an open letter to e

below is my comment to e's comment to my last post. 

e, this point, that pakistanis are the greatest victims of terrorism, is perhaps arguable, but there is a very compelling case to be made for it. first off, we have to define what "terrorism" means in this context. in my view it's composed of activities by state or non-state actors targeting civilians, or activities resulting in civilian deaths in far greater proportion to legitimate military / insurgent targets. of course, i'm declining to define what proportion is inoffensive enough to exempt said activity from my working definition, but suffice it to say that i believe the drone bombing campaigns over western pakistan, and yemen, and libya absolutely qualify as acts of state-sponsored terrorism. i know that that this statement alone will, for some people, nullify everything i say below, but i think it's important for us to divorce ourselves a bit from our creeds and flags, and think of these issues in terms of our principles and principles alone. i consider you, e, a fair mind and a very serious thinker, so you are not among the aforesaid people. you do what a friend does best -- challenge my convictions and make me think more clearly about them. i hope you do the same here.

according to wikipedia, last year alone there were 50 separate terrorist incidents in pakistan (excluding drone attacks). these were generally carried out by al-qaeda in pakistan, or a like-minded group like lashkar-e-taeba or jamaat-e-islami. these attacks were generally low-tech acts of violence (e.g., suicide bombs) carried out in public spaces. notably, in the last few years, these attacks have taken place in places like lahore, where my family is from, which is far from the badland west where the pasthun population resides and which is largely indistinguishable from afghanistan. while the sheer volume of deaths that has resulted from these acts does not compare to, say, a single act of terrorism like the september 11th attack on the world trade center, the effect of these attacks is palapable in everyday pakistan in a way that september 11th's is not  (except when it's evoked by brain-dead shitheads like giuliani and schumer -- he of the genius "no-ride" list proposal -- and other cynical exploiters of that event). that is to say, terrorism has disrupted pakistani society much more than it has any other society on the face of the planet -- unless you count iraq and afghanistan, which i don't because i think those two places are uniquely fucked up places in which terrorist activity targeting civilian populations and insurgent attacks on military targets are caught up in a whole incomprehensible morass. to put in another way, afghanistan and iraq are sites of war -- unlike pakistan, at least officially,  which is a site of non-militarily justifiable acts of terrorism.

now, it should be said that the wikipedia numbers are pure nonsense. they account only for high-profile events that have gotten press. i rely more on think tank numbers like the pakistan institute for peace studies, whose 2010 report states that there were 2113 terrorist acts in pakistan last year alone (again, not accounting for drone attacks) in which almost 3000 people were killed and almost 6000 injured. now, if drone attacks are counted, an additional 1000 people in pakistan were killed. this figure, 4000 people, is simply staggering, and i have not seen anything else anywhere in the world that compares to it -- again, with the exception of afghanistan and iraq, which are active theatres of war. more important, each year since 2001 has seen an uptick in terrorist acts in pakistan and deaths resulting therefrom. and with the killing of osama bin laden, it should be clear that any reprisal will be visited first and foremost on the pakistani people. such has been al-qaeda's (whatever that even is now, given its many diffuse forms across the world) modus operandi of late.

as for your other point, i appreciate it fully. human beings have no obligation to act in a principled manner or to put their emotions at bay. i get this. i totally do. know that, but know also i have a monumental problem with the notion that it's unobjectionable to celebrate the death of "someone who specifically targeted americans for being american." why is this relevant? seriously, why is it? if a person kills one person in a botched robbery, do we celebrate his execution? if a serial killer kills ten blonde women because he has some insane sexual fetish, do we celebrate his? if he kills ten black people because he's a white supremacist, same question. i have a huge problem with hate crimes legislation -- let me state that from the outset -- but the notion that a person's intentionality should affect my view of his bad acts is totally lost on me. this isn't about osama bin laden -- or it should not be. this is about us. our reaction to his death -- indeed, the way his killing was comissioned -- that speaks to our best or worst selves. i have a convert's zeal for this country and its bedrock principles. therefore, i cannot understand how it can be that we, collectively, have asked so few questions about the conflicting details of operation geronimo. it turns out bin laden wasn't armed. it turns out he wasn't using his wife as a human shield. it turns out that he attempted to surrender. brennan -- the deputy national security guy -- stated this was a kill operation. why was he not arrested? why was he not haled before a civilian court in the united states and given full due process rights and made to answer for the mountain of evidence compiled against him. why was he dumped in the sea? seriously, why? he was a piece of shit who couldn't give a fuck how his muslim victims were buried, and we're, well, we're denizens of a country that couldn't give a shit how the muslim victims of our drone attacks are buried. why afford this man a so-called islamic burial? what constituency does this satisfy?

