Home Free: California and the global connection
RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA – “What do you think of Arnold?” a young Pakistani asked me as we passed the time at a cricket match in Lahore in 2003. “I like his movies very much.”
“I like his movies too,” I said politely, “but I don’t like him as a politician.”
“Yes. Now he is going to be governor of which state?”
“California.”
“Yes.”
“You know that California is the biggest state?” I asked.
“Yes, I know.”
“I think that if Arnold wins in California,” I ventured, “Bush will win California [in the presidential election] next year.”
I was wrong in that prediction: Bush won re-election (just barely, if that), but he failed to carry California despite Arnold’s governatortorial victory. I included the conversation in my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, partly as a reminder to myself to stick to my principle of never making specific predictions, because the world – in this case California in particular – is more complex and unpredictable than we tend to allow for.
Eight long years later Bush is sort of gone, though his fell legacy lingers around America and worldwide, and Arnold Schwarzenegger has come and gone, trailing a stench of sexual scandal offscreen. But California, for better or worse, isn’t going anywhere. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Americans have long looked to California for omens and portents of where our country as a whole is headed. That felt good when California was thriving. These days we might be more inclined to avert our eyes, though it will be better for us if we don’t.
Tom Petty, who had the good sense and good timing to get the most out of California when the getting was good, composed a ditty around a clever couplet: “California’s been good to me/ I hope it don’t fall into the sea.” California hasn’t been as good to me as it’s been to Tom Petty, but that’s partly because I didn’t give it the chance. Less than eighteen months after moving here in 1989 for the most time-honored of American reasons – because I had no good reason to be anywhere else and, well, because it’s California – I left, because my brother invited me to travel with him in Central Europe during the summer after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That eye-opening adventure led to many others, but the great what-if in the back of my mind ever since has been how my life might have turned out if I had stayed in California.
Before I left, I lived in Berkeley and commuted to a tie-wearing customer-service job in downtown San Francisco, at a small company called The Information Store. The company’s business model – soon rendered hopelessly quaint – was to send a guy on a motorcycle to various university libraries every day, to make photocopies of articles from scientific journals to Fedex or fax to scientists at pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey. The job was a job, but it was my early-morning commute across the Bay Bridge, with its glorious view of the bay and of the City’s skyscrapers as the AC Transit bus emerged from the tunnel on Yerba Buena Island, that I fell in love with. Ever since I left abruptly in 1990 without really saying goodbye, California has been like the girl I might have married.
I’m writing this, at the end of a weekend business trip to the Bay Area, in the kitchen of friends in Richmond, a scorned and neglected working-class town at the north end of the East Bay. Every American metropolitan area has a nearby place that serves the ostensibly better class of people as a scapegoat for their fear and ignorance; in the Bay Area, that role is filled by Oakland and other East Bay cities like Richmond. If there’s anything I’ve learned as a traveling writer, it’s that it’s precisely in such places that one finds the truest and most telling stories, if one makes the effort to look for them beneath the rubble and obfuscation.
So I’m eager to return, on my American road trip next year, to this home of a long and still living tradition of militant labor and popular activism. On Sunday evening, my friends took me to a meeting of the local Haiti Action Committee. You might think that Haiti has nothing to do with California, but you would be mistaken. “The struggle is one,” Pierre Labossiere, a Haitian who has been active for decades here in local labor and protest movements as well as Haitian causes, told the meeting. “It’s the same struggle. It’s that same one percent that operates internationally.” He told us that when Oakland police attacked Occupy Oakland protesters on October 25 and fractured the skull of young Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen with a tear gas canister, “I said, ‘That looks like Haiti!’ A lot of times, we don’t see the global connection. They don’t want us to see that.”
Richmond mayor Gayle McLaughlin also spoke at the meeting. “America is awakening to the fact that we need to take the power back, just like the people of Haiti are taking the power back and trying to build a better society,” she said. McLaughlin took heat nationally last week when Fox News made hay out of her decision to visit the Occupy Richmond encampment instead of a Veterans Day event. She got an appreciative ovation for her unapologetic explanation: “Chevron sponsored the Veterans Day event, and the people of Richmond sponsored the Occupy Richmond event.”
