Defining terror: Better late than never? by Ahad Khan
Guest article by Ahad Khan
In his recent article “Home Free: Waging War on Ourselves,” Ethan Casey writes about what I know as “the American dream” or, as he calls it, “the ugly truth buried beneath the manicured lawns of the American suburbs.”
As a person of Pakistani heritage, I didn’t need help to notice the near exact parallel between the history of black people in America on one hand, and the plight of the U.S. government’s ghosts somewhere in “Afpakistan” on the other. I am talking about the victims of America’s drone war in the “Af-Pak” border region, home to the folks who supposedly hate the American way of life (courtesy U.S. presidents of the past decade). If we are to believe their advocates, Predator drones are so advanced that they even have their own conscience. You don’t have to worry about them mistakenly firing on women and children alike.
Our world’s affairs have arrived at a confusing point. Wars between different countries, overt and covert, increasingly appear to be conflicts between civilizations. I should not say that we can’t tell where it may lead us during the course of our own generation. History has clearly taught us time and again that struggles for freedom become inevitable wherever people are forced to live with a feeling of being suppressed. It was just such a struggle that gave birth to an America that dreamt of liberty and justice for all. It was such a struggle that solemnized the rights of the black people of America, through the brilliance of heroes like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
It was that same struggle that led to the creation of Pakistan, by a nation of people that – like black Americans – had grown sick and tired of being denied equal treatment in their own society. It is this freedom that we, as human beings, have shown to hold so dear, that it has served to justify our restless campaigns for the rights we demanded to live in honour and dignity.
It is no less amazing what man would do to defend what he perceives to be his freedom, or any symbol that represents it. While it still holds true that the horrific events of 9/11 raised more questions than answers (technically speaking), who would dare to challenge the notion that the USA was dealt a devastating blow to its core beliefs? To repair America’s presumably unshakeable spirit of justice, someone was going to have to pay. A determined U.S. military thus engaged in a worldwide war on ‘terror’. Over a decade later, we find the same forces holed up in Afghanistan, unwelcome and surrounded from all directions. Their enemies (those that were meant to be paid back) are stronger than they were at any point during the course of the war and easily project effective control over most of the country. The lack of a clearly defined war strategy is just one rampant example out of many to show how American leadership is completely clueless about what it’s doing there. But at least bin Laden’s dead. Mission accomplished, whatever it’s been.
As the world looks at its old ally today – they who slammed the lid on Hitler’s coffin – it’s been curious to know what the USA really aims to achieve. As America’s government continues to pursue ‘the terrorists’, it has made that country itself into the biggest victim of terror. Before anyone jumps me for contradicting other countries’ body counts: terror succeeds where people allow themselves to be terrorized; you can’t terrorize the dead. Thus, in my humble opinion, the primary victims of terror are not those that are now laid to rest in their graves; they’re the people amongst us who are ready to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of the mirage that’s presented as “threats to national security.” Those who refused to come to terms with their defeat once, failing to learn from it, are thereby damned to fail in future.
In my humble opinion the Obama administration does know that it had failed, long before the latest breakdown in relations with Pakistan after Pakistani soldiers were attacked without reason. When was the last time you heard any U.S. government official tell the world that they’re trying to “win the hearts of minds” of people on the other side of the world? They never intended to bomb their hearts and minds out, it depends on the means chosen to aim at the target. The tendencies that champion the death sentence as a means for the sake of internal security, favor the use of drones when it comes to external security.
As much as we’ve suffered as Pakistanis under America’s misleading wars, I can’t help but feel sorry for America. As this great nation’s ideology is its biggest victim of war, the defeat couldn’t be greater. The rampant paranoia at present about hunting “terrorists” does not represent the example America gave to the rest of the world in the course of the previous century. Sadly, most of our generation will remember it by the images of a shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist. Pakistan and the emerging Arab nations will learn what democracy is on their own. They’ll take an example in future of what happened in America when people allowed themselves to be governed by fear instead of by a determined leadership. Justice will be sought and found, even by some of those people that the knights of freedom would describe as terrorists.
Ahad Khan is a Dutch Pakistani whose parents hail from Karachi. A health management student from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, he’s a dental practice manager in everyday life.
