism

Now seven long years later, another president will again announce that the U.S. combat mission is over in Iraq, which is a good moment to ask: Was the Iraq War somehow post facto worth the blood and treasure consumed?

Look at what was lost and what it cost:

-- More than 4,500 American soldiers dead and 30,000 wounded.

-- At least 100,000 Iraqis killed.

-- Costs to U.S. taxpayers that will rise above a trillion dollars.

-- Jihadist terrorist attacks increased around the world sevenfold in the three years following the 2003 invasion.
There is no question that the United States liberated Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's demonic tyranny, but that argument was not what persuaded Americans that a preemptive war against the Iraqi dictator was in their best interests.
They were hustled to war by the invocation of putative Iraqi mushroom clouds and the argument that there was a genuine and threatening Saddam-al Qaeda WMD "weapons of mass destruction" nexus.
The war against Saddam wasn't conducted under the banner of the liberation of the Iraqi people but rather under the banner of winning the war on terrorism. And by that standard, it was a failure, giving the jihadist movement around the world a new battlefront and a new lease on life.
A study by New York University's Center on Law and Security, which I co-authored, compared the period after September 11 through the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with the period from March 2003 through September 2006. The study found there were seven times more deadly attacks by jihadists after the invasion than before.
Even excluding terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, fatal attacks by jihadists in the rest of the world increased by more than one-third in the three years after the invasion of Iraq. The Iraq War, of course, did not cause all of this terrorism, but it certainly increased the tempo of jihadist attacks in places far-flung as London, England; Kabul, Afghanistan; and Amman, Jordan.
It also bears recalling that almost none of the goals of the war as described by proponents of overthrowing Saddam were achieved:

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Theresa Brown tells of dying patient who got much sicker from aggressive treatment
She says "fighting" serious illnesses can cause terrible agony, keep patient from family
Brown cites study suggesting palliative care offers better quality and longer life
Dying patients should not be pressured to go through drastic treatments, she says
Editor's note: Theresa Brown is an oncology nurse in Pennsylvania. She is a leading contributor to The New York Times' blog Well. She is the author of "Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between."
The patient, in his late 70s, had survived prostate cancer and had a new diagnosis of leukemia. A few days before, he'd been healthy and fine, but now his white blood cell count was so high that it was clogging his circulatory system, making it hard for him to breathe.
We brought his white count down and relieved his shortness of breath. At that point, he could have opted for palliative care and gone home on hospice with a decent enough quality of life to enjoy what little time he had left. However, the patient, encouraged by h
This is a hard case. In his recent New Yorker article "Letting Go," Dr. Atul Gawande explains how the first impulse of doctors, patients and family members to "fight" cancer or other serious illnesses makes it very difficult to have honest discussions of what treatment can and cannot do.
I understand why physicians find these conversations difficult, why it's preferable to focus on the good we can possibly accomplish rather than the likely futility of the struggle.
But there's another story to be told in these cases, and it's usually the nurse who's the observer of that narrative: the suffering caused by these well-intentioned treatments. Chemo was risky for this patient because of his age and medical history, and the damage done was unbelievably bad.
The problems began when cells killed by the chemotherapy spilled their contents, overloading my patient's kidneys and throwing him into renal failure. The intravenous fluids he'd needed had been too much for his circulatory system, and he developed heart failure, too.
Watching this patient suffer ... because of what we did to him in the name of helping him was agonizing.
--Theresa Brown
RELATED TOPICS
End of Life Decisions
Cancer
Chemotherapy
Medical Treatments and Procedures

One morning, I came in with his pills, and he said, "You're doing too much. I can't take it." The next week, he was on dialysis, but it wasn't working, and his entire lower body was hugely swollen with fluid. That day, he accosted me with, "What the hell are you doing to me?"
Both times, I told the medical team what he'd said and asked whether it was ethical to continue chemotherapy. Several members of the team shared my concerns, and as a group, we talked the situation over with the attending doctor. Our view was that the treatments were eroding the patient's quality of life with little promise of good in return.
The attending physician, whom I know to be conscientious and caring, disagreed, as did the patient's family. When the doctor prodded the patient, saying, "You want to keep going, right? Right?" the patient himself concurred, "Yes, let's keep going."
So the chemo finished. Then, blood began to appear in the patient's urine. His bladder was brittle because of the radiation treatments he'd had for prostate cancer, and because of the chemo, he had too few platelets. Without enough platelets, that fragile tissue would not stop bleeding, but it also formed blood clots in his bladder that caused excruciating pain.
Watching this patient suffer, not from his disease but because of what we did to him in the name of helping him, was agonizing. He'd wanted to "keep going," to "keep on fighting," but what did he really mean?
Always when I hear these phrases applied to oncology patients, I think of Peter Weir's 1981 film "Gallipoli." The film portrays two Australian sprinters, Archy and Frank, who enlist together during World War I and end up fighting the Turkish army at the Battle of Gallipoli.





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Betio, Тарава Атолл (CNN) - археолог Грегори Фокс США военных версия Индианы Джонса, но больше похож Джерри Гарсия, чем Харрисон Форд.

Фокс путешествует по всему миру для рытья свою версию сокровище - останков пропавших без вести американские военнослужащие, погибших в бою.

"Один месяц вы замораживания заднице отправился в горных беспокоит горной болезни, то вы где-нибудь пожелать вам было кондиционирования воздуха." Фокс говорит, лопату в руках, рядом с новым отверстие он и группа морских пехотинцев роют в южной части Тихого.