You can support Ethan Casey’s 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, Palestine, and the USA: In search of common humanity
I woke up this morning to the news that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last week. The New York Times called it “the most serious charge that the United States has leveled against Pakistan in the decade that America has been at war in Afghanistan.”
The geopolitics of such matters are analyzed ad nauseum by Very Intelligent People in think tanks from Washington to Islamabad. The careerist participants in that debate are largely talking past each other, because each of them starts from the tendentious premise that the state that represents his or her society is the one that’s in the right. I don’t intend to contribute to that tedious and largely pointless conversation. I intend to do an end run around it, by reminding myself and anyone who might read this of our shared humanity.
Part of the problem is that both Pakistan and America are hyper-political cultures that, for historical and ideological reasons, both suffer from a damaging tendency to conflate the society with the state. Hence the unexamined terms “the United States” and “Pakistan” – the impoverished vocabulary of conventional journalism – in the quote above from the New York Times. What is “the United States”? What is “Pakistan”? To what version of these notional entities do I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, owe allegiance? Am I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, required or entitled to make excuses for things “the United States” or “Pakistan” do that we know to be wrong? Are we required always to support and excuse “us” against “them,” as though societies were necessarily rivals, like football teams?
This sort of thing has gotten much worse, and the stakes much higher, in recent years, but in truth it’s nothing new. Way back in 1767, Samuel Johnson observed that
In a time of war the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves, and ill of the enemy. At this time the task of news-writers is easy; they have nothing to do but to tell that the battle is expected, and afterwards that a battle has been fought, in which we and our friends, whether conquering or conquered, did all, and our enemies did nothing. Scarcely any thing awakens attention like a tale of cruelty. The writer of news never fails in the intermission of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins; and if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province.
In other words, don’t believe what you read in the papers. I began as a political journalist – a writer of news – like any other, but quickly became dissatisfied with the constraints and conventions of that kind of writing. It’s the opposite of poetry, in the sense that it systematically squeezes meaning out of language by resorting habitually to cant and to glib phrases like “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” (Haiti), “Himalayan kingdom” (Nepal), “Muslim separatist insurgency” (Kashmir). George Orwell would have – did have – a lot to say about phrases like those, whose purpose is not to enhance understanding but to disable thinking and human sympathy by pushing emotive buttons.
My personal declaration of independence from the treadmill of such intellectually and morally impoverished language was my 2004 book Alive and Well in Pakistan, whose title as well as form – first-person nonfiction narrative, following role models like Graham Greene and Paul Theroux – are acts of intentional resistance. Resistance is anything but futile; it is hard but necessary work that we must do in order to maintain our humanity.
But resistance to the states that presume to represent our societies, and to the propaganda organs that presume to define the terms of our conversation, is only the first step. The long-term task is to maintain our use of language at a level that enhances understanding, in both the intellectual and the empathetic sense. The kindest review of Alive and Well in Pakistan was by Alex Spillius in The Daily Telegraph, who wrote that “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity.” What “the media” would define for us as “the other” is not other at all; we’re all human beings, all in it together. We may not properly understand or agree with each other, but that only means that we need to work all the harder to find common ground, and then to hold it against the forces of division and enmity.
But just as it won’t do simply to blame the putative other side, blaming “the media” is an evasion and a cop-out. The ultimate responsibility lies in each and all of us. If you don’t like or believe what you’re told or what you see on television, do the work of reading and of joining the conversation. We can joke ruefully about how people don’t read books anymore, how we’re all too distracted to take the time to understand or care, but the solution is to make the time. There’s no more urgent task.
Is this post, then, a plug for my own books? Sure it is. I wouldn’t have written them if I didn’t believe that they do some of what needs to be done. And my occasional writings, my “blog” and my columns in Dawn, are a running addendum to my books. But my writings are only a starting point, and only one of many. If you’re an American and you want to understand Pakistan, read the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa or Mohsin Hamid. To understand what the most vulnerable immigrants to the United States endure, read the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant memoir Brother, I’m Dying.