It is indeed about Greg Mortenson, by Mahvesh Khan
Guest article by Mahvesh Khan
When I disagreed with some ideas in Ethan Casey’s recent article “It’s not about Greg Mortenson,” he very kindly responded with certain clarifications and invited me to contribute a guest article. On reading his clarifications, I realized that, had I read the article more carefully, I would have seen that his argument was balanced enough to include my point of view. So this is not an article contradicting Ethan. It is simply a further elucidation of my own views.
I stated two basic points to Ethan. The first is that it is indeed about Greg. Although his story might have inspired Americans to hope for a better future as regards their relationship with Pakistan, the lies he told destroyed his credibility and provided one more reason for cynicism in a turbulent world.
I am Pakistani. I grew up here in Pakistan, I was educated here, I work here. Therefore, I understand and, to an extent, share certain perspectives with my fellow countrymen. These include the idea that all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the Americans are fronts for the CIA. Americans working in the development sector and caught telling lies are automatically used as further evidence for this view. Therefore, whatever Greg might have done for the American public, he has certainly contributed enormously to the negative image of American aid to Pakistan.
This idea might seem absurd from an American perspective, but our lack of trust in our own government – with good reason – provides a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories, and many of these revolve around American intelligence agencies. An example is the February 2010 furore over Blackwater operatives said to be employed by an American NGO in Peshawar. The incident was covered by the Pakistani newspaper The Nation.
From a more pragmatic, less suspicious point of view, if I were to donate to a charity, I would prefer to donate to one I trust. If the founder of a charitable organization has lied about the organization itself, whatever his reasons, I will take my donations elsewhere. This is not an exercise in theory. I live in a badly governed country and am obliged by my religion to give a certain portion of my income in charity every year. This means that, like most Pakistanis I am close to and will consult with, I am always on the lookout for a trustworthy charitable organization. For American donors giving money to a charity halfway around the world, this verification becomes imperative, and therefore the face (and reputation) of the organization is indeed important.
My second point is that a “serious and large-scale engagement” with the American public is not necessary for Pakistan to turn its education system around. The only engagement Pakistan requires is with its own self. This I hold to be true for any Pakistani system, education or otherwise.
Leaders for social change emerge from the struggle within their own societies. They do not visit the society in question from time to time, inject a little money to assist a certain project, then go off home to continue with their other, more comfortable lives. A highly relevant example is Mother Teresa, who settled in India to carry out her work. Martin Luther King is a wonderful, American example. Our homegrown example is Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi, who truly should be celebrated much more than he is. Nelson Mandela is a leader I admire tremendously. Indeed, of all world leaders today, he is the one I respect and honor most.
In fact, I believe that attempting to change aspects of a culture that is not one’s own can only bring grief, both to oneself and to the people one is trying to benefit. The intentions may be noble, but history is littered with noble intentions leading to ignoble results. For example, one reason for taking state custody of the stolen generations of aboriginal Australians was “child protection.” Recently in the U.S., the issue of taking state custody of obese children is being debated.
The point is that when we are obviously unable to decide what is best for ourselves, within our own culture, it is extremely arrogant to assume that we know what is best for others who are operating in a different and completely unknown culture. One question that cropped up on Ethan’s blog was: Where are the Pakistani leaders for social change? In addition to Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi’s work, here are links to a Pakistani charity for the blind, the Layton-Rahmatullah trust fund, and to the Ittefaq Hospital Trust set up by the father of our former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Ethan has included quite a few links related to local charities working for education in his blog. I am inserting these links here simply to demonstrate that we do not lack people seriously attempting to alleviate the issues faced by our country.
A problem Pakistanis face both within and outside the country is our own inability to project ourselves. This means that a lot of good work done here is done so quietly that the media – whether Pakistani or foreign – either does not know it’s being done, or does not project it as an impressive achievement. Therefore, instead of idolizing the true, Pakistani heroes and heroines, we are reduced to applauding the foreigner whose impact on the country is obviously going to be much less than that of local change-makers.
