BOOK REVIEWS

[DarkStar]

Munir has raised objections to the Ahmedi establishment too. One can’t go into that here because of the bad times — including the possibility of a pogrom at the hands of an entire population converted to Al Qaeda — the community is facing these days in Pakistan. But his first cousin Nasir Ahmad Khan alias Pervez Parvazi, who critiques memoirs, may have something to say in reply.

Thanks for the info about this author, but I can't understand the last part.
One cant go into details about objections to the Ahmedi establishment?

You didn't shy away from the authors criticisms of the Khairis, or Detlev Khalid who seems to have apostosised from Ahmadiat. Nor did you spare Frau Schimmel, a great intellectual and researcher on Islam, who was fluent in most Islamic country's languages, and recipient of nishane imtiaz from the pakistani govt.

Which is this entire population converted by Al Qaeda? What a slanderous remark to repeat in this article. Pakistan is awash with Maulvis who expound their sometimes harsh views about Ahmadis, yet I don't see any progroms there, so why should this little known biography do that?

I wish the poster used cut and paste tools, to edit such scandalous remarks.

 

[muse]

Darkstar

What would be the point of argiuing that Ahmadi do not face persecution in Pakistan? It would be and is a lie to argue that they do not - and if the word pogrom is not, in your opinion, the appropriate word to use, perhaps becuase of the images and ideas that go along with it, we can be certain that is why Munir and Ahmad use it, we need to remember that the author, Munir, is presenting his first hand perpective - no one has a monopoly on "truth", what we bring to any thing we experience, is the baggage of our eduation or training, our personas, and these always color views, a sort of paint by numbers scheme.

By the way, you may wish to also read a thread ont he Current Affairs board, "Damning Silence" - you will note how many times the thread was read and how many times it was responded to - it speaks volumes and silence is damning in that regard.

 

[muse]

A debut novel about India wins the Man Booker prize
By Victoria Young Published: October 15, 2008


LONDON: Aravind Adiga, 33, won the 40th Man Booker prize on Tuesday night for his debut novel, "The White Tiger," a vivid exploration of India's class struggle told through the story of a village boy who becomes the chauffeur to a rich man.

Adiga, who lives in Mumbai, was born in India and brought up partly in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford and is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India. He is the second youngest writer to win the award; Ben Okri was 32 when he won for "The Famished Road" in 1991.

Michael Portillo, a former cabinet minister and the chairman of this year's panel of judges, praised Adiga's novel, saying that the short list had contained a series of "extraordinarily readable page-turners." However, Adiga's book had prevailed, he said "because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure."

Adiga said his book was an "attempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India — the voice of the colossal underclass."

"This voice was not captured," he added, "and I wanted to do so without sentimentality or portraying them as mirthless humorless weaklings as they are usually."

When he accepted the award, Adiga dedicated it to "the people of New Delhi where I lived and where I wrote this book." When asked what he would do with the money , Adiga joked, "The first thing I am going to do is to find a bank that I can actually put it in."

The Man Booker prize, Britain's best-known and most generous literary award, is given annually to a novel written by an author from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth nations and is accompanied by a check for £50,000 — about $86,000 — as well as an inevitable increase in sales.

This year's list of finalists was one of the least star-studded in recent years. It included two first-time novelists, and several of the favorites were snubbed by judges. Joseph O'Neill's critically acclaimed "Netherland" was omitted from the short list, as was "The Enchantress of Florence" by Salman Rushdie.

As a result, bookmakers were divided over the likely winner, oscillating between Adiga and the Irish writer Sebastian Barry, 53, whose book "The Secret Scripture" is the story of an Irish patient in a mental hospital sharing her shocking family history with her psychiatrist.

The other books on the shortlist were "Sea of Poppies" by Amitav Ghosh, "The Clothes on Their Backs" by Linda Grant, "The Northern Clemency" by Philip Hensher and "A Fraction of the Whole" by Steve Toltz.

 

[muse]

Book review: The illusive Islamic state —by Babar Ayaz

Chasing a Mirage — The Tragic Illusion of the Islamic State,

By Tarek Fatah;
John Wiley & Sons,
Pp410; Price: $28.95,
Available on Amazon.com

Tarek Fatah, a well-known leftist student leader of Karachi in the late 1960s and early 1970s, now lives in Canada and has come up with a well-researched book which demolishes brick by brick the many myths regarding the existence of an Islamic state. Fatah’s basic thesis is that there is no concept of an Islamic state in Islam, there is no existing Islamic state in the world, and there never was. While this has drawn considerable interest among intellectual circles, author Fatah has received threats as well.

At the very outset Fatah explains: “In this book I attempt to draw a distinction between Islamists and Muslims. What Islamists seek and what Muslims seek are two separate objectives, sometimes overlapping but clearly distinct. While the former seeks an ‘Islamic State’, the latter merely desires a ‘state of Islam.’ One state requires theocracy, the other a state of spirituality.”

I have always been of the opinion that the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) should be renamed as the Organisation of Muslim Countries, because they are basically countries with Muslim majorities. Their commonality ends there.

Fatah touches this issue to set the course of research: “Most Muslims too believe that countries with majority Muslim populations are Islamic countries with a distinct character. However, this is not how the Islamists see the world. From the perspective of those who follow the doctrine of Wahhabism or Salafi Islam or even the ruling ayatollahs of Iran, a country can be labelled an Islamic State only if it is governed by the laws of Shariah. Thus neither Turkey nor Indonesia is an Islamic State in the eyes of the Islamists.”

Fatah has devoted chapters to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which claim to be Islamic states, and has argued that there was nothing that proves the claim of these countries that they are Islamic states. Maintaining his blunt style, he has broken the myth these states have tried to build around themselves. He maintains that the institutions of Saudi Monarchy supported by Wahhabi clergy and Iranian Velayat-e-faqhi (a religious institution which is supreme and above the elected parliament) have no place in Islam.

He rejects the two-nation theory, considered the basis for the creation of Pakistan. To him: “The biggest losers in this great game of divide and rule were India’s Muslim. In the name of Islam, they were divided into three separate parts and cut off from each other.”

To support his argument, Fatah has quoted extensively a number of Muslim scholars, who were hounded by the Islamists throughout the Muslim history. He quotes Ali Abdel Al-Razik, an Egyptian scholar of the 1920s, who was harassed by the extremists. Al Razik had concluded in his book Islam and the Fundamentals of Authority that:”(1) Government of political authority, as necessary as it might be seen to realise Islamic ideals and obligations, was not the essence of Islam and had nothing to do with primary principles of the faith; and (2) Islam left Muslims free to choose whatever form of government they felt could solve their day-to-day problems with civil society minus an official state religion being best able to offer such a solution.”

The book draws on a number of such scholars including Allama Mohammad Iqbal, who opposed the revival of the Caliphate on the grounds that it was an obstacle to the modernisation of the Muslim world. Quoting from the Holy Quran and Hadith, Fatah has maintained that if God or his Prophet (PBUH) had felt the need to set up an Islamic State, the issue would have been dealt with in the Holy Scriptures.

Al-Razik had quoted the Holy Quran to prove his point: “Whoso obeyeth the Apostle, in doing so hath obeyed God, and who turneth away from thee: We have not sent thee to be their keeper.” (Sura al-Nisa, chapter 4, verse 83). This message is repeated in other verses also where it has been said that God had not sent the Prophet (PBUH) as ‘custodian’ or ‘warden’ over people.

Drawing extensively from Muslim history, Fatah has trod a bold path by narrating the events that followed the death of the Prophet (PBUH) and the struggle for the Caliphate in the coming years. His view is that an Islamic state model did not exist even after the Prophet’s (PBUH) death. The very fact that it was decided to choose the Caliph on tribal basis from among the Quraysh of Mecca was against the teachings of Islam that one should rise above tribalism, and that righteousness should be the criteria.

Fatah’s point is that tribalism took over Muslim society soon after the death of the Prophet (PBUH). He has praised some of the actions of the companions of the Prophet (PBUH) and the Muslim intellectuals who followed in history where it was due. But he has not shied from challenging the contradictions and myths that have been promoted by ‘some all-is-good scholars’.

Fatah’s book establishes that the acceptance of one tribe’s superiority over others and their right to the Caliphate is the basis of the Arab’s arrogance that is suffered by other Muslims of the world.

The book has challenged the notion of a ‘Golden Islamic era’ in the last 1400 years, which the Islamists are chasing today. History, even when looked at from the Muslim historians’ perspective, Fatah argues, is the history of various dynasties, which were mostly occupied with intrigue and conflict with each other. He has drawn a vivid picture of palace intrigues, ruthlessness and internal fighting among the Muslim rulers. He argues that there was nothing Islamic about these empires, and that these dynasties ruled like any other in the contemporary period. Most rulers had their own sets of clerics, who would find Islamic justification (fatwa) for the convenience of their respective master. Those who did not were either killed or exiled.

Fatah’s contention is that the sharia that today’s Islamists want to implement is man-made and has evolved, mostly out of Arab customary law. He questions why it has been awarded sacred status and why any objective discussion of it is considered blasphemous by the Islamists.

Tarek Fatah is a Canadian citizen of Pakistani origin and has fair knowledge of the prevailing hypocrisies among the Muslims who have migrated to the West. He is well known in Canada for taking radical stands against the demands of some Islamists, and has exposed them in detail in Chasing the Mirage.He is equally critical of the leftists that have become apologists for the Islamists and consider the latter’s cause as anti-imperialist struggle. The book is a must-read for all those Pakistani intellectuals that have helped the state and Islamist groups to spread these myths. *

 

[muse]

For long our concerned forum members have noted that among the most radical, most rabid, are members who also live and have recieved education in the UK and as forum members have wondered why and how has this been allowed to come about - unintended consequences:


Friends of Al Qaeda in Europe —by Khaled Ahmed

The Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe
By Alison Pargeter
IB Tauris 2008
Pp244; Special Price Rs 1495
Available at bookstores in Pakistan

Here is another book on the phenomenon of radical Islam in Europe although it is less of an indictment of the British government than Londonistan (2006) by Melanie Phillips.