Meanwhile, in New York, Palestine has formally requested membership in the United Nations, and starting today you’re going to be asked to acquiesce in what “the United States” thinks about that. As a very partial antidote, maybe a starting point to thinking about it differently, I ask you to read my article “Israel and the Distortion of American Politics,” which I wrote last May after the deadly attack on the flotilla that was trying to deliver relief supplies to the Gaza Strip.
Don’t excuse yourself. And, to begin with, refuse to accept at face value whatever you read in the New York Times or hear on TV about what “the United States” – the state – accuses “Pakistan” – the state – of doing or abetting. The stakes are too high, and we’re all responsible for the damage that results from misunderstanding and mutual suspicion.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) andOvertaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti, will be published in March 2012. He lives in Seattle. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Terry Jones’s America: A Dangerous Place to Be
SEATTLE, April 3 – There are so many reasons to feel alarmed, worried, and/or confused at the moment – Japan, Libya, Obama, take your pick – that it seems almost quaint, “so last year,” to single out the Quran-burning pastor in Florida. But his latest antic, and the resulting deaths of innocent people in Afghanistan, leave me feeling angry and disgusted. When will we in America begin taking responsibility for our own extremists?
As the riots in Afghanistan show starkly, this is a matter of life and death. By the time you read this, the two days of riots I’m referring to might have swollen into a major crisis – or they might have been subsumed and forgotten in the din and onrush of mayhem in Libya and Syria, radiation in Japan, or whatever’s next. Either way, the people who died in them will remain just as dead. And it will remain the fault of Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida.
It would be nice if we could ignore Jones and his ilk, but we can’t afford to. “The local strategy of everybody was to ignore this,” the Rev. Lawrence D. Reimer, pastor of the United Church of Gainesville, told the New York Times. “It’s just a horrible tragedy that this act triggered the deaths of more innocent people.” It’s understandable that well-meaning Gainesvillians would be embarrassed, and a tactic of declining to dignify Jones’s stunt with attention is defensible. But some of the comments responding to my article “Is America Any Different from Pakistan?” – published in January, just after the killing of Salmaan Taseer in Islamabad and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson – are telling. One reader wrote (anonymously of course):
Yawn yet another typical leftie more than willing to jump on the bandwagon of blaming the right, America, and any other group he/she opposes for the actions of a mentally insane person. Jared Loughner appears to have been a psychotic, I suspect a schizophrenic. Please wait for the facts instead [of] falling into your own biases.
It’s plausible to dismiss Loughner and Jones as nuts, or me as “yet another typical leftie,” but I don’t buy it. Ever since Ronald Reagan’s henchmen coined the phrase “plausible deniability,” that’s become our national motto. Contrast the anonymous comment with this, from reader Arif Humayun:
Right-wing extremists are made of the same stuff; geography does not matter. This breed in the US is no different from that in Pakistan or the one in India. They exploit the religious sentiments for votes and refuse to take responsibility when their rhetoric causes extreme reactions like the killings in Tucson AZ or the murder of Governor Taseer in Pakistan or the Gujarat riots in India.
And this, from Tess Abidi:
The American rightwingers deny the shooting of a liberal politician had anything to do with their hate speech, and denounce anyone who dares even remotely suggest otherwise. The Pakistani rightwingers proudly acknowledge – nay, take credit for – their speeches that led to the shooting.
Admit there is a difference. But if things stay as is, it wouldn’t take much for the Americans to become more and more like Pakistanis. It doesn’t take much, you know. I left Pakistan during the 90’s. It’s a very different country now. Didn’t take that long.
Arif and Tess both are Americans who are Muslim and of Pakistani origin. In our national and international conversation, it’s important for their voices to be heard. Here’s another voice I’d like you to hear – my friend Todd Shea:
Right now many people’s reality is rooted in misconceptions on all sides, and that’s a dangerous place to be. And somebody somewhere has to take initiative in presenting information that people need to have in order to have a better understanding. In this case, educating Americans about the reality on the ground in Pakistan, the history that they don’t understand, our culpability, and our need to do something about it.