i know there are still many details not known about geronimo. i know that. and it may turn out some of my questions have legitimate answers. i hope so. but putting aside protestations about america's egregious violation of pakistani sovereignty -- an irrelevant point, as far as i'm concerned given the pakistani army and intelligence services' incompetence in catching bin laden / duplicity in allowing him sanctuary -- and putting aside the basic human need, perhaps, to celebrate something, anything, after 10 years of confused, neo-imperial brutality in various parts of the muslim world, i put to you this: upon hearing news of bin laden's death, doesn't a mature population push aside its base instincts, and think about all that has been lost and can never be restored? doesn't it think about what we -- as a nation -- have lost, but also allowed ourselves to lose? when bin laden was shot dead in abbottabad and then dumped into the arabian sea, i couldn't help thinking we're now a nation that cannot stomach its own core values. we cannot put one of the world's greatest criminals on trial. as a fiercely proud, and thoroughly skeptical american, i wonder if america is now a shadow of itself. would tocqueville recognize this country? would tom paine be proud of it?

also, and i mean this question seriously, say you're a ten-year old pakistani boy whose entire family -- none of whom were involved in any kind of terrorist activity -- was killed in a drone strike. say you're face is half-charred and you lost an arm in the strike. say you did nothing -- clearly -- to deserve this. nothing at all. say "it's rather human to enjoy the elimination of one's enemy." who is your enemy in this situation? the guy in missouri manning the drone? leon panetta? barack obama? what measure of vengeance are you allowed? put aside creed and flag. put aside who-started-what, and tell me. what kind of world are we barreling towards? what have we wrought?

yours,
c4ts

Canada Just Killing It, Like Always

Look, people (person?), I think it's weird that you're so consumed by your national bloodlust that you haven't thought twice about the conflicting details of the Bin Laden kill operation and whether it comports with our national values. Or that your response to the admittedly strange, frankly unbelievable circumstances in which he was found is to proclaim that we stop all aid to Pakistan and regard it as a terrorist state -- despite the fact that the United States has thousands of troops and tons of military equipment and other supplies in Afghanistan, which got there through Pakistani ports and would have to get out the same way; despite the fact that the greatest victim of terrorism in the world today is Pakistan, its people, its police force, its soldiers; despite the fact that an incompetent Pakistani army or duplicitous Pakistani intelligence agency is not interchangeable with its people; despite the fact that we continue to drone-bomb the Pakistani countryside, which, understandably, might cloud its people's feelings about American wonderfulness. I think it's weird that you, strawman, disregard obvious geopolitical complexities for easy "USA!" sloganeering. But that's just me.

Still, while we can disagree about politics and policy, here and abroad, it's nice to know there remains some common ground between us: We can still agree, for instance, that Canadians are just killing it--straight murdering shit--with their amazing awesomeness at life. Really, just a paragon of democratic values that country is.

Yay, Sports!

I am resistant to NBC's deliberate attempts to pull at my heartstrings with all its dead-mothers, handicapped-siblings, return-from-injury Olympic backstories, but here's a story I can't resist: this guy, Muhammad Abbas, is the best.

Confused

Now, I'm just stumped. I give up. The man has no problems continuing Bush's state secrets and preventitive detention policies, especially as applied to Muslims arrested on the Afghani-Pakistani border, and he has shown real enthusiasm for Predator drone strikes in the same region, but he can cook keema and daal, and reads Ghalib, which is more than I can say about myself. Go figure.

We Fly High, No Lie, You Know This...

The gentleman passionately scratching his nether regions in this video, which was seen on internationally broadcast GEO tv, is Wasi Zafar, Pakistan's former minster of motherfuckin' law. That is all.

Calling All Douche-staches

This is Tom Friedman's latest sad sack of racism and unreasonable generalizations.

Below is the (unedited -- Director's cut!) letter I submitted to the Times in response:

In his most recent op-ed piece, "Calling All Pakistanis," Thomas Friedman asks "ordinary" Pakistanis to gather in the streets to denounce the depraved lunatics who perpetrated the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. On the surface, this is not an unreasonable request. After all, in the name of a shared faith several Pakistanis, it would seem, have murdered scores of innocents, and yet no outpouring of organized dissent has spilled forth onto the streets of Lahore and Karachi.

