The unintentional humour of Pakistan's blasphemy law

...a 17-year-old schoolboy, also in Karachi, had been arrested and charged with blasphemy. His sin? Apparently he had written something objectionable while doing an exam, although nobody can be told what it was he wrote (lest they be charged with committing blasphemy-by-repetition).

-- The Economist

Beyond 'evil'

Andrew Sullivan posts an excerpt of a response from the DiA blog commenting on the interview with a suicide bomber that he described as 'evil'. DiA is right to go into depth here. DiA concludes:

[American] Bombs can only do so much. Long after the bulk of American troops have left the region, Pakistani moderates will still be fighting the long war of ideas. And there is no guarantee that they will win.

Two comments on that: 1) American bombs probably only make things worse; and 2) No there is no guarantee the moderates in Pakistan will win. Indeed, it looks at least as likely that people with the mentality of this would-be suicide bomber will get their hands on nuclear weapons, or rather that their handlers will.

Loose nukes

The Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead.

-- Seymour Hersch

Karakoram to Kashmir

A few years ago on a hike high in the Karakoram my companion and I bumped into some blokes with fearsome thick beards and wild eyes. It turned out that most of them worked for Siemens in Karachi, and were on holiday. They were a lovely chaps: educated, sophisticated and funny.

Even though I am now the father of a small child and hardly have a brain any more, I remain vaguely aware that all kinds of stuff is happening in this part of the world (including, on the sidelines, normal eccentricities such as a polo match at Shandur Pass), not to mention 'at home'.

Nevertheless it's sobering to be reminded via Joe Romm's blog of what is likely to be an important part of the big picture:

According to an article by Stephen Faris in Foreign Policy and the IPCC, the Himalayan glacier in the Kashmir province that provides 90 percent of Pakistan’s water for agricultural irrigation will disappear by 2035 as a consequence of climate change.

Is this really what the IPCC estimate says? They may:

a) be wrong on rate of melt: it could take longer;
b) underestimate the likely rate of temperature rise;
c) ...?

Brink

The mean age for a suicide bomber is now just sixteen.

-- from Pakistan on the brink by Ahmed Rashid

Dilemma

Bob Herbert argues for more rapid draw down in Afghanistan (and Iraq). 

Ashraf Ghani argues that Afghanistan is not lost.

William Dalrymple on instability in Pakistan

The Pakistan gamble

In a thoughtful interview [1] on NPR last week, Thomas E. Ricks concluded that the struggles raging in Pakistan, not Afghanistan are key to the interests of the U.S. and its allies, but that there is no military solution here.

Fuel for the hope of building a better society in Pakistan may come in part from its writers. Of course, they can always be killed or scared off.

In the medium term, a decline in the flow of the Indus could have enormous knock-on consequences.

Footnote [1]: but Emma Sky "anti-American"?

Roll to your rifle

There’s clearly a consensus that things are heading in the wrong direction. What’s not clear to me is why sending 30,000 more troops is the essential step to changing that. My understanding of the larger objective of the allied enterprise in Afghanistan is to bring into existence something that looks like a modern cohesive Afghan state. Well, it could be that that’s an unrealistic objective. It could be that sending 30,000 more troops is throwing money and lives down a rat hole.

-- Andrew Bacevich, quoted in Obama's War: Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan.

An Obama administration may, the report says, "look for ways to press Mr. Karzai to crack down on corruption and drug trafficking." Well, that seems more likely than not to fail.

Whatever comes cannot be separated from what happens in Pakistan. Here, William Dalrymple suggests in a review of Ahmed Rashid's new book, there should be three priorities: negotiate with elements of the Taliban; reform/crack down on ISI and Pakistani military (as if!); and find ways to stop the madrasa-inspired and Saudi-financed advance of Wahhabi Islam.

Jaipur in January

We took a view at the festival that it was extremely important to keep up the cultural dialogue between Pakistan and India, and that once you start pulling the plug on writers and artists, the fanatics have won. Our Pakistani delegates are still coming, and they've got their visas despite slightly hysterical travel warnings from their own government.

William Dalrymple on the Jaipur literature fesitval in The Week in Books

Israel Iran nuclear attack

One senior intelligence official argued that as Mr. Bush prepared to leave office, the Iranians were already so close to achieving a weapons capacity that they were unlikely to be stopped.

Others disagreed, making the point that the Israelis would not have been dissuaded from conducting an attack if they believed that the American effort was unlikely to prove effective.

New York Times

(The same reporter, David Sanger, also writes on The Worst Pakistan Nightmare for Obama, such as: what happens when [the Pakistani military] move the [nuclear] weapons. The United States feared that some groups could try to provoke a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope that the Pakistani military would transport tactical nuclear weapons closer to the front lines, where they would be more vulnerable to seizure. Indeed, when the deadly terror attacks occurred in Mumbai in late November, officials told me they feared that one of the attackers’ motives might have been to trigger exactly that series of events.)

Mumbai and celebrity

Not sure this is right, but it is thought provoking:

Mumbai could represent something rather different in the history of terrorism, and possibly something far more disturbing even than global jihad. Perhaps we have come to the point where casually self-radicalised, sociopathic individuals can form a loose organisation, acquire sufficient weapons and equipment for a few thousand dollars, make a basic plan of action and indulge in a violent expression of their generalised disaffection and anomie.