Both books carry a photograph of Abu Hamza al-Masri on the title page. Together with Umar Bakri, Al Masri was the single most effective advocate of Al Qaeda’s worldview in the UK and attracted jihadis from all parts of Europe because of his brazen attack on what the Western political system stood for.

He is interesting for us because he inspired expatriate Pakistanis in the UK and, from his Finsbury Mosque, is alleged to have organised terrorist plots that the Pakistani youths joined.

Pargeter is also less interested than Phillips in the allegation that terrorism in the UK by the Islamists was a blowback from an earlier policy, spearheaded by the UK and followed less enthusiastically by the rest of Europe, of welcoming and nurturing dissenters from the Muslim world and thus revengefully gaining the high moral ground while pretending to be friends of the ‘undemocratic’ governments in the Islamic world.

When Umar Bakri was finally disallowed return to the UK, he had fathered eight children on British money, was living in a house gifted by the UK government, and was driving a luxury car put at his disposal. The man had spawned together with Al Masri two organisations that are banned today in Pakistan because they threatened the very idea of the state of Pakistan: Al Muhajirun and Hizb al-Tahrir. Britain was the ‘zone of contact’ between Pakistanis and the Arabs, and English was their medium of expression, something that never happened in the Middle East where expat Pakistanis are much larger in number.

But the author gives us a wider canvas of the terrorist cult in Europe and its connections within the UK. The account begins with the career of the Syrian radical Abu Musab Al Suri, who arose as the intellect of Al Qaeda, writing its encyclopaedia of terrorism. He travelled to Pakistan and came under the influence of the famous Dr Fadl — now opposed to Al Zawahiri from his prison in Egypt — and met Osama bin Laden, telling him he shouldn’t appear on the media too much and not build up his own personality cult too much.

Al Suri’s base was in Spain but he thought he would do better in the more ‘helpful’ environment in the UK. He was traced to bombings in Spain in 2004 and the UK in 2005. He was caught in Pakistan in October 2005 and handed over to the US with USD5 million on his head.

The Brotherhood, Syrian and Egyptian, was wooed by Europe, and its Saudi brand was borrowed by Algeria and Morocco before immigrants infected by it were stuffed into Europe. The UK borrowed the hardline Islamists from France and the rest of Europe thinking it was acquiring “assets” for its Middle East policy. It doomed its majority Muslim population composed of Pakistanis in the process as most of these Arab extremists linked up with Al Qaeda and its funded madrassas in Pakistan.

The Saudis funded everything in sight in the UK, including the big universities, which immediately began to expurgate their orientalist publications, and the Pakistani mosques, which, as Gilles Kepel tells us, began as Barelvi places of worship, finally succumbed to Wahhabi funds and became Deobandi mouthpieces of Al Qaeda.

At least one Pakistani appeared at the head of radical Islam in the UK before the Arabs took over from him. He was Kalim Siddiqi, who took the UK’s multicultural policy to the absurd extreme of establishing a separate Islamic Parliament with its own laws. He was inspired by Iran’s Revolution; so were many Arabs who thought their countries too needed something like that. As the number of Muslims swelled and their radicalisation became a serious possibility, Middle Eastern regimes competed in funding their Islamisation, thinking the expats will send back killers against them.

The Saudis opened the purse-strings but so did Libya and Baathist Iraq. As a result, mosques proliferated and the expat Muslims in Europe apparently flocked to them forgetting that they had to integrate like other expats for their own good. It got to a point where it was difficult to say if radical Islam got exported to Europe or got exported from Europe.

The orders to go to Afghanistan and fight a new kind of war came from Al Azhar and from Saudi Mufti Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the blind sheikh who was one of the many blind sheikhs with extremist worldview, such as the two we know, Sheikh Abdul Hamid Kishk and the chief of Jamaa Islamiyya, Sheikh Umar Abdur Rehman. The launching pad was Pakistan with Lahore as the post where Arabs were received and then sent on to Kunar, the Afghan province with strong Wahhabi influence which also flowed into a sympathetic Bajaur tribal agency in Pakistan. When the veterans of this jihad went back they caused discord in their countries from Algeria to Indonesia and were pushed out. Europe accepted them and began incubating something that was to explode in the fullness of time.

The book gives us an excellent survey of who was embedded where. The Moroccans had a big presence in Spain but were “innocent” till Morocco thought it should allow the extremist infection to creep in from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The author gives us a detailed account of the Al Qaeda strike in Spain in 2004, killing 129 that had the effect of taking Spain out of the war in Iraq. Now Moroccans are causing sleepless nights in the Benelux states where minority rights are treated as sacred trust but which the expat Muslims exploit. Many Pakistani clerics have transplanted their Pakistani sectarianism into Belgium.

The Egyptian Sheikh Anwar Shaban was granted asylum in Italy as he could not enter Egypt because of his dangerous views based on his expertise of hadith. He organised the jihad that opened up in Bosnia in 1992, creating a virtual army from out of the expat Muslims living in Europe. Britain took in the vitriolic Abu Qatada al-Filistini from Palestine who denounced the un-Islamic regimes back in the Middle East but was to become a thorn in the side of the UK that took his fulminations to mean that he supported democracy back home.

The Algerians dominated in France which has more Muslims than any other state in Europe. When Libyans and Algerian Islamists found the going tough in Europe they shifted their headquarters to Londonistan and guided their strategy in the Arab world from here.

Europe is now reacting to what has happened in the past; so is the UK. The reaction is measured and rational. One can’t agree with people like Oriana Fallaci who think Europe is becoming a ‘colony of Islam’. The fact is that Islam is on the boil and will take time subsiding if the world holds fast and doesn’t play around too much with democracy as a fix-all formula. That much of the Islamic radicalism got spread around because of old policies will surely cause the right kind of corrections in Europe and the UK. *

 

[Neo]

Book review: India’s maritime troubles ​

By Khaled Ahmed

​

Contested Coastlines: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia;

By Charu Gupta & Mukul Sharma
Routledge 2008
Pp251; Price Indian Rs 650
Available in bookstores in Pakistan

South Asia has unresolved border disputes with consequences for human beings living alongside these disputed lines. It also has unresolved maritime problems with consequences for fishermen who go to the sea to catch fish and are caught because they have crossed lines they can’t see.

The tragedy is that the people who catch them also can’t see where the national boundary is. Fishermen therefore have become a symbol of the immaturity of the nation states in South Asia. It is a shame that imprisoned fishermen are dramatically “exchanged” every now and then as a reluctant confidence-building measure with which to dupe the world.

Gupta and Sharma have written a very important book and its importance lies in its humanist involvement in the plight of fishermen. The book also contains the best account in one place of the three big maritime muddles that bring a bad name to the subcontinent.

Sadly, nationalisms have become attached to the Sir Creek dispute between Pakistan and India; and if you ask a Pakistani or an Indian what the quarrel is all about, he doesn’t know. Yet he supports governments who don’t want to resolve the dispute but in fact use Sir Creek as one of the grounds on which to condemn the ‘enemy’ country.

India has a coastline 7,417 km long, out of which the Gujarat state has 1,663 km, which is one-third of the entire coastline, which makes Gujarat the principal maritime state of India. Because of a rich delta, Gujarat has the best fishing, and the Gulf of Kutch has the best fish known in India. Next to Gujarat is Pakistan, and there are no agreed maritime frontiers between the two. The Maritime Zones Act of India 1976 and 1981 under which the fishermen are caught and punished doesn’t conform to the United Nations Convention on Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), which India has signed. Pakistan is guilty of the same non-conformity.

The rival geographies of India and Pakistan are symbolised by the rival cartographies relating to Sir Creek, which is a 100 km long estuary in the marshes of the Rann of Kutch between Gujarat and Sindh. Sir Creek is not a flowing creek but a tidal channel which has no officially demarcated boundary separating Pakistan and India. Till 1954 there was free movement across the Creek. Then came the issue of finding out where the border lay. And this border was also to decide where in the Arabian Sea the line will be drawn separating Indian waters from Pakistani waters.

Till these two issues are resolved, the two countries cannot set up their continental shelves up to 350 nautical miles and describe their economic zones up to 200 nautical miles. The deadline for doing so falls in 2009. This is the area where the two could find oil and gas deposits. They can’t exploit these deposits without first sorting out the maritime boundary dispute. And the line that is drawn to describe the national frontier along Sir Creek will decide who gets how much of the sea off the Gulf of Kutch. That explains why there is no ‘give and take’ in the bilateral negotiations.

The western side of Sir Creek is under Pakistani control, and there are naval installations on the Indian side. Pakistan owns 16 creeks of Sindh and lays claim to the 17th called Sir Creek by saying that the dividing line must run along the eastern bank of the Creek — somewhat like Saddam Hussein’s claim on the Shatt-al-Arab, rejecting the more internationally recognised thalweg claim of a line running in the middle of the Creek — on the basis of an old map that India no longer recognises despite past record of an agreement of 1914 signed by the governments of Bombay, Sindh and the Raja of Kutch.

The Pakistani claim thus includes the left bank of the Creek, which means that the maritime border too will have to run further east than where the Indians think it is right now. Indian lawyer AG Noorani thinks India has a better case because Pakistan in 1958 had admitted that ‘this map was intended to be no more than an annexure to the Bombay government resolution’. And the said Bombay resolution recommends the boundary in the centre of the navigable current of Sir Creek. The Creek no longer flows and has shifted westwards, to Pakistan’s disadvantage. Pakistan wants the boundary established according to the historical maps; India wants that too but according to thalweg.