How can this be, Mr. Friedman wonders, given Pakistanis' easy devolution into violent street protest in the wake of the frivolous Danish cartoon affair. The only conclusion to be drawn from Mr. Friedman's words is that Pakistanis are irrational, petty, and disinterested in substantive affronts to their faith and to their nation. In reading his piece, I am reminded how empty our own streets have been in the wake of all that we know about Guantanamo; I am reminded how spirited the boycott of the Dixie Chicks was following their remarks about the President. I am reminded that we too are a people more inclined to protest words with which we disagree than violent acts committed in our name. Perhaps, there remains a question of degree, but in this regard are the Pakistanis very different from us?

And this is my letter were it a Lolcat:

Disorientalism

Hello, betrayed blog-reading community. Without even the indignity of a break-up post-it -- look, E, I made a Sex and the City reference -- I left you for sootier, developing-worldlier pastures. But I'm back.

Sugarpockets and I took a very unrelaxing trip to Pakistan (with detours in Hong Kong and Bangkok) to attend my sister's wedding and to catch up with extended family. There is much to be said about our adventures, but I should probably seize my jet-lag-jump-started day and head to work soon. So I will say only this: It's good to be back, though strangely not at all disorienting.

I last went to Pakistan in 2002, and in the previous six years the reach of globalized brands has extended far and wide across the Karachi and Lahore urban landscapes. The blue-chip brands had long ago made their mark in the Pakistani marketplace, but now lower market companies-- like Papa John's and Clarks -- have come to the fore. Of course, Lahore has always been a branded city -- Pepsi and Coca-Cola have waged an advertising war there for years -- but the presence of these new brands has given the place a new and more noticeably western sheen. In the past, at least Pepsi and Coke made attempts to transliterate their logos into Urdu. But in the current wave of branding, all logos look like they've been exported straight from the Paramus Park Mall. While it's one thing to go to Pakistan and find knockoff Izod polo shirts, it's quite another--and it's vaguely unsettling--to see an official Lacoste store in Clifton in Karachi. Couple this increased multi-national presence with the fact that everyone--everyone from Karachi to Lahore to Bangkok to Hong Kong to Kowloon is talking about Obama and The Dark Knight--coming home doesn't seem strange at all.

A Day Two Dictators Would Die

In our wide-ranging coverage here at Interweb Detritus, the Pakistani political scene ranks almost as highly as bile David Brooks has to spew and references to 80's sitcoms; so, in the spirit of completeness, today--the day that Fidel Castro resigned from a post he didn't even occupy (because a guy whose stock and trade is drawing ejaculate on the faces of Hollywood teenagers reported him dead months ago)--I join the fray and write the political obituary of another dictator, Pervez Musharraf.

I don't have a lot of insight to offer: his cabal of yes-men took a severe blow in yesterday's election, and it looks as though Benazir's PPP will now come to some sort of understanding with the Muslim League and its once-bald/now-resplendent mascot, Nawaz Sharif. A new coalition government will form, and if it can cobble together the two-thirds majority needed to impeach the old Generalissimo, it'll toss him out (provided of course that he pig-headedly resists his political fortunes and sticks around for the ass-beating).

I could speculate what the future holds for a country that has seized onto-- Obamaniacally you could say--"change" as its watchword, only to hale back into office the two previous ruling parties (as some sort of Voltron-esque collaboration): one party, a craven cult of personality, whose fallen leader gave the Taliban succour, and the other, a divisive, provincial (in both senses of the word) joke, whose moronic leader entered a nuclear arms race and garnered Pakistan the title of "world's most dangerous country." I could speculate, but with today's news that the United States has already carried out at least one clandestine, unilateral strike on Pakistan, even I am not willing to follow my dark, cynical heart farther into the abyss.

Benazir, Epilogue

Of all the reasons that Pakistan is a bizarre place--described here and elsewhere--one of particular note is this: the most preposterous explanations offered by the country's standard-bearers in response to high-profile deaths of public figures (e.g., fuck you, cricket coach Bob Woolmer was not murdered, and, fuck you, Benazir Bhutto was not felled by an assassin's bullets) somehow manage to be vindicated in the end: Woolmer indeed died of natural causes, and Bhutto died, having knocked her head against the top of a sunroof. I yukked it up when these two theories were first offered, so I eat crow again tonight.

Dear Heidi, Democracy Is a Failed Enterprise

In 1995, when I was 17, I procured some funds from my school to go to South Africa (then a newly minted democracy). Ostensibly, I was to study the roles of Asian and Muslim subgroups in the anti-Apartheid movement, but really, the expectations were pretty low: if I came back and showed some nice pictures in a slide show presentation at assembly I'd have satisfied my charge--which was fine by me, because, given my tender years and unshakable nature, I wasn't really one to labor over anything anyway.