Certainly, though, the attacks in Mumbai got vastly more attention in UK media (and I guess elsewhere internationally) than, for example the riots in Nigeria in which, it appears, many more people died.

1 Dec: Steve Coll

4 Dec: Armchair Generalist

5 Dec: Juan Cole

Islamabad bumps

A deep rift over anti-terror policy has opened up within Pakistan's political class, as extremist violence and an economic crisis push the country to the verge of collapse...

-- report from The Guardian. Panicky or a fair summary?

P.S. Fasih Ahmed asks whether Pakistan can stay afloat (10 Oct).

Hard choices

In a review of Simon Schama's The American Future: A History, Niall Ferguson says that in the not too far distant future Barack Obama will stand revealed as "the Chicago-schooled politico that he is". There may be something to this, although I still think Obama can be more and better than Ferguson means to imply.

That said, it's hard to see how an Obama administration will avoid the mother of all train wrecks in Afghanistan and Pakistan (on which see, e.g., Paul Rogers and Afghan 'dictator' proposed).

P.S. 5 and 6 Oct: Afghan victory hopes played down and Bloodiest year so far in Afghanistan.


Not in the pink anymore.

Next

The chaos that is engulfing Pakistan appears to represent an especially frightening case of strategic blowback, one that has now begun to seriously undermine the American effort in Afghanistan.

-- Dexter Filkins

Raw with Akpistan/Kapistan

American liberals can't quite face the fact that if [Obama] does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

-- Christopher Hitchens.

See also Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark.

Fear eats the soul

Matt Dellinger: Why haven't we found Bin Laden?

Lawrence Wright: This is one of the questions I've asked many people in the intelligence community including [Mike] McConnell [the director of U.S. National Intelligence]. First of all, we know where he is. He's in the tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan. So we have found him in that sense. Beyond that, the truth is we haven't found him because we're not really looking. Even the Pakistanis are not really looking for him...For one thing, there are very important diplomatic considerations. If we went in to Pakistan, essentially invaded it, we might undermine what is already a very volatile country. Pakistan has a nuclear bomb. They have spread nuclear technology around the world before. The prospect of a radical Islamist group taking over a nuclear armed country paralyses the American policy community. It is to them a much greater problem than even Osama Bin Laden.

Matt Dellinger: It sounds like there is some ambivalence about what we would do with him.

Lawrence Wright: It's a fascinating dilemma because if you do catch kill him you make him a martyr. He would be more powerful in death than in life. But if you capture him and put him on trial you give him a forum for his views. The head of the FBI's intelligence division said to me: "what did we do when we got Saddam Hussein? Do we want to go through that with Osama Bin Laden?"

Matt Dellinger: So what's the next generation of dangers we face?

Lawrence Wright: It can be quite terrifying. Take the example of Chinese hackers. One NSA official told me there are forty thousand of them who are constantly trying to penetrate American networks...According to the Germans, last summer many German government computers were penetrated and they blame the Chinese Army. Similarly the Pentagon had to take fifteen hundred computers offline because they had been penetrated. It's a really significant problem. As this NSA official was telling me, "how many of these Chinese hackers speak English? Virtually all of them. How many of our guys speak Mandarin? Virtually none." So he says we should never get into a hacking war with the Chinese. As for other dangers, well one of the things McConnell worries about is weaponising some virus like the Avian flu, which could kill tens of millions maybe even hundreds of millions of people.

(This a rough transcript, not word for word, excerpted from What we know on The New Yorker web site)

Bhutto's death 'good news'

A counterintuitive and literate analysis from Shashi Tharoor. But is it right?

Us, worried?

"Our assessment is that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal is under control," said Pentagon spokesman Colonel Gary Keck. "At this time, we have no need for concern."

-- Pentagon readies plans for Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

P.S. David Remnick quotes Mary Anne Weaver's 1993 description of Benazir Bhutto:

She is part Radcliffe and Oxford, with an extremely well-stocked mind, full of feminist literature, peace marches, the Oxford Union, and with a very liberated social life. She is also part feudal Sindh, a haughty aristocrat, the daughter and granddaughter of immensely wealthy landlords, whose inheritance gave her the right to rule. . . . She is an Eastern fatalist by birth, a Western liberal by conviction, and a people-power revolutionary—who has carefully modelled herself on Evita Perón and Corazon Aquino—through sheer necessity. She is an expensively educated product of the West who has ruled a male-dominated Islamic society of the East. She is a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties.

P.S. 30 Dec: Sound analysis, as ever, from William Dalrymple, who writes that Bhutto, a product of elective feudalism, failed to pass a single piece of major legislation during her first 20-month premiership.

'Pakistan, Bush and the bomb'

-- from Jonathan Schell.

Pakistan emergency

See the Avaaz blog. (Also, TomDispatch notes Todd Gitlin's suggestion "How about this for a Democratic slogan: Who Lost Pakistan?")

[P.S. 8 Nov: Dowd on Mushy in Uniform, and letters reflecting the complexity and intractability of the matter.]