As both the countries are deadlocked after 9 rounds of discussions till 2006, the fisherfolk suffer at the hands of the police and intelligence agencies. These poor original owners of the coast are doomed because both countries have killed the world’s biggest mangroves and fish reserve through pollution and are now simply focused on oil and gas that might or might not be there on the continental shelf. Let’s hope that there is no secret discovery of oil or gas in the uncharted waters or the two will likely have another casus belli.

India and Sri Lanka share a maritime border which is more than 400 km long cutting across three different seas: the Bay of Bengal in the north, the Palk Bay in the centre and the Gulf of Mannar in the south. In 1974 and 1976, the two countries signed agreements on how to sort out their boundaries in the sea and their territorial waters extending 12 nautical miles from the coast. The second agreement barred fishing in each other’s side of the line demarcated in the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Mannar. But there are islands given to one or the other country which cause confusion among the fishermen. The result is jailed fishermen in India and Sri Lanka.

With countries located close to one another and in some ways opposite rather than alongside each other, there is bound to be trouble when demarcating long 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zones. And if the sands are shifting either in the case of Sir Creek or in the case of an island in the case of Bay of Bengal, the states are going to be selfish in the absence of statesmen among their politicians. The India-Bangladesh land border is 4,000 km long and there are 20 million illegal Bangladeshis in India, which makes India rather nervous about people it catches crossing over.

The Bay of Bengal is the crux of the problem. Bangladesh has a concave coast reducing its continental shelf if the line is drawn from the coast; India has a convex coast and gets a larger share of the Gulf as continental shelf. India and Burma both reject Bangladesh’s stance that its shelf be measured from where its coastline is navigable and not choked with riverine effluvium. To make things worse, India and Bangladesh claim a 2 miles square island, two miles from India and five from Bangladesh, which has appeared in the Bay of Bengal composed of drifting volcanic silt. The quarrel is based on the flow of the river Haribanga inside the Bay.

When the coastal states are looking at the sea with greed and refuse to demarcate their areas of control, the fishermen come in the middle of the crossfire. The book describes the suffering of these poor people whose lives are already faced with destruction because of the environmental damage caused by these states to their fish beds. In old days, they had no problems with going far into the sea. Today navies patrol the waters jealously and spend their bravado on these victims of ‘contested coastlines’. *

 

[fatman17]

Book review: Partition: only one-quarter human —by Khaled Ahmed

Humanity amidst Insanity: Hope during and after the Indo-Pak Partition

By Tridivesh Singh Maini, Tahir Malik & Ali Farooq Malik

UBSPD, New Delhi, 2009

Pp186; Price Rs295 Indian

This very thoughtful and much- needed book says Partition was 75 percent inhuman and depraved, but there was 25 percent of it which was human and which has not been memorialised because of the dominant hostile narratives that came after 1947.

The memory of Partition has concretised the communal fracture of India and made it permanent in the shape of India and Pakistan. Even the ‘neutral’ accounts compiled after the more intense periods of nationalism have been ‘partitioned’, the Indian side putting on record the good deeds done by non-Muslims, and the Pakistani side recording the acts of grace of the Muslims.

This book could be the first of its kind. It is ‘unpartitioned’ in its account of the residual good among two savage communities and puts its hope in the 25 percent of the population of India and Pakistan to save the subcontinent from descending into a Hobbesian end of its 1.4 billion people.

Think of it, this can be done very easily too today, with the help of the nuclear weapons that Partition has caused to appear like malignant growths on the map of the region. The book contains interviews with non-Muslims who fled to India in 1947 and 11 interviews with refugee families in Pakistan. One doesn’t need to emphasise that they are moving in the extreme.

Around 13 million changed home in 1947 and it took them two months to complete the process. Hundreds of thousands got killed, women were raped and children lost. The wound of it went deep, bequeathing to South Asia one of the world’s most lethal sets of nationalisms that braked development and prosperity and unleashed poverty-provoking wars. If there was holocaust in the West this was one in which ‘no one community could be held responsible’. Politely, it means both were abysmal. If that is what the book says, which it does, then we are face to face with an evil that was more pervasive and therefore more sinister. That means we were 80 percent all individual Hitlers.

Ashis Nandy thinks that the 25 percent Muslims and non-Muslims not subscribing to the hatred of their community are the saving grace which will finally rescue the Subcontinent from its historical death-wish succubi. He makes a case for abstention of uniformity of thinking that nationalism dictates because the 25 percent at Partition who did not conform are today worth remembering.

One hopes that those in India and Pakistan who did not conform after the Mumbai attacks in November 2008 will also be remembered some day when madness has finally left us. But people like Ashish Nandy have always been there though few in number: Khushwant Singh, Balraj Sahni, Kartar Singh Duggal and Saadat Hasan Manto.

The book mentions only Manto as the Pakistani ‘deviant’. That is understandable for two reasons: first that a community that dominates numerically is bound to have more ‘original’ people; second, anxiety levels in a smaller revisionist state are so high that deviationist thinking is cruelly suppressed as opposed to the big status quo power where ‘comfort’ levels prevalent in society tolerate deviationist and innovative thinking.

One can name six Indian historians at the same level of deviationism from the nationalist prescription as Pakistan’s Ayesha Jalal simply because of this difference. But then people like Satish Agarwal, Papiya Ghosh, Urvashi Butalia, and Ritu Menon, together with Ayesha Jalal, are no longer simply Indians and Pakistanis; they belong in the category that this book wants to idealise.

Should we forget Partition as an unpleasant experience? The book says no, but in a way Partition will be consigned to oblivion once, somewhere during the future generations, India and Pakistan become normal towards each other. One reason one shouldn’t go along with the case for retaining the memory is Pakistan’s upcoming Bab-e-Pakistan monument that will memorialise the sufferings of the Muslim refugees without any reference to the suffering of the non-Muslim refugees that went out of Pakistan. Unless, of course, India and Pakistan enter a treaty banning one-sided monuments and pledge to ‘bilateralise’ the suffering of Partition and eulogise only the 25 percent that didn’t kill.

The authors have many ‘intermediaries’ of their pacific cause and they include Pakistan’s great lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan who in his book The Indus Saga told India that it should permit the presence of ‘distinctness’, and told Pakistan not to ignore the ‘commonalities’ that existed between the two countries.

The book focuses on the two Punjabs where ethnic and linguist commonalities set up bonds that can be ignored but not denied. It is termed ‘Punjabi ethos’, reaffirmed by physical contiguity and easy official contacts across the Wahga border. The book enlists the contacts made recently by the two Punjabi chief ministers Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi and Amarinder Singh to highlight the jati networks that have not died in Pakistan despite state efforts.

For instance, the Warraich tribe has flourished in Pakistan just as it has in India among the Jats. In Pakistan Warraich is a familiar suffix to Muslim names even though some leaders have taken it off to facilitate their identification with all the population instead of just one tribe. For instance, not many people in Pakistan know that Aitzaz Ahsan and the family of Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain are Warraich although it is known that they both are Jats from Gujrat. But the stature of these Jat-Warraich leaders in Pakistan is uncontested, the Chaudhrys at the political level and Aitzaz Ahsan at political and intellectual levels. One can’t disagree with the book that the Sikh state of Punjab can be the positive agent in transforming and humanising the Partition experience.

The book recommends a ‘memorial of the 25 percent’ in the no-man’s land at Wahga, but one must warn that the monument of Bab-e-Pakistan, coming up in Lahore, will easily dwarf it with the malignance of its size and dimensions. One may also in conclusion apologetically remind the authors that Punjabis of Pakistan often do themselves no credit by monopolising the negative aspects of Pakistani nationalism and are responsible, because of their two-thirds majority in population, to arm-twist the rest of Pakistan into perpetuating conflict with India. *

http:///www.dailytimes.com.pk

 

[muse]

BOOK REVIEW
Twelve steps to a new grand strategy
Great Powers: America and the World after Bush
by Thomas P M Barnett

Reviewed by Benjamin A Shobert

The sheer number of books written about the 2003 Iraqi War suggests the level of anxiety and confusion many Americans feel - even those who consider themselves educated on the casus belli of the conflict - remains acute. A certain amount of honest guilt and soul-searching has driven many of America's best writers, journalists and thinkers to explore what drove the country into Iraq. Those who have put pen to paper in an effort to make sense of it all seem to fall into two separate camps: one dissects politics and tactics, focusing on how the war was sold and managed, while the other employs a more strategic evaluation of the ideologies which rationalized the decision.

Noticeably absent from most of these is an attempt to penetrate the fog of past mistakes and advocate a path forward based on what the errors of Iraq tell us. Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, Thomas P M Barnett's newest book, works to correct this inadequacy by adding clarity to the challenges facing the world, recasting them as opportunities and reminding Americans that we are "the source code for globalization". (pg 423) Barnett's passionate belief comes across clearly in this book: Americans need to be reminded that even those things which make us feel insecure, such as China's rise, can only be understood as the American model having won over the decrepit model of communism. But this equally means that Americans are in a unique position to set the process back, in particular in response to the country's financial instability.

Given the current economic turmoil, when baser instincts are to look outside our borders for others to blame, Barnett's book is a well-reasoned argument for America to re-imagine itself and re-engage with the world's problems, precisely when our impulses are to retract and disengage. Barnett believes that America has insights on politics, economic development and fostering innovation which are unique to our history. Many of the lessons of our development - in particular the uglier chapters of America's Civil War period - should be reminders to us of the challenges emerging countries will face. These memories should also empower a gracious patience on our part towards them as they develop.

Equally important, at time when many Americans question both the nature of their country's power and the means by which it should be used, Barnett reminds his readers that the US still has the military, diplomatic and economic power to make the world safer. In many ways, he wants to remind his readers that America is still a "Great Power".