Truthfully, I was going only because I wanted to be there in that improbable country in that astonishing moment--not because I wanted to write up a report for school. Mandela had been transformed from prisoner to statesman, and, I don't know--I guess I just wanted to live in the milieu, amidst all that gathering hope. For me, South Africa was rife with vague possibility, and I became fixated with it. In my grant proposal I think I said something to the effect of never having lived through the 1960's, I couldn't really know what it was for a democracy to be born, and so I could but only take it for granted.

More than twelve years later, Mandela's handpicked successor has shown the world what it is to take democracy for granted: he has bungled his way through a deepening race and class divide and has denied prevailing medical science as HIV ravages sub-Saharan Africa. He's become so unpopular that he was unseated by a notoriously corrupt bigamist whose achievements include resisting a rape conviction (and doing so only after asserting that a woman wearing a skirt invites sex, and that once sex has been purloined from such a woman, one need only shower in order to stave off HIV). This is modern democratic South Africa. This is the country that Mandela's efforts gave birth to, and that my youthful, exuberant feelings of hope were pinned to.

But I shouldn't pick on South Africa. Our own country is in a state of severe indifference about that which we have wrought in the decaying world: We de-Baathified Iraq and disbanded its army and squeezed the Iraqi people dry to the bone, and then reelected the President who perpetrated these acts and said of them, "Freedom is on the march"; we say now that he's led us into disgrace, but we do nothing to punish his unrepentant enablers; we call for men and women of ideas to lead us, yet we're spasmodic with joy when ideas are traded for watchwords and hollow platitudes; in fact we refuse wholesale to process ideas, and we punish those who dare run for office solely on the basis of them.

As the embers of the World Trade Center scatttered about New York City, we were driven to bloodlust, and Susan Sontag said, poignantly and most bravely, that we are not a mature democracy. She was excoriated for this, but the fact remains we don't care about our democratic institutions, and so we've stood watch as they've eroded.

And this brings me to the Presidential race. Although New Hampshire and Nevada have not gone his way (well, at least not the popular vote in Nevada), now comes Barack Obama with promises to end all this malarkey. South Carolina, a bellweather state in the primary season, aims to vault him to the nomination, if polls are to be trusted. (I'm being insincere--we know polls are not to be trusted, and we know his opponent is an intensely disciplined campaigner who will parry his every move.) And If my generation and its Ritalin-addled, Playstation- atrophied collective mind is to be trusted--and of course, we know it too is not to be--he's a symbol of hope, an agent of change, and on these wings he should glide into the White House, but I confess: he leaves me wanting and sad.

Firstly, it should be pointed out, that I don't care at all about character. Serious people are able to see that a man who has had an affair, or one who moronically provided receipts for pricey salon care, or one who has snorted cocaine as a teenager can govern this broken country. Serious people do not stand around with "Oh, no, he di'n't" placed firmly on the tips of their tongues should a hoarse candidate emote oddly into a microphone. And serious people don't base their vote on what they think their unserious colleagues think about a candidate's chances--that is, on the tyranny of electability. I don't object to Barack Obama because of nebulous ideas about his character; nor, conversely, do I care if nebulous ideas about his character make him appear like a man of consequence. In this regard, however, he does not sway me and I'm bewildered by those who are inspired by his speechifying. I care only about the substance of what he has to say, and to date he has said little that gives me hope for the future of our country.

He has declared open disdain for the sovereignty of Pakistan, a country that has been torn asunder by refugees and pro-Taliban forces, people who were driven out of Afghanistan in the first place by Bush's War on Terror, saying, "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will." The extent of the naivete of this statement is staggering: it is true that Musharraf has over-reached in myriad ways the last year or so, and hangs on by a thread, but there are no viable political parties left to contest elections, and the Pakistani electorate is seething in frustration--yet one of the Democratic front-runners thinks that it's in America's interest to further galvanize dispossessed Pakistanis by making reckless claims about how he'd proceed in a post-Bush world. Some have called this an extension of the Bush doctrine, but at least Bush understands now how dumb it is to assert your will on to countries that can bite you in the ass.

Now, I'm not naive. I understand that if Osama Bin Laden popped up on the grid in a hut outside of Peshawar, whoever's President's going to take him out, but announcing to the world--unprovoked--as Obama did, that he has no interest in preserving our tenuous ties to the Pakistani government shows that he misunderstands basic geopolitics--and he misunderstands what American interests are. Musharraf's an asshole, but if you alienate him, where exactly does he go to make alliances? Obama is willing to score the easy political points by running to the hawkish center, but as he promises to cowboy his way around dangerous and complex regions of the world, I'm left wondering--this, this, motherfucker, is the politics of hope?