"Это в основном обещания правительства США, что они будут делать все от них зависящее, чтобы принести их павших воинов домой, и то, как мы ролл".

Фокс является частью Объединенной военнопленных / MIA учета командования или СОКК, уникальный коллектив почти 400 гражданских и военнослужащих. Устройство две трети военных и 1-третьих гражданского, при этом каждый филиал военного представлены. Хотя поисковые группы прочесывали мире остается, специалистов в штабе СОКК в Гонолулу, Гавайи, чтобы матчи между костями и солдат числятся пропавшими без вести в действии.

"Это в основном CSI, но гораздо медленнее", говорит Фокс. "Мы не можем сделать матча в 45 минут.

Тарава, атолл южной части Тихого океана, стал местом проведения 1 кровавых битв в истории морской пехоты. Начиная с утра 20 ноября 1942 года более 1000 мужчин были убиты примерно в 72 часов борьбы с японцами. Сотни морских пехотинцев были убиты в воде, пытаясь сделать их на берег.

Тарава было до Иводзимы. Для морской пехоты, бой является как источником гордости и уроком. Высокие потери были обвинены в части плохого планирования. Атака была начата во время отлива, который оставил много десантных судов застряли на кораллы.

Японский сидели в укрепленных бункерах вдоль береговой линии, стрельба морских пехотинцев с близкого расстояния, когда они пытались внести его на пляже. В конце концов, морские пехотинцы взяли пляжа и выиграл бой. Около 4000 японских солдат погибли в боях, за то, что считалось в то время стратегические взлетно-посадочной полосы в Тихом океане.

Александр "Санди" Бонниман был посмертно награжден Почетной медалью Конгресса за его героизм на Тарава.

это рекордного обвала жары, что является причиной гибели тысяч людей в России так или иначе связаны с разрушительным наводнениям в Пакистане?

Являются ли эти бедствия происходят все чаще - и они в результате глобального потепления?

Иногда эти связи могут быть четко замечен и понят. В других случаях они являются более сложными, происходящие во времени масштабах гораздо дольше, чем мы можем наблюдать.

Москвичи еще долго будут помнить летом 2010 года, как самые горячие и самые экстремальные погодные условия лета в долгой истории города. Все время температура рекорд был установлен, и повторно установить, 5 разное время в течение 2 недель промежуток с конца июля до начала августа. В этот период температура поднялась выше 30 градусов по Цельсию (87 градусов по Фаренгейту) в течение 29 календарных дней (и еще больше).

Отправить Ваши рассказы, видео, фото экстремальных погодных

В дополнение к сильной жары, которая доходила до 39 градусов Цельсия (102 градусов по Фаренгейту) на нескольких дней в городе, что средние августа высокого уровня в 22 градусов по Цельсию (72 градусов по Фаренгейту), столица была окутана толстым слоем дыма из области лесные пожары.

Видео: Что вызывает экстремальные погодные явления?

Видео: Пакистана Эвакуация пострадавших от наводнения

Видео: Москва небе ясно дыма

Видео: Свидетель образы бедствий Пакистана
СМЕЖНЫЕ ТЕМЫ
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Сочетание жары и отсутствия осадков левой западной Россию уязвимой к пожаров, которые горели из-под контроля юго-востоку от Москвы.

Почти 4000 километров (2485 миль) от Пакистана, муссонных дождей упал с интенсивностью, что никогда раньше не наблюдалось.

Пешавар, город на севере Пакистана 140 км (87 милях) к западу от столицы Исламабада, получил шесть раз средних ежемесячных осадков в течение 24 часов.

Дождь по-прежнему происходят в Пакистане с момента первоначального сильный ливень на 29 июля, и наводнения повлияли на примерно 14 миллионов человек, погибло более 1300 на момент написания книги.

Хотя эти бедствия различны и зависят от большого расстояния, они могут иметь как было результатом больших площадей высокого давления с центром над западной части России.

Высокого давления, также известный как "блокирование высоким", может повлиять на погодные условия на большие расстояния путем изменения струйного течения.

Струи потока области быстро движущегося воздуха, что происходит высоко в атмосфере, на высоте примерно где коммерческие круизных лайнеров, а также выступает как шоссе бурь.

Как и предполагает название, "блокирование высокой" исключительно сильна и блоков струйного течения, которое заставляет струйного течения двигаться вокруг нее. Эти сценарии обычно длятся в течение нескольких дней, но может длиться в течение недели, как мы уже видели в России.

Жанр: триллер, мелодрама, драма, история Режиссер: Серджо Мимика-Геззан В ролях: Иэн МакШейн, Мэтью Макфейден, Эдди Редмэйн, Хейли Этвелл, Дэвид Оакес, Наталиа Вёрнер, Сэм Клафлин, Анатоль Таубман, Готц Отто, Джоди Халс О фильме: Время действия - Англия, XII век. Тяжелое, смутное время, жестокие нравы... Граница между добром и злом настолько условна, что легко сделать неверный шаг, принимая решения в масштабах целого государства. Вечная борьба за престол, постоянные войны, предательство церкви... Великолепная экранизация одноименного романа Кена Фоллета никого не оставит равнодушным! Выпущено: Германия, Канада Продолжительность: 00:50:16 Перевод: Профессиональный (многоголосый закадровый) LostFilm Формат: AVI Качество: WEB-DLRip Видео: 624x352 (1.77:1), 23.976 fps, XviD build 50, 1112 kbps avg, 0.21 bit/pixel Звук: 48 kHz, MPEG Layer 3, 2 ch, 192.00 kbps avg Размер: 530 Mb Добавлена 2 серия