Granted, the nature of American power is changing, and unless it is properly managed could lead to disastrous over-reactions and miscues as the shared power of the world is allocated differently and finds new centers of gravity. In particular, Barnett believes the next generation of US leaders will need to be comfortable sharing their power among equals, with confidence that the American model is ultimately that which most countries seek to emulate. Admittedly, this can seem to be an increasingly tenuous proposition given the undercurrent of fear Americans now feel regarding their economic future.

When growth was a given and capital relatively inexpensive, concerns over the downside risks to the globe's interdependency could be easily accommodated. But now the interwoven nature of the world's economy seems as much a threat as a blessing, in particular as the global economy slows down and the much lauded de-coupling proves to be overstated. At its most profound, Barnett's argument is that the only path forward, absent conflict of terrifying proportions, is to give ourselves over to even further inter-connection, greater proximity and increased cooperation.

This is, as he says, a form of economic mutually assured destruction, where the disengagement of one partner from bilateral agreements can be enough to tear the whole thing apart. Barnett believes this is precisely why economic inter-dependency may be one of the pre-eminent enablers of sustainable peace. As one might expect of a former Naval War College researcher, Barnett is not one to overlook or ignore the necessary role of hard power; however, he also believes that American power is much more than what is enabled by the military.

Barnett does not want us to forget the unexplored opportunities that still await those who can steer through what he believes are short-term setbacks: "There is a new world still out there, awaiting some great nation's discovery and description … a world of unlimited creativity, energy and ingenuity, and we as its dominant species need to get there fast." (pg 37) Barnett recognizes that not only does America need to motivate itself to re-engage in the midst of our crisis, but that post-Bush the rest of the world has some reservations about our intentions. Consequently, Barnett believes the path forward has to be marked by an acknowledgement of what went wrong during the last presidency.

To accomplish this, Barnett admits to what he sees as the recent mistakes - the "Seven Deadly Sins of Bush-Cheney": Lust - leading to the quest for primacy; Anger - leading to the demonization of enemies; Greed - leading to the concentration of power; Pride - leading to avoidable postwar failures; Envy - leading to the misguided redirect on Iran; Sloth - leading to the US military finally asserting command; and Gluttony - leading to strategic overhang cynically foisted upon the next president. (pgs 12-35) He does not spend too much time going over these things, largely because in almost every case the "Deadly Sin" in question has already been dissected by others. Barnett is working towards a different goal, to cast a vision of where we go now.

While the majority of the book develops a worldview that is distinctly different from most of what the last administration advocated, a sense of fairness seems to drive Barnett to acknowledge what he believes were constructive actions on their part. These range from compliments for the president's "strategic imagination regarding development issues" to the administration's resistance against "popular pressures for trade protectionism". (pg 10) But readers may struggle with Barnett's somewhat unapologetic support of Bush's decision to go into Iraq:
I still admire George W Bush's display of audacity and hope in launching his Big Bang strategy upon the Persian Gulf. There's not a question in my mind that, no matter the weak rationales offered (or the slick sales job), Saddam Hussein was a horrific dictator whose time had come. That Bush-Cheney were able to pin the tail on the 9/11 donkey didn't bother me in the least, for democracies such as our own always have to make it personal before we can launch a war of choice. (pg 10)

For readers new to Barnett, it helps to understand that much of his work emphasizes that America must learn to do more than simply project power through what he calls the "Leviathan", a conventional military. He has long believed we need to be equally competent at managing the aftermath of our military actions with a role and set of resources he labels the "SysAdmin, the 'second half' blended force that wages the peace after the Leviathan force has successfully waged war". (pg 432)

Additionally, Barnett takes international accountability seriously, and takes a very dim view towards those actors who seek to act disruptively within their region or the world. Consequently, his support for Bush's decision is consistent within the arc of his career's work. To his lasting credit, Barnett is one of a handful of thinkers ahead of the curve in seeing the chronic needs that reveal themselves once the conventional war is over. Some may read this section of Great Powers and at a minimum get sidetracked, or worse misunderstand, the very practical orientation of the book towards how power should be effectively used.

Regardless of the reader's belief about the rightness or wrongness of going into Iraq, this brief section may come across as attempting to combine the right objective with an inadequate justification and incomplete execution. Taken together, the argument can appear uneven. At some level Barnett seems to accept this, wanting to focus primarily on how America moves forward from the mistakes of its past.

In Great Powers, the main emphasis is on suggesting a new foreign policy which is intensely pragmatic. Barnett advocates a balanced, but forward-thinking, view of what America can accomplish, through what he calls "A Twelve-Step Recovery Program for American Grand Strategy". Much of Barnett's 12 steps rest on the first, "Admit that we Americans are powerless over globalization." (pg 37) To Barnett, this is no admission of weakness, rather a realization born of strength, and a consequence of ideological victory.
In this regard, his thoughts on China are compelling: if China was going to set aside its communist ways and re-enter the global economy, how else was it going to do so other than by becoming the world's factory? Did we expect it to go from a deeply withdrawn country, lacking industry and technology, with a chronic need to feed itself, to a nation competing on innovation in the space of a decade? Two? Barnett deeply wants Americans reading his book to wrestle with their own history, specifically when the US economy had its own predatory habits. By positioning much of his 12 steps within America's own challenges while it developed, Barnett hopes to introduce some maturity and patience into our expectations for China.

A number of the 12 steps show a realization of how and where America's response to September 11, 2001, was misguided, such as number four, which asks that Americans to "make a searching and fearless moral inventory of the ‘global war on terror'." (pg 46) Surprisingly, much of Barnett's 12 steps involve acts of admission, or what advocates of American generational super-power status may see as unbecoming humility.

Number five requires that we "admit to the world and to ourselves the exact nature of our mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan". (pg 52) Number six is likely to force accountability for some of these mistakes because it mandates that we "work with the international community to remove the defects of wartime injustice". (pg 56).

Barnett believes that only through the admission of past mistakes can we hope to move forward, and that if we attempt and gloss over these errors, many existing and potential allies may refuse to enter new commitments and partnerships with us, fearing that we will ultimately reject forms of accountability which we find unappealing.

Later in the book, Barnett writes "America needs to approach this grand strategy with great humility, and by that I mean we need to make sure others get the credit more than we do." (pg 250) Against the backdrop of a now-gone president who seemed incapable of acknowledging error, the simplicity of this aspect of Barnett's suggestion will be deeply appealing to many readers.

The 12 steps act as preparation for America and the world to develop a new grand strategy, one Barnett believes the US still has the political capital, military capability and cultural heritage to lead. For Barnett, this strategy must have at its center greater cooperation between the US, China, Brazil and India.

This is easier said than done, because the relationship Barnett envisions between these countries would include a level of joint military activities that goes against the grain of many in the Pentagon. Not only this, but the idea of such integration and cooperation would negate the rationalization at the heart of many weapons platforms like the F-22 which require Congress and the US military to view countries including China as potential threats, instead of partners.

The backdrop of much, if not all of Great Powers, is Barnett's belief that globalization ultimately gets Americans what they really most desire: a safer, more secure world, characterized by countries with healthy middle classes that can participate in their governments through increasingly democratic means. As he writes, "What's so scary about globalization today is that it's triggering a global consciousness regarding the possibilities of individual liberty, and in doing so, it places a lot of elites in nondemocratic societies in a tough place." (pg 296)

He also believes the threat from fundamentalist Islam may not be best countered with the military. Again, Barnett does see the need for a vibrant and well-trained force, only that it is most politically effective when widely seeded from different countries and capable of dealing seriously with the aftermath of intervention. The best counter to militant Muslim extremists may be to further enable the very forces they fear, the essence of modernizing influences best carried by, and embodied through, international trade.

Similarly, whatever fear Americans have of China's true intentions, concerns that Beijing harbors some latent commitment to overthrowing the world and remaking it in Mao Zedong's image, is best addressed by bringing China more - not less - into the fold. Doing so forces its leaders to mature and choose to participate in the systems of global governance which define our economies.

Towards the end of his book, Barnett pulls from a somewhat surprising source of inspiration, president Richard Nixon, when writing: "To Nixon, without great ideas, great powers ceased to be great. And that simple maxim is the reason America's faith in itself is so crucial to the planet right now. What the rising great powers of our age present in terms of great ideas are merely successful catch-up development (eg, the China model) or integration (eg, the EU) strategies - basically, how best to engage the liberal international trade order of America's creation." (pg 418)
Beset by economic worries, aware of basic flaws in our economic thinking, critical of our ability to reshape the world through judicious use of military force or political will, Americans have forgotten that for whatever short-term losses we are experiencing now, most of the world still traces their most recent successes back to the American standard.

Barnett's Great Powers seeks to remind us of how much we still have to offer the world if we can adjust and realign our own expectations. If we believe we are the stewards of something special, something unique, something worth protecting, now is a critical time to reconnect with these beliefs.

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush by Thomas P M Barnett, Putnam Adult (February 5, 2009). ISBN-10: 0399155376. Price US$29.95, 496 pages.

Benjamin A Shobert is the managing director of Teleos Inc (Teleos - The Intelligent Way To U.S. Markets), a consulting firm dedicated to helping 'n businesses bring innovative technologies into the North American market.

 

[muse]

INTERVIEW
Redefining America's global role

The February release of Tom Barnett's latest book, Great Powers: America and the World after Bush, is the most recent in a line of bestselling books that have advocated a different model of engagement for US military power coupled to a new structure of how America can deal with threats to its safety and security. Benjamin A Shobert interviewed Dr Barnett.

Benjamin A Shobert: For readers not familiar with your past work, would you expand on what you saw as the ideas and opportunities which justified the original decision to go into Iraq?

