Acronym for Trouble

Friends,

  Pakistan itself is an an acronym. Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir and Inus-Sind with an added suffix stan for land. Just another line drawn on an English map 

Peace and Love,

Rev O

Pakistan Is the Problem And Barack Obama seems to be the only candidate willing to face it.

Christopher Hitchens Sept. 15, 2008 Salon.com

The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition namedChaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania,Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means "land." In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means "land of the pure." It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India. Interestingly, too, there is no B in this cobbled-together name, despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against genocidal Pakistani repression) and still includes Baluchistan, a restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste (which hated Benazir Bhutto, for example, because she came from Sind).