Or maybe we are such a media-saturated society, encouraged to pity the less prosperous and convinced that nothing is worthy unless it occurs on a large scale and becomes famous, that we are unable to recognise the true heroes when we see them. In Lasbella, Balochistan, I met a young government school teacher. She told me that her father was a daily wage labourer (for Pakistani readers, a mazdoor) who had always wanted to educate his daughters. However, while they lived in their local village, her father’s elder brother managed to dissuade him from doing so. It was when they shifted to Lasbella, a semi-urban area, that her father was able to educate his two younger daughters. Her four older sisters were completely illiterate.
I asked her if her father was happy with the result, and she replied, “Of course. Today I receive so much respect!” Sufficient people like this young lady and her father will create the Pakistan we would so dearly like to see.
By the way, while we were having this conversation, we both had our heads covered. It is the culture in Balochistan, which I adopt when I go there.
If Americans actually have an emotional and spiritual need to believe in and support constructive, life-affirming projects, their collaboration with Pakistanis is always welcome. Books and blogs like Ethan’s, or documentaries revealing the positive side of Pakistan – and we must have some positive aspects since, as far as I know, we are of human descent – are undoubtedly useful.
However, if money is being sunk into development projects, I would suggest that the citizens themselves ensure that the project is actually carrying out the work it is supposed to be doing. Physical verification of that work, and an impact analysis, would be good ideas. After all, it’s hard-earned money. Why waste it?
Mahvesh Khan belongs to a family that shifted en masse from Indian Punjab to Pakistan during the Partition of 1947, leaving behind a 400-year-old settlement. Her grandmothers observed purdah in India. In Pakistan they were the first women to inherit property, due to the shariah. Supported by her father, Mahvesh obtained a master’s degree in business from a university in Australia at a time when women from her family were not encouraged to study abroad. She has been a teacher/administrator for a private school system and is currently employed in the development sector.
Home Free: It’s always right to try
Last week was an eventful one on multiple fronts, though really they’re all of a piece. The dust-up in the London Review of Books between the neo-imperialist British historian Niall Ferguson and the prolific Indian writer Pankaj Mishra spurred me to write a critique – not of Ferguson, who has been amply critiqued (most amply of all by Mishra), but rather of Mishra. The broader purpose of my essay “Has Pankaj Mishra Ever Been to South Dakota?”, published this week in the Indian magazine Open, is to ask people worldwide who see themselves and/or their countries as victims of Western imperialism to remember with compassion that odious system’s other victims, namely the ordinary and provincial people of the West itself.
A teach-in at the Occupy Seattle encampment on the grounds of Seattle Central Community College in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, December 9, 2011.
There’s more to say on that than I have space for here; suffice it to say that I’ll be continuing to write on that subject. It must sound cheap or glib for an American to assert that we’re all in it together, but the millions of American families whose homes are in foreclosure are not equivalent to the power that’s killing civilians in Waziristan with unmanned drone aircraft. The fact that Americans themselves will soon be on the receiving end of drone surveillance is not something from which Pakistanis or anyone else should be taking any pleasure or satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the slugger Albert Pujols made a most peremptory non-verbal statement to the people of St. Louis, a venerable and very serious baseball town, by signing a gargantuan ten-year contract with the Los Angeles Angels. Actually, the statement Pujols and his agent, and the powers that run America’s sometime national pastime, are making ramifies far beyond St. Louis, indeed beyond baseball, which is why I feel a need to devote next week’s entire column to it. Watch this space.
And on the streets of the real America, I witnessed the dismantling of the Occupy Seattle encampment on the grounds of Seattle Central Community College. My friend Jeb Wyman, who teaches at Seattle Central, emailed and phoned Friday morning urging me to join him at a teach-in that afternoon. The college was planning to evict the encampment over the weekend, so this would likely be my last chance to see the Occupy movement in the flesh, at least in its original incarnation.
Various criticisms have been made of the Occupy movement, by its enemies as well as by some who share many of its goals. Some of these are legitimate; others are distractions or even lies. What isn’t feasible is to dismiss the movement entirely. Since September it has touched a very sensitive national nerve and genuinely redirected the public conversation in America, not definitively (yet), but irreversibly. As we slouch ominously into a thoroughly uninspiring election year, the establishment that presumes to control the conversation and everything else in America has been put on notice.