Tom Barnett: I revisit this in my latest book, because I supported the original decision to go into Iraq. If we had made the big playing field only Afghanistan and stayed there, we would have spent the same blood - maybe not the same national treasure, but likely the same blood - in pursuit of something that would have had little strategic value to us. We would have been sucked into a quagmire of al-Qaeda's making, mixing it up with the Taliban in a "nowhere" location.

Al-Qaeda's real strategic target isn't Afghanistan or Pakistan, it's the House of Saud. Say, because of that, you know you need to deal with objects closer to the House of Saud, so you have to ask yourself "what can I do to shake up this region, to outflank al-Qaeda's regional objectives?" My thinking was that if we are going to do something to shake up a calcified Middle East, taking on Saddam made sense.

Recently I was with my kids at a museum and heard an old JFK [president John Fitzgerald Kennedy] speech on the Middle East and it occurred to me that in four decades of diplomacy we've accomplished nothing other than getting Egypt to leave Israel alone, and even that requires annual investments on our parts to both. But with the intervention in Iraq, either done well or badly, we set lasting change in motion in the region, especially in highlighting the major rivalry there, which is not between Israel and Iran but between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Benjamin A Shobert: I think some readers might struggle with your thoughts on the "exact nature of our mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan" (pg 52). Specifically, if you knew America didn't have, as you call it, a "department of everything else" to deal with the aftermath of Iraq, don't you run the risk of leaving behind an even more unstable situation than the one you inherited?

Tom Barnett: Absolutely, that was a risk. My argument was that there is no way the US military was ever going to break its Vietnam syndrome (we self deter and limit our impact on regime changes because we're not comfortable with the post-war requirements of nation-building and counter-insurgency), unless something along the lines of Iraq occurred. That's easy to say from where I'm sitting, but the long hard slog in Iraq was going to trigger a process of evolution the military needed to go through.

Looking at it as a sequence of unfolding events, Iraq will be judged by history to be relatively unimportant in a strategic sense, not unlike Britain's Boar War. It is not game-changing in the sense it is not a conflict where American "empire" had gone to die. Rather, it serves as a crucial turning point in the US military's evolution: yielding the type of military that we need so that we can step up to future challenges in this global security environment.

Benjamin A Shobert: But doesn't that mean it was going to get out of control?

Tom Barnett: Truthfully, you could say to the region, "I can't control this." If you look at what was happening in the region around 2005, the events in Iraq were triggering a load of positive change in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, etc. Granted not all of it was going to turn out well, but overall there was this sense that there was no going back and that some of the change was going to be quite meaningful.

The problem was, right at the apogee of all this churn, Bush-Cheney decided to rerun the whole [weapons of mass destruction] drama with Iran, which naturally triggered Iranian obstructionism across the board. In the end, the real stress that we trigger via Iraq in the Persian Gulf is not between Israel and Iran, but scaring the House of Saud by successfully federating Iraq.

Thus, the dynamic of what was/is happening in Iraq is more to the point than what we would have achieved by getting bogged down solely in Afghanistan. The package of international support we need now for truly stabilizing both Afghanistan and Pakistan is probably an overreach (we just don't have those relationships in line with regional great powers like India, China, Russia, Iran and Turkey).

But it seems equally clear that we just don't have the wherewithal to make that happen ourselves. Again, fixing Afghanistan really does nothing in terms of what we want to accomplish, other than continue keeping pressure on al-Qaeda. But make no mistake, we drive al-Qaeda out of that region, it will inevitably surface somewhere else, so this struggle continues.

Benjamin A Shobert: In an article you wrote for Good magazine, you referred to yourself as an economic determinist, that politics follow economics.

Tom Barnett: Yes - an economic determinist and technological opportunist.

Benjamin A Shobert: If that is the case, in the face of the current economic crisis, what prevents the world from letting politics become destructive?

Tom Barnett: The coming restructuring of international trade and the resilient structure of the international security community are two of the reasons I believe we can prevent this from becoming too destructive. I believe in what we've created here (eg, the international liberal trade order, the end of great-power war), that it's enough to pull us through.

We still have the biggest gun in the world, but that, along with our still central role in the global economy, also means that America is the one country that could derail things. That influenced my thoughts about the last presidential election - I was convinced we need a systems thinker, preferably one with economic training. Unfortunately, neither had the business training I would have liked to see; however, at least one guy [Barack Obama] was comfortable about needing to learn and not shoot from the hip. Obama is not Eurocentric, meaning he's not out to make the EU and Japan happy at the expense of the rest of the world. He's sensitive to the message of what a post-American world could look like if we play our cards badly. One thing that bothers me in his administration is the lack of Asian hands.

Benjamin A Shobert: Your writing has an inherent constructive aspect - seeing what is possible. How do you balance that against what history says about moments where our baser impulses prevail?

Tom Barnett: At this moment in time, we can certainly be subject to the same knee-jerk reactions as the late 1920s and early 1930s. Back then, smart guys had also wired a global system. But the difference this time is that the people in the system, like China - it's their own money. Last time the players such as China were captive, their role was muted. Their own countries were really in other nations' imperial orbits, financial flows were almost entirely bilateral. This time the connectivity is so vast, and the players with stakes in this are not just Europe and America. That having been said, we do have some immature players, so despite the safeguards in the system, people can still do bad things.

What scares me now is that because the so-called "Bretton Woods II" (America consumes and Asia exports) falls apart early, we need China to traverse a lot of development time very quickly - in effect, mature as a global power at a much faster pace. We need to have an understanding and mentoring relationship with China. If I had my druthers, I would ask for six more years - China would have become stronger and would have more confident leaders in that time frame. I want America to allow China's leaders to mature, meaning we need to show patience. That means we're going to have to stretch out crises, and de-escalate things. Because if we pile on and force too many decisions now, Beijing is going to make bad ones.

Benjamin A Shobert: You say that America is the "source code" of the world's globalization. Where do you see China having to modify this source code for itself?

Tom Barnett: Simply because of the size of China's middle class, and the country next door [India] that is so much like them in its rise, they are going to have to develop leadership - in particular on matters like the environment and a commitment to a diplomatic approach - that I think will be somewhat unique.

In America at the start of the 20th century, the role of lawyers in arbitration within our economy gave us a similar mindset regarding international relations. Our instinct to "fix" the system - however naive - helped. We need to get China into the same mindset. In some ways, they still have a very weak view of their own leadership, and we need them to take more responsibility in response to the bad things that happen around the world. We have probably caught the next generation of leadership in China too soon - they aren't quite ready yet. They are still learning that language, which, if delivered badly on the international stage, can cause things to escalate.

We also need them to be more experimental while they are conscious of how they impact the world - not just saying "we're here to do business". As an example, the US and China have complimentary roles in Africa. We see a ton of bad things happening in Africa with a limited ability of our military to deal with al-Qaeda popping up. When Chinese go to Africa they say "I see something not that different from home"; they are in a frontier-integrating mode (just like in China's western interior) and we need them to take some additional responsibility for the role they are going to play in Africa.

Africa is a tabula rosa for the US, India and China - none of us have colonial interests there. Instead, we now have overlapping, complimentary interests. So we could do good things and set good examples of how to reach the bottom of the pyramid with environmentally friendly products and technologies and infrastructure development.

Benjamin A Shobert: Which of your 12 Steps has the recent financial turbulence made least likely and the most problematic?

Tom Barnett: On some level, the temptation is to start with the first one, admit that Americans are powerless over globalization: the knee-jerk reaction in times of stress is that you do things to protect yourself. You could pursue every advantage you can within the existing rule-set to do this, but if you start to break rules, it's a sign of desperation. That mindset is probably the biggest obstacle.

The last step [that America must try to sell the grand strategy to the world and make globalization truly global], is sort of like the culminating statement of Alcoholics Anonymous: we've gone through the first 11 steps and now we're going to go through life confidently and spread the good news [about globalization]. These two steps are sort of the alpha and omega of my vision. Consequently, no one can screw it up like we can by forgetting who we are. The rest of the system recognizes that we are its progenitor - when they see us break a rule we send a signal to the rest of the world that they can as well. In the short term you may get what you want, but in the longer term you'll trigger fear, which you don't want.

Benjamin A Shobert: Can you narrow that concern down to what you believe Americans need to do, be mindful of and advocate for from their leaders?

Tom Barnett: Read about our history during our post-Civil War integration of the American West and how we knitted together a sectional economy into a networked, continental economy. Look at how bad and nasty we were back then. The booms and busts we went through back then are highly predictive of what others are going to go through now as we knit together regional economies into a truly globalized one.

Back then, our internal integration process was tough, with lots of unequal growth, and we needed periods where things recalibrated - when the ethos of people like Horatio Alger flourished - self-made men. These times were also when many of our community groups were founded and our leisure society began. We can translate those past dynamics to China, and apply what we learned to the emerging global middle class. We need to ask ourselves how we can encourage civic institutions and the soft power they represent within these countries.

We also have to look at how we view religious institutions, to see them as a way of enabling positive transformative change in cultures. As many of these countries experience dramatic change, they wrestle with how to hold onto a moral code. There was much goodness that came out of the various “great awakenings” of religious fervor in the United States. In many ways, as we became more religious as a society, we also became more pluralistic and nondenominational (ie, tolerant of competition among religions for believers).

This allows for a certain personal stability for all of us: I maintain a wall between what I don't want in my home but what I will allow in my society. That impulse is something we need to feed in Islam and could be a progressive force in China as well. China starts out historically as a wonderfully rich spiritual country and then Mao [Zedong] hijacks its spiritual heritage. The religious desire of Chinese is a power that can be co-opted for social good, as it was in America's "progressive era" at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. Globalization has a lot that needs to be cleaned up.

If I'm trying - at the same time - to deal with a religious awakening like what I'm seeing in China and across much of the developing world, because globalization is integrating a lot of traditional societies into the modern world, we need to view that less as a danger and more like an opportunity. In this aspect, post-religious Europe is not the model, we are. In America, we have successfully integrated numerous nationalities and religions within a multinational union that is - in many ways - globalization in miniature.