Huh? Our culpability? Here’s part of what Todd means:
If U.S. leaders had treated them as important in a human way [after our successful proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s], then society in Pakistan and Afghanistan would be far further along today, because we would have helped them avoid all the things that are happening now. If you remember, at the time, we were loved. Both countries were in such a state of need, and then we just left. ‘We got rid of our big enemy, let’s get outta here,’ and boy, wasn’t that a strategic error.
Contrast Todd’s emphasis on historical context and self-examination with Pastor Terry Jones’s excuse for putting the Quran “on trial” and then burning it: “It’s time to hold Islam accountable.”
Is it also time to hold America, and Americans, accountable? It had better be. Accountability begins at home. It’s fine, and important, for people to write and read edifying primers like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s recent Washington Post op-ed “Five Myths about Muslims in America.” But that’s not enough. As I told a right-wing friend of mine recently in a different context, I’m ready to fight for the America that I want to live in. More of us need to find the courage and strength of character that my fellow Wisconsinites have been showing lately, or we’ll end up living in Terry Jones’s America. And that’s a dangerous place to be.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
What Does Egypt Mean for Pakistan?
One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received for my work was when a Pakistani journalist, a young woman, told me I’m not afflicted by what she called “Have pen will write syndrome.” I write when I have something to say, or a story to tell, that I believe others will find helpful and worth reading. Lately I’ve been itching a little to write about Egypt, but so far I’ve concluded that the world doesn’t need my gratuitous drop in the ocean of commentary, particularly given that I’ve never been to Egypt.
But I have been to Pakistan, many times since 1995, and I’m going there again for three weeks starting February 18. And I can’t help wondering what kinds of conversations I might have there in the wake or context of the Egyptian revolution.
This will be my first trip to Pakistan since the visit almost exactly two years ago that resulted in my book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. I flatter myself that, whatever its other merits, my book has a well-chosen title. As Zaka Shafiq, a young man I met in Karachi, told me at the end of the trip and the start of the book: “It’ll be out of date by the time it’s published.” But I’m not worried about being overtaken by events, because I’ve resigned myself to it as a condition of being alive in this world, especially these days. I figure my job is to listen, pay attention, and take notes. There’s a lot to be learned about where we’re at and where we’re headed, if you stay alert.
My coming trip hasn’t even started, and it’s already been overtaken by events. When I began planning it several months ago, its purpose was to witness and write about the grossly under-reported effects of last summer’s historically severe flooding – and that remains an important goal. But then, in early January, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated and, in a shockingly parallel incident, US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson. And, now, Egypt is in upheaval.
But what does Egypt have to do with Pakistan? Well, I’m hoping you can help me answer that question. Particularly if you’re Pakistani, but even if you’re not, I invite you to post a comment on this article or on my Facebook page or, if you prefer, to write to me privately with your thoughts. And please forward this article far and wide. I want to read and hear as many voices as you can help me gather about Pakistan’s future and the implications – for Pakistan, for the Muslim world, and for all of us – of the Egyptian revolution.
My starting point is that, in what I’ve been reading, Western writers are starting to speculate – ominously and/or hopefully, depending on their loyalties – on the wider implications of Egypt for the Arab world. Even factoring in the Western public’s fuzziness on the distinction between Arabs and Muslims, it’s striking to me that few seem to be wondering, in this context, about Pakistan. The American public has had a lot on its plate lately, what with Egypt, severe winter weather, and the Super Bowl all happening at the same time, but Frank Rich’s bracingly unsparing February 6 column acknowledges the stakes:
The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.
Rich notes the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir and remembers that, like the events in Cairo, the bombardments of Iraq that Rumsfeld ordered
were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We [Americans] lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.
So there is a lot of work to do, to continue educating the American public – I include myself – on our steep learning curve about the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular. What do Americans need to know about Pakistan? And, most pressingly at the moment, what are the similarities and differences between Pakistan and Egypt? And what might the events in Egypt portend for Pakistan?
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Will the Real America Please Stand Up?
SEATTLE, JANUARY 8 – Those of us who are concerned about the fate of Pakistan were still reeling from the January 4 assassination of Punjab governor and liberal newspaper publisher Salmaan Taseer in Islamabad, when we heard about the shooting of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. What does one have to do with the other? All too much.