After using the filthy men’s room, I walked out the south exit of Seattle Central’s main building to the urban intersection that Occupy has been occupying since getting kicked out of Westlake Plaza downtown some weeks ago. A man standing on a wooden box and wearing a black-on-blue “FACULTY UNION” t-shirt was telling a small crowd that we can’t necessarily expect history to turn out the way we want it to, but at every moment we have both an opportunity and an obligation to do what we can to move it in the right direction. “All you can know is that it’s always right to try,” he said.
I drifted away from the speaker and walked around, watching occupiers raking up straw from the ground around the tents they’ve been sleeping in (Friday was a cold day, near freezing). Then a young woman approached me, introduced herself as Marisa, and handed me off to Ian Finkenbinder, who was pepper-sprayed by Seattle cops on the same recent occasion as 84-year-old Dorli Rainey. Like several others I met and saw that day, Ian had a photocopied 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet paper-clipped to his back that read:
NON-VIOLENT
SEATTLE CENTRAL
STUDENT AND
PROTESTER
Ian, it turns out, is a student of Jeb’s, an Iraq veteran, and an assertive political activist and blogger. Just that morning, he told me, “I was doing my morning walk-through, which I do every day before class.” He saw some Seattle Central administrators taking pictures of the encampment. “And I overheard them say, ‘We’re gonna have to resod all of this, and it’s gonna cost a lot of money.’ So I turned to them, and I said, ‘Perhaps a better use of that money would be replacing ceiling tiles that are soaked with rat pee in every classroom.’ So they laughed at me, and I walked away.”
Prof. Jeb Wyman of Seattle Central Community College (left) and Ethan Casey at Bill's Off Broadway, Seattle, December 9, 2011.
As things turned out I didn’t get to share the speaker’s wooden box with Jeb, which was fine, because I wasn’t sure what I could have said that the occupiers hadn’t already figured out for themselves. And while Jeb was speaking I got caught up in an interesting conversation with Rich Jensen, who described himself as having been briefly president of the famous Seattle-based Sub Pop Records and a lifelong Northwesterner, a member of this region’s pervasive white middle class, who in recent years experienced a kind of conversion to a truer awareness of Seattle and of America as a whole.
“Seattle is a very interesting microcosm,” Rich told me. “Many of the neuroses that we have in Seattle are essential American neuroses.” Seattle, he accurately said, “is so segregated that the white liberals of the northern neighborhoods don’t even know.” That hit home for me, because I live in one of those northern neighborhoods.
Rich thought that what’s begun happening the past few months might qualify to be described as a revolution. “People see Che Guevara and bullets and stuff,” he said, meaning that’s what people think a revolution is. “But most of a revolution is a change in consciousness. My experience is definitely not unique. It’s not really reported, but it’s the kind of transformation that’s happening throughout the culture.”
“The media discussion has been so sterile for so long, that just one weed in the sidewalk gets everyone’s attention,” he said. “The 1 percent/ 99 percent dichotomy is very real. The 99 percent are not at the table, and are not allowed at the table. This is just ordinary people who are saying, ‘You know what? I’m not gonna wait for the Democratic Party.’”
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Home Free: Waging war on ourselves
A couple of years ago, giving a talk at a church in Seattle, I was conveying as best I could the anger Pakistanis feel toward the U.S. about drone attacks, when a woman raised her hand and asked, “What’s a drone attack?” I give her credit for asking, but I was astounded nonetheless. Ever since then I’ve kept that woman in my mind, and often cited her to audiences, as an example of the ignorance of ordinary Americans about things that are happening – I should say things we’re doing to other people – beyond our shores.
My mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit used to say that we’re all ignorant, only about different things. That can be a helpful working assumption when trying to achieve common understanding, but it’s also true that some of us are closer than others to the coal face of hard experience. For example, the novelist John Grisham recently pointed out that support for the death penalty is “still very much the consensus among white people in the South. Black people know better because they have seen so many wrongful convictions and executions.”