I also believe we have to rethink where we prioritize our partnerships. In my opinion, China, India and Brazil - in that order - are the top three long-term allies for the US going forward; they are more important than Europe or Russia, largely because of demographics. If I have these three nations with me, I have a quorum of the world's rising powers, and, because we're talking about the future world they're going to live in, they have a clear stake in making it happen.

The problem in Europe is aging - consequently they have a very short strategic time horizon. "Mr & Mrs Chindia" - those countries' new middle class - is the real system-changer in this century. Speaking as the rest of the world: my whole life is going to revolve around trying to make them happy. The 21st century is going to be about making their rise possible and sustainable in an environmental sense: eg, making them mobile, getting them more plugged into the grid and shaping their middle-class ideology along the way.

How the middle class was handled in Europe was badly bungled in the early 20th century, yielding Bolshevism and fascism. If I'm right about global demographics, if you want to get global pluralism and democracy, people in the middle class are critical. We managed this process successfully in America, and we can do this again on a global scale and essentially re-run much of the American experiment there, yielding a pervasively democratic world across this century.

Benjamin A Shobert is the managing director of Teleos Inc (Teleos - The Intelligent Way To U.S. Markets), a consulting firm dedicated to helping Asian businesses bring innovative technologies into the North American market.

 

[muse]

The Rites of War

Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change, Michael Vlahos, Praeger Security International, 260 pages

Michael Lind


In a brilliant scene early in Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change, Michael Vlahos describes how he walked the battlefield of Fredericksburg on the eve of the 145th anniversary of the Civil War battle: “This Victorian Fallujah took 9,000 Union shells. It was America’s first real street fighting, its first urban combat, and it was not pretty. Lee remarked that the Vandals could not have looted a town better.” To show that the mentality of the religious martyr is far from alien in America, he quotes a wounded Southern soldier: “I was not only unafraid to die, but death seemed to me a welcome messenger. Immediately there came over my soul such a burst of the glories of heaven, such a foretaste of its joys, as I have never before experienced. The New Jerusalem seemed to rise before me. … I was wholly unconscious of any tie that bound me to earth.” Vlahos asks, “Was their sacrifice so different from Taliban who ambush that armored American patrol, phat with Predator-C41SR?”

As this passage suggests, Fighting Identity is not a typical book on U.S. strategy. It is unconventional no less in its literary style than in its historical sweep. It is as though George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” had been rewritten by Arnold Toynbee in the manner of Thomas Carlyle.

Michael Vlahos is a fellow and principal at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He is also a former director of security studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. His career includes service in the Navy, the CIA, and the State Department, where I had the privilege of serving with him for a time in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Brilliant and unorthodox, with a broader range of experience and a deeper erudition than most better known scholars can draw upon, he is always fascinating and in this book is at the height of his powers as an analyst who tries to understand politics the only way that it can be understood: from inside the skulls of human beings.

Although the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey sought to ground the human sciences in Einfühlung, or empathy, the attempt to understand people from within is not a methodology valued by conventional social science, which in recent generations has been afflicted by economics envy—game theory, rational choice—even as economics suffers from physics envy. Vlahos is a rigorous thinker, though his rigor does not come dressed in equations and does not posit a world of profit-maximizing individuals. He describes his method as “a synthesis of anthropology and history. Anthropology offers a holistic guide for thinking about human culture: our thought and action. History is the observed record of human thought and action.”

At the heart of Fighting Identity is a theory of historical change worthy of Toynbee or Ibn Khaldun. Most comparisons of the U.S. with Rome are jejune: we have stadium sports and corrupt senators and mighty legions. Vlahos goes beyond such trite parallels to argue that the U.S. is not an ordinary nation-state but a “system leader,” a civilizational power like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire. The system leader is “a universalistic identity framework tied to a state. This vantage is helpful because the United States clearly owns this identity framework today.” Having vanquished its last great-power rivals during the Cold War, the U.S. is now undergoing a metamorphosis from one kind of entity to another, a metamorphosis that is unsought and unplanned but not unprecedented:

After success, system leaders inhabit a worldview of iron conservatism. After all, they are defending not ‘the nation’ but rather its universalist vision. … But how to defend everywhere with limited resources? ... First, grow and harden the administrative and regulatory bureaucracy to maximize revenue. Second, with this tax bounty, reify and militarize the state. This in no way implies militarizing the society; indeed, the society’s movement away from martial ardor is the core motivation for the state to assume the security burden. ... Hence the state effectively grows and separates to become its own subculture, or rather, a constellation of state subcultures, military and bureaucratic. …The vast American ‘Tribal confederacy’ of military societies, intelligence agencies, and defense contractors is the legacy of Cold War.

Vlahos is savage toward technocrats in the military-industrial intelligentsia who define jihadism as a policy problem to be solved by techniques like “counterinsurgency” and “nation-building.” Of one such American, he writes that “when it came to the nonstate world he had the emotional toughness and steely intent of a Victorian district officer riding herd on Her Majesty’s domains, save just one thing: the district officer’s kit would likely have packed several full canteens of cultural empathy.”

What makes Vlahos essential reading is his perception, based on a profound personal and scholarly knowledge of the contemporary U.S. military as well as history ancient and modern, that while there may be technocratic strategists, there are no technocrat soldiers. Soldiers on both sides—the Roman Empire and the barbarian tribe, the Pax Americana and the nonstate terrorist—belong to communities, treasure their identities, and fight on behalf of creeds.

“The original American Way of War was insurgency, the war of the armed citizen, the militiaman: the Republic,” Vlahos writes. He warns that the republican creed that originally inspired the American citizen-soldier is giving way, among America’s professional soldiers, to a warrior ethic at odds with the values of civilian society and resembling the warrior ethics of military professionals in other times and places. Vlahos is troubled by the emergence of what he sees as a military subculture that in many ways is also a military counterculture. “We are no longer a fighting society. Hence the emergence after three generations of an intercessor nation: The Tribal Confederacy. … The reality of a forever-altered American ethos shows why and how Bowie, Travis, and Crockett could be replaced in the ‘warrior’ heart by the 300.”

According to Vlahos, “The confederacy grew up in the Cold War, where the tribal confederacy was everywhere needed—and presumably, for eternity.” This military subculture has its own distinctive ethos: “History’s greatest professional armies—including our own—also embody deep cultural convictions, even if they are unacknowledged, that make for identity power.” As a result of the “forever war” against enemies real and imagined, in which the vanished Soviet threat was soon replaced in the American imagination by a vaguely defined, pervasive, and universal terrorist threat, Vlahos sees a “formal separation of American national identity” into civilian and military subcultures … on one side the regular, maybe-voting American citizen is held in contempt by a hoplite of the 300 and the millions who are citizens of the confederacy. Likewise, on the other side, the regular guy sees the digital-camo dude like he was a Roman legionnaire or a space Marine in Halo 3: honored, but also alien and afar.”

In the very process of waging first the Cold War and then what the Pentagon has called the “Long War” or the “War on Terror” or GSAVE (Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism), the military and the U.S. itself have been warped by America’s enemies, who in turn are changed by and defined against the United States. After 9/11, “America’s leaders out of their own prophecy saw apocalyptic war: a full-blown Great War in which humanity would be redeemed through altruistic military action.” For their part, jihadists are acting out solipsistic, anachronistic cultural rituals that they mistake for politics and strategy. Young jihadists think of themselves as medieval Muslim knights, while young American soldiers refer to Iraqis as “Indians” as though Mesopotamia were the Wild West. “It is not simply that Western—or U.S.—military units are forced to fight the enemy’s war, in the enemy’s battle environment,” writes Vlahos. “Far more significantly we fight as world managers against mythic heroes sacrificing themselves for ‘the river’ of their particular humanity. … The role we play as the Other in their passion play—evil, weak, even subhuman—is central to a cultural ritual that is almost primitive in its emotional intensity and passionate symbolism.”

Vlahos is profoundly American in his dread that the pressures of engagement with the world could make America less American. “My prescription is hardly original and almost ordinary: National Service. All citizens. No exceptions. Reintegrate American national identity.” But he recognizes that his longing for the citizen-soldier is nostalgic: “I know this will not happen.” The reader is left to wonder whether a nation divided between centurions and consumers can still be described as a republic.
__________________________________________

Michael Lind, the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of The American Way of Strategy.

 

[muse]

Jihad goes on in Pakistan
by Khaled Ahmed

The Fluttering Flag of Jehad

By Amir Mir Mashal Books Lahore 2008 Pp306; Price Rs 700

Amir Mir has developed into an informed commentator on the state of jihad with an uncomfortable inside track with those who are supposed to counter it in Pakistan. Of course jihad has unfortunately become another name for terrorism and those who have taken it out of the roster of the functions of the state and privatised it are to blame for this development.

Amir Mir was able to interview Benazir Bhutto just before she fell to the terrorism of Al Qaeda or whoever it was who assassinated her in December 2007. She thought Pervez Musharraf was secretly in league with the terrorists and had tried to kill her in Karachi in October 2007, and was sure he would get terrorists like Abdur Rehman Otho of Lashkar-e Jhangvi and Qari Saifullah Akhtar of Harkat Jihad Islami, protégés of the ISI, to do the job. She named Brigadier Ijaz Shah and Brigadier Riaz Chibb etc. in her final writings. She predicted her death and blamed it on the army; months later, Major General Faisal Alvi too predicted his own death at the hands of the army and was shot down in Islamabad.

Musharraf claimed that Benazir was killed by Baitullah Mehsud through his suicide-bombers whose minder was taped talking to him on the phone about the achievement. Evidence in place was destroyed by the establishment, and questions arising from her murder could not be answered although Al Qaeda was at first quoted in the press as having taken care of ‘the most precious American asset’ in the words of Mustafa Abu Yazid, the Al Qaeda commander in Afghanistan. Benazir had her moles inside the ISI (p.28); but Amir doesn’t accept that Baitullah Mehsud killed her and gives a convincing critique of the findings of Scotland Yard.