On Friday I responded to a query from a Times of India reporter by calling the Taseer killing “extremely ominous.” I followed that statement of the obvious with this sentence: “An aggressive, self-righteous and over-confident radical element, a feckless and compromised central government, and a brave but besieged liberal class add up to a country in severe crisis.” That’s accurate enough as a description of Pakistan, but Americans who can dish out this sort of thing need to be able to take it too (and I’m not sure I’m so generous as to call my own country’s liberal class “brave”). What kind of society are we willing to allow ourselves to live in? At the very least, it’s high time we Americans knocked off the self-righteousness that permits us to judge Pakistan and took a long, hard look in the mirror.
In April 1995, I was in Lahore when I learned about the bombing in Oklahoma City. You’ll remember that the widespread initial assumption was that it must have been the doing of Islamic fundamentalists – and it wasn’t, was it? In Delhi a few days later, a Kashmiri friend exclaimed to me: “There was bomb blast in America!” What struck me was that he was surprised not that there had been a bomb blast per se, but that there had been one in America, of all places. In my travels to that point, I had come to know that bomb blasts happen all the time around the subcontinent. Now they happened in America too. This was why I had left Wisconsin: to learn that the serene small-town world I came from was of a piece with the world at large. Oddly, I found my new awareness comforting.
Why comforting? Because it’s better to know the truth than to live in a fictionalized world where everything’s all right. Why is that better? Because wishing doesn’t make it so. We’re all in this together, and everything is very far from all right. And the truth is that America isn’t any different, after all, from the rest of the world. We’re just another Third World country – only bigger. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
These are truths Americans have been learning the hard way in the long years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. When a radicalized lumpen member of American society’s mainstream blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, I thought of something Norman Mailer had written in 1962: that ”so long as there is a cold war, there are no politics of consequence in America.” Not to put too fine a point on it but, since we stopped having the Russians to kick around, American politics have become all too consequential. We now kick each other around instead – as well as, of course, vulnerable minorities like Latinos and Muslims.
Just the other day, the New York Review of Books blog published an item by Christian Caryl titled “Pakistan: When the State Loses Control”:
It has become extremely hard to see how anyone can pull the country’s political culture back from the brink. … No, what’s particularly worrisome about this [Salmaan Taseer] case is the failure of the Pakistani political system to protect one of its own. When the state surrenders its monopoly on violence to those who stand outside of it, it can no longer be described as a functioning state. Pakistan’s political institutions are supposed to represent the many different parties and groups that participate in the country’s civic life, yet now state power is succumbing to the demands of an exclusionist view of the world that can benefit only a particular few. In the weeks and months preceding his assassination, Taseer had been courageously campaigning—in the face of direct threats—to overturn an anti-blasphemy law that had been frequently abused to condemn people of minority faiths.
Substitute “America” for “Pakistan,” read that passage again, and recall that Congresswoman Giffords has been an outspoken opponent of Arizona’s new immigration law and received death threats and attacks on her office after voting for the Obama administration’s health-care bill.
Sarah Palin, whose publication of a map depicting crosshairs targeting Democratic members of Congress, including Giffords, has been noted since the shooting, infamously spoke during the 2008 campaign of “the real America.” I don’t concede Sarah Palin’s right to identify or speak for the real America. In fact, I insist that she does not. But will the real America please stand up?
Those of us who would speak for the real America need to bear in mind, though, that this isn’t cold war-era armchair politics anymore. Are we prepared to show as much physical, moral and political courage as Gabrielle Giffords and Salmaan Taseer did? And the next time we go to Safeway to buy groceries, will we remember to feel compassion for the millions of innocent Pakistanis who put themselves in harm’s way from suicide bombers every time they do the same?
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Good Muslims and good Americans
Ben Owen (left), Jafar "Jeff" Siddiqui (center), and other speakers at the Challenging Adversity symposium, Seattle Central Community College, December 2, 2010.