The same goes for drones. In Karachi in 2009 I met a teenage refugee from Waziristan, who told me: “Most of these drone attacks kill innocent people. … What the U.S. is doing by these drone attacks is creating more problems for themselves, rather than solving problems. Every person [in Waziristan] now that did not want to carry weapons, now wants to carry a weapon, because his children have died in these U.S. attacks. They’re just making it worse for themselves.”
Well, America, drones are coming soon to your local police department. But don’t worry, a boosterish Nov. 27 article in the Los Angeles Times assures us, they’re going to be used only for good purposes like spraying pesticides on crops and catching bad guys. The Federal Aviation Administration, which plans to issue new rules for the use of drones in U.S. domestic airspace in January, is concerned about “the creative ways in which criminals and terrorists might use the machines.” But don’t worry, everything will be fine, because “The aerospace industry believes that the good guys – the nation’s law enforcement agencies – are probably the biggest commercial market for domestic drones, at least initially.”
And oh, by the way, “Officials in Tampa, Fla., want to use them for security surveillance at next year’s Republican National Convention.”
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where all this is headed. In fact, we’re there already. For years now we’ve been growing accustomed to living our lives under perpetual surveillance, as we do more and more of our communications and transactions online and on the cell phones that we carry with us everywhere we go. As far as I’ve been able to tell, most of my fellow Americans either don’t really understand what’s happening, or they don’t object; many members of what Richard Nixon all too accurately called the silent majority hold the attitude that “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”
This sort of defiant smugness is not unique to middle America; I encountered it in middle England a decade ago, when I was living there and cameras were appearing (discreetly) on every street corner. The unasked question, of course, is who gets to decide whether I’m doing anything wrong. The answer, according to Them, is that They do. Not that I’m paranoid or anything.
Most Americans apparently prefer security to freedom. You can’t really have both, but even in such conditions, we’re free whether we like it or not: free to live in fear and paranoia, presumed guilty (of what exactly, it’s not always clear), or to live as if we were free. If we live as if we were free, then in a real sense we are free.
We’re all guilty of this, that, or the other. I know I am. As Russell Baker (bless him for sticking around among us so long; the old guy is a national treasure) noted in reviewing Clint Eastwood’s new film about J. Edgar Hoover:
The FBI chief trafficked in fear, which flourishes best when the fog is thickest, the uncertainty deepest, and people who have always thought themselves above suspicion begin to wonder if perhaps there is some long forgotten incident in their distant past that might be dug up, exposing them to public humiliation, Congressional investigation, criminal indictment, destruction. It is a rare life that hasn’t a few deplorable incidents in its chronicle. As Willie Stark observes in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, man is conceived in sin, born in corruption, and “passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud,” and when someone looks deep enough for dirt, “There is always something.”
The ugly truth buried beneath the manicured lawns of the American suburbs is that we don’t mind horrible things being done to people in our name, as long as they’re done to other people. This is the truth Grisham identifies in pointing out that white Southerners still support the death penalty, but black people know better.
Analogously, many Americans apparently don’t mind if the U.S. military is used to arrest U.S. citizens within U.S. borders, so long as those U.S. citizens are Muslims or other brown people. One non-Muslim who does mind is Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL). As he wrote last Thursday in a letter to constituents: “This week, the Senate considered legislation specifically authorizing our military to arrest and detain anyone, including U.S. citizens inside America, who the President suspects may be connected to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. In my view, American citizens inside this country have inalienable Constitutional rights that can only be removed by a civilian jury of your peers.”
In taking such a stand, Senator Kirk is behaving like a patriot, in the true sense of that word. If I lived in Illinois, I might even vote for him. What he understands is that we can’t take away others’ freedom without taking away our own. And, as the dawn of the domestic drones should bring home to us, we can’t wage war on others without also waging it on ourselves.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Pakistan and the US: We are free to choose peace
My latest article in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn is headlined “We are free to choose peace.” It includes this paragraph:
Our two countries have arrived at a depressing and discouraging pass, both in relation to each other and internally. The exigencies of “defense,” which is a euphemism for war, have brought us here. As individuals, we feel (because we are) largely powerless to affect the course of events. As human communities there’s more we can do, as the Occupy Wall Street movement has been showing in America, and as the lawyers’ movement showed in Pakistan.
Read the full article here:
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