Now a lot of writers use inside information from the US government to claim that Musharraf was sympathetic to the Taliban as they fled from the US attack in 2001. Amir Mir tells us that Corps Commander Peshawar General Safdar Hussain, who signed the peace accord with Baitullah Mehsud at Sararogha near Wana in February 2005, had called him a soldier of peace even as Mehsud’s warriors shouted ‘Death to America’. Major General Faisal Alvi was to accuse some elements in the army high command of being on the side of the Taliban before his assassination in 2008. Baitullah rewarded General Hussain with 200 captured Pakistani troops in August 2007.

Benazir believed Qari Saifullah Akhtar was involved in the attempt on her life in Karachi in October 2007 (p.43). Qari was in prison for trying to kill Musharraf in 2004 and was sprung from there to do the job on Benazir. Musharraf was outraged when he got to know that an ISI protégé had tried to kill him from his safe haven in Dubai after fleeing from Afghanistan in 2001. Qari was special because he was rescued by the spooks after he was found involved in trying to stage a military coup in league with Islamist fanatic Major General Zaheerul Islam Abbasi in 1995. He along with his Harkat Jihad Islami was to become the favourite of the Taliban government.

The place to be mined for leadership talent was Karachi’s Banuri Mosque where the Qari and that other protégé Fazlur Rehman Khalil had received their Deobandi orientation. The third Banuri Mosque protégé of the state was Maulana Masud Azhar, who formed Jaish-e Muhammad and was rescued from an Indian jail together with Omar Sheikh, the man who later helped kill Daniel Pearl in Karachi. Qari was recalled from Dubai and kept in custody, and the Lahore High Court did not release him on a habeas corpus petition. But he was released quietly before Benazir arrived in Pakistan in October 2007 (p.45).

After Benazir named him in her posthumous book, Qari was arrested again in March 2008. The reaction came in the shape of a suicide attacks on the Naval War College and the FIA office in Lahore where Qari’s terrorists were being kept for interrogation into the War College attack (p.47). A Karachi terrorist court heard the case against Qari and freed him on bail because the proof with which the prosecution could have proved him guilty had ‘disappeared’. Later he was rearrested but then quietly released by the Home Department because the spooks wanted him freed (p.48).

Fazlur Rehman Khalil is another protected person who lives in Islamabad but governments hardly know what he has been saying to the American authors who visit him. When Islamabad got into trouble with its own clerics in Lal Masjid, it was Khalil who was taken out and made to negotiate with them (p.109). He is the sort of person who can some day get Pakistan into trouble after which Islamabad will have to say he has mysteriously left the country and cannot be produced. He is Osama bin Laden’s man and his Harkatul Mujahideen was prominent among the jihadi organisations in Kashmir and ran training camps for warriors in Dhamial just outside Rawalpindi, at least that is what an American suspect Hamid Hayat told the FBI after visiting it (p.108).

It is not only Dr AQ Khan whom Pakistan has to save from being kidnapped by the anti-proliferationist West, there is also Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the top scientist who enriched uranium at Khushab and then conferred with Osama bin Laden about building a nuclear bomb when he was in Kabul looking after his charity organisation called Umma Tameer Nau (p.111). He is the crazy bearded man who once presented a paper to General Zia saying Pakistan could make electricity from jinns. He also thought he could use a nuclear bomb to clear up a silted Tarbela Dam. Daniel Pearl was on to him, but he got killed when he got close to another protected person.

The other person was Mubarak Shah Gilani, a scion of the great Sufi of Lahore, Mianmir, who actually controlled jinns and ran a jihadi organisation named Al Fuqra still alive and doing well in the UK’s Londonistan. He had recruited Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber terrorist who was caught before he could blow up an aircraft. Daniel Pearl had traced Mubarak Shah Gilani to Karachi and was going to interview him when he was tricked by Omar Sheikh into going with Lashkar-e Jhangvi gunmen who then handed him over to Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, who confessed at Guantanamo to personally beheading him (p.116). Omar Sheikh, who got involved in planning the 9/11 strike, was finally made to surrender after sheltering in home secretary and ex-ISI officer Ijaz Shah’s residence in Lahore for a week.

The book says on page 122 that the ISI chief General Mehmood was later investigated by FBI for sending $100,000 to plane hijacker Atta, who led the 9/11 strike on the World Trade Centre. The conduit for Mehmood was Omar Sheikh. The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pearl’s paper, reported that an examination of Omar Sheikh’s telephone record showed him talking to General Mehmood, proving also that the money sent by General Mehmood through Omar Sheikh was funding for the New York strike (p.122). General Musharraf in his book reported, as if in rebuttal, that Omar Sheikh was first recruited by the British spy agency MI6.

The book also reports that the hijacking — done by Masood Azhar’s brother Abdul Rauf and brother-in-law Yusuf Azhar — of an Indian airliner that led to the release of Omar Sheikh and Masood Azhar from an Indian jail was linked to the ISI because its Quetta-based officers talked to the hijackers on the wireless set at Kandahar (p.128). Masood Azhar then went on to attack the Parliament in New Delhi in 2001, a month after 9/11. ISI chief Javed Ashraf Qazi on March 6, 2004 admitted that Jaish was involved in the New Delhi parliament assault (p.134). Later Jaish militants were to be housed in Lal Masjid during its siege by state troops in 2007 (p.141).

An interesting chapter is included on the infiltration of the Pakistani cricket team by the Tablighi Jama’at. As a result, the team under captain Inzamam-ul Haq lost its playing ability to its obsession with tabligh and conversion. Media manager PJ Mir accused the team of neglecting the game during the 2007 World Cup and spending all the time trying to convert the innocent people of the West Indies (p.204). *

 

[Xeric]

Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terror

Author: David Cole

Publisher: The New Press

Date of Publication: 2003, pp. 316.

For many of us in the Muslim world, the US detention centre based in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has emerged as a symbol of injustice and abuse. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the Bush Administration has pursued a relentless policy of pursuit and persecution of ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’. The word ‘terrorism’ itself has given the administration in the US a wide canvas on which to operate. Its policy includes not only direct military intervention and preemptive measures for rooting out ‘terrorism’, but also to capture, detain and persecute all those accused of being involved and associated with ‘terrorist’ networks.

In his pocket book, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terror, the situation at Guantanamo Bay is a major focus of David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Centre and a volunteer staff attorney at the Centre for Constitutional Rights in Washington DC.

President Bush designated the over 650 Guantanamo prisoners, captured in Afghanistan and Iraq after November 2001, as “enemy combatants” — as opposed to prisoners of war, who would be entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions (pp. 22- 46). The Bush Administration has taken the position that the “enemy combatants” — captured mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan and where they are alleged to have been fighting for the Taliban or Al-Qaeda — are not entitled to attorneys, or even to hearings to determine if they are being wrongfully held. As of December 2007, around 275 people remain at the detention centre in Cuba and the Pentagon says another 60 inmates are now eligible for transfer or release.

Consequently, concerned agencies in the US have increasingly been involved in secret detentions, tortures, renditions, and indefinite detentions without charge, flouting not only basic international human rights principles, but also bypassing the US legal system. Such practices have affected people both outside the US (in the name of ‘war on terror’) and inside the US (under the ‘Patriot Act’ of October 2001). And this is the theme that runs constantly throughout the book.

Cole’s thesis finds the root of today’s ‘War on Terror’ in the ‘Cold War’. To explain the parallels, he discusses several cases in which he represented defendants alleged to be communists, or were alleged to be aiding and abetting communist organizations. The government’s modus operandi was: target, snoop, charge, and deport. According to Cole, even at that time, the FBI admitted that it never found evidence of criminal or terrorist activity, yet insisted on deportation proceedings (pp. 85-182).

Cole argues that the same tactics are now being repeated against those who seem “suspicious”. But while yesterday it were the communists, today it is the Muslims and Arabs who are being targeted under laws amended as part of the USA Patriot Act, commonly known as the Patriot Act signed by President Bush in October 2001. He maintains that in balancing liberty and security, the US has consistently relied on a double standard, imposing measures on foreigners that the Americans would not tolerate if applied more broadly to all of them. Cole warns that while such a double standard is politically easy, it is constitutionally suspect, counter-productive as a security measure, and ultimately illusory, because history shows that acceptance of such treatment for outsiders paves the way for similar measures against American citizens. Cole points out that those who believed this treatment would never be applied to Americans have been proven very wrong indeed (pp. 183-208). To the contrary, American citizens such as Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla have now been declared “enemy combatants” as well on allegations only. Neither citizen has been charged with a crime, nor have they been afforded access to a lawyer (pp. 1-5).

Besides the treatment of “enemy combatants” — both citizens and non-citizens — Cole’s other major concern is post-September 11 immigration proceedings. Immediately after September 11, the government rounded up thousands of Arab and Muslim men. It held them without charges and without access to attorneys or their families for far longer than the law allowed. With the facts provided by Cole, it seems absurd that former Attorney General John Ashcroft and his Department of Justice touted such deportations as evidence of fighting and winning the “war on terror.” It seems more like a war on immigrants. Cole criticizes all of these tactics as both strategic and human rights failures. From a strategic point of view, Cole argues that if the US indeed has reason to believe that terrorists are lurking in Arab and Muslim immigrant communities, then it ought to work with the communities to identify the threats. Instead, however, it has discriminatorily targeted these ethnic groups for selective prosecution for immigration violations. The result, Cole says, is a loss of goodwill among these communities. And that loss, he contends, will have a long-term negative effect both on the “war on terrorism” and on US relationships with Arab and Muslim communities both at home and abroad (pp-211-227). One cannot help avoid an ugly conclusion: The US government is using the “war on terror” as a justification for selectively targeting and prosecuting foreign nationals from Arab and Muslim countries, virtually none of whom have ever been remotely involved with terrorism.