By Ben Owen
Note: Ben Owen is my assistant and creative collaborator and a student at Seattle Central Community College. This piece is, I hope, the first of many by Ben that you’ll be reading on www.ethancasey.com. – Ethan
On December 2, I organized a small symposium at Seattle Central Community College on Haiti and Pakistan. The idea came about because of my recent trip to Haiti and the work I’ve been doing with Ethan Casey to help change Americans’ perceptions of Pakistan and Pakistanis. Through these experiences, and many conversations with Haitians and Pakistanis, I began to see how similar their struggles are. I wanted to recreate this experience for others. The symposium was a way to share these insights with a broader audience and allow others to make the connections themselves, and it was a huge success. We filled the Student Events Center to capacity, the speakers gave thoughtful, well-researched talks, and everyone walked away having had at least one “I didn’t know that!” moment.
The first speaker was Jafar “Jeff” Siddiqui, a real estate agent, former chairman of the Islamic School of Seattle, and founding member of American Muslims of Puget Sound. He was also one of the first Muslims to be a Presidential Elector, in the 2008 Presidential Elections. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer said of Jeff: “His mission is to counteract the image of Muslims as fanatical terrorists and extremists that, he believes, is propagated in the media, popular culture, and even the government.”
He gave a stirring and enlightening talk about Pakistan, discussing its political relationship with the United States and how it’s portrayed in our media. He put Pakistan in a historical and geopolitical context and, in doing so, opened the door for people to reexamine their beliefs and ideas about it.
Even with my recent involvement with Pakistan, I had many “I didn’t know that!” moments myself. I knew that the United States has had a vested interest in the region for some time now, but I had no idea the extent of it. In the late 1970s, Afghanistan had a coup. King Zahir Shah was overthrown, and his cousin took over in a pro-communist regime. Those were the days of the Cold War, and the United States was determined to stop the spread of communism and the Soviet Union, which was occupying Afghanistan at the time. So we went to war in Afghanistan, but we didn’t actually go to war. What we did instead was arm and fund Pakistan to go to war for us. We gave money and weapons to anyone with any political or opinion influence in Pakistan, in order to buy their favor. As Siddiqui put it:
We loaded Pakistan with so much weaponry that those weapons are still moving around in the streets of Pakistan today. They, in turn, quashed the public opinion in Pakistan, which did not want to get involved in a proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union. But the people of Pakistan were dragged into war anyways, kicking and screaming, by the generals, the CIA and the United States.
This was also when Osama bin Laden came to Afghanistan, also to fight the Soviets, but for different reasons. According to The Council on Foreign Affairs, Bin Laden became involved with Afghanistan “during the 1979-89 war against the Soviets. Bin Laden raised money and supplied heavy machinery for the anticommunist mujahadeen, or holy warriors, fighting the Soviet invasion. He also provided financing for the so-called Services Office, which recruited and trained a brigade of foreign Muslim militants that fought alongside the Afghan mujahadeen.” Soon after, more than 3 million Afghan refugees flooded into Pakistan, and the United States was there with all the money that Pakistan needed to support them. “We just asked for open access to channels of funding and weaponry to people in Afghanistan and training camps in Pakistan to train the Afghans to fight so they can go back and fight,” Siddiqui said. Hundreds of religious schools, called madrassas, were set up in Pakistan. They taught Afghan refugee children very intolerant versions of Islam, wrongly teaching that Islam directs you to kill unbelievers.
Siddiqui remembers that in those days people in Pakistan were saying, “For God’s sake! Don’t teach this to the kids! They’re going to grow up, you will be long gone, they will still be here, and we will have to deal with them.” But we had a mission to accomplish. Eventually, our plan worked. The Soviet Union pulled out, but we pulled out right behind them before the dust even had time to settle, leaving radicals like bin Laden behind with the rubble and destruction of a ten-year war. As Siddiqui said, “That was the worst thing the United States could have done. The easiest thing the United States could have done was invest $100 million to start industry, start schools, and start an infrastructure in Afghanistan. But as we’ve always insisted: we’re not into ‘nation construction.’ What we leave out is that we are into ‘nation destruction.’”