I understand that this issue is simply irrelevant to the masses of Americans who want to resist Clinton-Bush imperial succession and that I'm uniquely interested in it; I understand also that many of us want to credit Obama for his early resistance to the War on Iraq, and we want to celebrate his progressive bona fides because he was a community organizer and led get-out-the-vote efforts, but shouldn't the Presidency require more? What does it mean to oppose the War from the beginning--like, by the way, I did and virtually everyone I know--and then to vote unwaveringly in financial support of it once you've arrived in the Senate (in a fashion identical almost to Hillary Clinton)? What does it mean to
stand for health-care reform but eschew a universal mandate , thereby excluding millions of Americans? What does it mean when your great healthcare triumph in Illinois was brokered through insurance companies? What does it mean that you've established yourself as a moderate in the Senate, voting to confirm three of Bush's judicial nominees? And what does it mean when you've declared Ronald Reagan as your political role model?

There can be wide-ranging debate about these questions, but I think if, like me, you see the Presidency as something more than just a repository for rhetorical hope, then you have trouble swallowing the notion that Barack Obama will lead a progressive renaissance in the Executive. I don't want the next President compromising out of the gates with lobbyists, and I don't want him or her continuing to promote the failed notion that carpet bombing is the best way to deal with beleaguered and humiliated Muslims. (Hint: the best way is to take a page out of Hezbollah's book and build hospitals.) And I don't want the next President selling me bipartisanship and calling it hope. I want the next President to be pissed off and brimming with hell-fury about the ways in which common Americans have been cheated, poisoned, and lied to by our government. And most important, with the fracturing of the Republican coalition, I want the next President to eviscerate the other side, to expose it as the haven for rank, moneyed hypocrites that it is. I want the next President to answer to no God but the people. Maybe like the Americans Susan Sontag saw in the wake of September 11th, I'm immature--I've been called it before--but that's what democracy looks like to me. And since I know it's not what's in store for us (or for South Africans or for Pakistanis), I can't help but think democracy is a failed enterprise.

Happy Armageddon!

Hey, I need to blog again. I know. Parents were in town Christmasweek, and then 'Pockets and I flew back east for a wedding in Pittsburgh/to see if my new niece/nephew had arrived on the scene, but that's no excuse: Benazir was assassinated/bumped her head; Pakistan devolved into a riotous and blood-spattered free-for-all (which led to the destruction of, among other things, my aunt's car...while she was driving it); The Wire season premiere dropped On Demand; Mike Huckabee became the would-be-nominee for a bit, then started to talk about things not related to our Lord and Savior/love handles; Giuliani became irrelevant; and Will Smith secretly converted to Scientology (which makes him still more electable than Romney). Also, Happy New Year! Here's to hoping that nuclear holocaust/impending Chinese colonization/bird flu/Britney-LiLo-Winehouse's inevitable group overdose and-or suicide pact decides to put off plans till '09 at least.

I Learned It By Watching You

So, it's only sensible that as my homeland descends into typicality, I should feel the urge to blog about it. However, I didn't opine on the state of Pakistani affairs when the chief justice was sacked initially several months ago; nor did I weigh in when Generalissimo Musharraf reneged on his promise not to stand for reelection whilst in uniform. I suppose I was a bit blog-shy because my posts about the dead Pakistani cricket coach yielded little attention from you, fickle reader.

Alas, that said, this news is a big deal, or at least the MSM is making it out to be. I remember when I was a kid it was a big deal when anything related to Pakistan made its way into the newspaper; now Pakistan's as big a story as the Duke rape scandal (though not quite as big a story as the overdose death of a soft-core pornography star). Before the blowhards and alarmists of the world come to completely dominate this story, let me wipe some of the saliva from their glee: It ain't no big deal. Sure, Musharraf's suspended civil liberties, quashed thousands of dissenting voices, made a mockery of the terror threat by exploiting it for political gain, asserted himself in the workings of a so-called independent judiciary, and willfully misinterepreted the Constitution.

But it's how we do in Pakistan; it's how we've always done, and nothing about it should be unfamiliar to those of us who've lived in America the last six years.

Golden Years

Happy 60th birthday, Pakistan. To celebrate here's a decent piece from the Guardian by downer-historian William Dalrymple.