Cole’s Enemy Aliens deftly presents the legal issues that abound in the treatment of immigrants post-September 11. Granted, he concedes, the Supreme Court has long allowed the differential treatment of alien fighters captured on battlefield abroad. But that ruling does not extend to aliens who are not fighting against the US. And that may be the case with respect to a significant number of those still being held in Guantanamo Bay. Moreover, it was certainly the case with those illegally detained after September 11. Cole’s most passionate argument is that the way the US government has treated immigrants is morally and constitutionally wrong. Indeed, Cole argues that the only morally acceptable option is a simple one: to treat them as human beings entitled to the same fundamental rights as citizens. But the US government, especially since September 11, 2001 has fallen terribly short of this ideal.

Enemy Aliens is a recommended read for anyone interested in the profound legal and governmental changes the US has seen since September 11 — and, especially, for anyone concerned about the harms those changes have inflicted on civil liberties. While those directly impacted by the US ‘war on terror’ and its legal ramifications currently happen to be Muslims and people of Arab origin, the book serves as a warning for Americans to worry about the way their government treats immigrants, for it has and will continue to have an impact on the way it will treat its own citizens.


Najam Rafique

 

[fatman17]

Barker on books

'Other Rooms' offers glimpse of Pakistan

By Dan Barker (Contact)

Friday, April 24, 2009


“In Other Rooms, Other Wonders” by Daniyal Mueenuddin is a collection of existential stories which paint a picture of a different land — the changing face of Pakistan.

Since Pakistan is a center of U.S. international concern, we owe it to ourselves not to stereotype Pakistanis, and Mueenuddin’s stories can help to give a picture of life in a country perched between the Middle East and India.

This book is a compilation of short stories that have been published in The New Yorker magazine and other venues. That should come as no surprise, since Mueenuddin spent time with his mother in Wisconsin and graduated from Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, even though he lives and farms in the region he writes about.

At times conjuring up the sophistication of urban life or the seeming innocence of pastoral pursuits, Mueenuddin has a way of making words put the reader in the scene:

“Nawab each evening put the (motorcycle) on its kickstand, and waited for his (12) girls to come, all of them, around him, jumping on him. His face often at this moment had the same expression, an expression of childish innocent joy, which contrasted strangely and even sadly with the heaviness of his face and its lines and stubble.”

The same man later has to fight a life-and-death struggle to keep his motorcycle, on which his livelihood depends, or his family would be reduced to begging.

Mueenuddin writes about a Pakistan emerging from its feudal past into the industrial world, but in which its social structure is still archaic and uncertain:

“(The men) in the room, mostly provincial politicians risen from the business classes, held their phones in their hands when not speaking into them, displaying this new status symbol recently introduced in Lahore and the other big Pakistani cities.”

Their social status is ambiguous, though.

These are stories of people touched in one way or another by fictional feudal landowner and lord KK. Harouni — whether as lover, servant, relative or distantly — during the days of his decline, a symbol of the change that is happening in the country.

It is an in-between time, when even “salaried” men, which means people who work for a company, are considered servants, almost slaves from our American perspective.

Everyone is either master or servant, and those who do not fit that mold are confusing to others:

“She behaved and spoke ... (as) neither rich nor poor, neither servant nor (ruling class), in a city where the very concept of a middle class still found expression in only a few households...,” Mueenuddin writes.

Everything in these people’s lives is about how much money a person has, who one marries — and burning a woman to death can be handled with enough bribes.

The way the whims of those who wield personal power rules everything and everyone, changing and often ruining lives, gives an insight into how this society runs, especially for the almost powerless women.

At the same time, the reader can see the simplicity of this life, even for the underclass. In one section of a story, a woman is washing clothes for her mistress from a garden faucet.

“She felt happier perhaps than she ever had,” Mueenuddin says, as she sits in an opulent garden amid a country estate. Small moments make up the lives of the characters and, one senses, of many Pakistanis.

In this book we hear firsthand about the lives of rulers and servants alike in a poor land which is full of pride, honor and, sometimes, the foolishness of humans everywhere.

Pakistan is not like the U.S. These people do not perceive the world or fellow humans in the same way as Americans, and this book is one easy way to get a feel for that.

Don’t settle for my explanation, give it a try.

Contact Dan Barker at business@fmtimes.com.

 

[Elmo]

It's not a review but a column by Fisk on books. Didn't know the relevant section to post it, so pasting it here.


Robert Fisk's World: Everyone wants to be an author, but no one is reading books

Our dependency on computers is destroying our ability to ‘deep read’


Saturday, 25 April 2009



I blame technology. The internet, email – neither of which I use – and the accursed laptop. I curse the laptop for two reasons. Firstly because I use it. Secondly because it encourages hopeless authorship. It's not that everyone with a laptop thinks they can write a book. The problem is that everyone with a laptop does write a book.


They arrive by the dozen, in my Beirut mail bag, unsolicited on my Beirut doorstep, in my European mail. A few are brilliant. Most are awful. They are packed with misspellings, bad grammar and often pseudo-anthropological jargon. "An Ontology of Abstraction and Concreteness" is the subtitle of one heavy volume I was generously handed after giving a lecture in Ottawa. "The Arab Mind as a Function of a Rational Epistemic Orientation" one chapter is entitled. "From Multidimensional Thinking to Dual and Dichotomous Thinking: The State of Intellectual Retreat," reads another. "Social Catalysts of Cultural Collapse." And on and on.

The foundation of the book isn't bad: that Westerners and Arabs think in different ways. The author uses four precious pages to describe the strengths of Arabic – the language is easier to spell than English; words for commonly used objects rarely overlap; it has a remarkable capacity for brevity; its verbal roots allow Arabic to coin new terms – but the book is buried in quotations from Nietzsche. "Negation of Negating Entities" is another chapter subtitle. The book almost has "Do Not Read" printed on the cover.

And this is far better than most. Many are in manuscript – there simply is, understandably, no publisher – and far too many are privately published. There may only be 10 copies in existence, but the writer can then call himself an "author" and bore us all. And can give me a conscience. I once chucked an unreadable manuscript PhD thesis on Pakistani literary "tropes" into my bin, but was conscious-stricken for weeks. However awful the work, I felt like a Nazi book-burner. Henceforth, I would lug numerous volumes around with me to leave in hotel rooms. Maybe the bellboy in Seattle would be interested in a history of anti-Zionism or the Filipina maid in Dubai in a doctoral thesis on Libyan flora. I gave several books on south-west Asia to my cook in Beirut – a lady from Togo – who absorbed every one and, I have to admit, predicted the murder of Benazir Bhutto weeks before her assassination.

But the hi-tech anthropological language now infects even lecture invitations. Not long ago, I received a letter from the "conference co-ordinator" of a major Canadian university which shall remain nameless. (A rich province of that great nation will be my only clue.) I was asked to give a 45-minute presentation to the meeting whose aim was "to challenge the mainstream hegemonic and ethnocentric discourse about radicalism and extremism ... in order to gain a better understanding of the multidimensionality of the problem". Needless to say, I let that one go by.

But how do I account for an even more recent laptop letter from the undergraduate head of a major British university debating society – the location of this academy is north-west of Hartlepool, in a riverside city with a 12th-century cathedral – who invited me to address its members. He was extending this invitation, he announced, because he found my reports on the Middle East "exstremely (sic) eluminating (sic)". Now I might just stretch some generosity to cover the misspelling of "extremely"; the X and the S are diagonally next to each other on the laptop. But the Molesworth-like "eluminating" for "illuminating"? Even the Latin origin is "illuminare". My hand reached out for my Beirut phone and I called Durham (yes, of course, this was the institution) only to have a young lady tell me that the undergraduate who wrote to me "doesn't always show his letters to me first". I guess she was the spell-checker for the debating society. I thought the laptop was supposed to do that.

I know they warn of misspelling with a red underline, which is why "recognize" rather than "recognise" and "favor" rather than "favour" keep slipping into British newspapers. But it is a fact – born out by almost every print-out that The Independent sends me – that emails are slovenly written, rife with misspellings, grammatically often incomprehensible. Trendy linguists may tell us that language is "evolving". It is not. SMSs aside – their codes are, after all, little more than a modern-day version of Morse code – emails are crippling our power to express ourselves.

Some months ago, The Independent published a long and wise article from Atlantic Monthly which suggested that the internet, Googling on laptops and dependency on computers were destroying our ability to "deep read". Readers of books, it seems, were experiencing ever greater difficulty in reading for any length of time. On a four-and-three-quarter-hour flight from Paris to Beirut, for example, I can usually read the entire French press (the paper version from the lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport) and up to 200 pages of a book.

Not so many of my fellow passengers. They put down their papers after a few minutes in the air and open up their laptop and skim through page after page of "documents". But when they turn to a book – usually a light novel – I notice that they are flicking through it. They are not reading. They are "surfing" the pages. At school, my English teachers would shout "concentrate" and "use your brains, boy". And we did. But now the internet does the concentration and the laptop is our brain. I am not alone out there. When a student in Georgia asked me two years ago if I could recommend "some good websites to learn about the Middle East", I asked him what was wrong with books. And the rest of the American students applauded my question.

I hate the "O tempora! O mores!" school of criticism. The "if-God-had-meant-us-to-fly-he-would-have-given-us-wings" argument holds no interest for me. Shouldn't the short-sighted (like me) have spectacles? It's just that I think we're so enamoured of hi-tech that we don't control it any more. We are not looking after ourselves.

 

[fatman17]

and if you cant "deep read", there's always the abridged version of the book! or one can always watch the movie version.