This stood out to me as an important point. Currently, we’re fighting a war in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. These two wars have cost our country hundreds of billions of dollars. And, as Siddiqui noted, “According to a poll taken just a year ago, public opinion about Muslims is worse today than it was on the one-year anniversary of 9/11.” There is no way to know how things would be different today had we invested in rebuilding Afghanistan after the Soviets left. But we can put ourselves in the shoes of the people there. Imagine that we lived in a country that was not the world superpower, and a proxy war between two foreign countries was fought on American soil, leaving thousands of innocent civilians dead and our infrastructure in shambles. Would that not create a bitterness and resentment within the heart of every American patriot? Radicals would spring up from the Atlantic to the Pacific, denouncing the entities that brought such suffering to our land. Why would we expect anything different from the people of Afghanistan?
Although I found all this profoundly interesting, I started to think, “Isn’t Jeff supposed to be talking about Pakistan?” And at that moment, as if he had read my mind, he said:
Now, all of this has a major impact on Pakistan. Afghanistan garnered its intolerant Muslims from the madrassa schools which also trained Pakistanis. The people who learned from them became even more intolerant and trained even more intolerance into Pakistan. Pakistan right now is a chaotic country. If I have the most weapons, then I am king. And nobody can say anything. And If I invoke Islam, then I can get away with anything I want.
What we have to remember is that violent people are often the ones who rise to power, especially in environments like Pakistan today. The “leaders” of a country, more often than not, are not representative of the people they rule over. Yet the media here in the US (and many of our citizens) demonize all Muslims and Pakistanis because of the actions of a few radicals that our government (not us) indirectly supported and helped to thrive. We must remember that it is Pakistani and Afghan citizens – people like you and me, with friends and families – who are suffering the most. By demonizing them and judging an entire people based on the actions of a few, we do an injustice not only to them, but to ourselves.
Siddiqui closed by showing how all this affects us here in America:
Since 9/11, the biggest industry in the world has been the fear industry. In the name of fear, in the name of security, we have given up our civil liberties. We have been deprived of our civil rights, but we are no closer to security. … In the name of security, in just the first year after 9/11, 14,000 Muslims in the US had been put in jail and were kept in jail – fourteen thousand! And when the question was brought up in the Senate, Senator John Ashcroft said, ‘Individually, these people are like pieces of a mosaic; they don’t show anything. But we’re trying to develop a pattern from this mosaic. That’s why we’re holding so many people.’ And people shut up, because it was a matter of national security.
I couldn’t believe that such a ridiculous justification was used for such a blatant violation of human rights and civil liberties that we hold so dear in the United States, so I looked it up. One of the first citations I found was a 2005 study in the Yale Law Journal titled “The Mosaic Theory, National Security, and the Freedom of Information Act,” which concluded: “Though essentially valid, the mosaic theory has been applied in ways that are unfalsifiable, in tension with the text and purpose of FOIA, and susceptible to abuse and overbreadth.” The paper discusses the many uses of this theory by our government – particularly the Bush Administration – to justify invasive and unconstitutional policies and actions.
We have all averted our eyes from injustice and discrimination against Muslims in our country. I have. I have listened to people make ignorant statements like, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims,” and I have kept my mouth shut. We cannot afford to keep our mouths closed or our eyes shut any more. We live in a diverse country that was founded on the principles of freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of the people to pursue happiness. And no one will be happy as long as we allow fear of Muslims to be perpetuated in our communities. We listen to the bigotry and single-sided perspectives spouted through the “news,” and we take it in and swallow it whole.
I was largely unaware of the mass detention of Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11 because, to my discredit, I simply did not know very many Muslims. But there are large Muslim communities all across the US, American citizens who are doing their best to be “good Muslims” and good Americans, just as others are doing their best to be “good Christians.” Now, I personally know of a group of several hundred Pakistani doctors who did relief work in Haiti after the earthquake there. We have no excuse to live in fear of all Muslims. We have no excuse to be ignorant. Most likely, you have a Muslim co-worker or classmate. Why not ask him or her out to lunch or coffee? I guarantee that you’ll have at least one “I didn’t know that!” moment.
Blindly ingesting popular culture’s representation of Islam and Muslims is a choice. Only by actively pursuing knowledge about what we do not understand will we be able to overcome the fear and misconceptions that have overtaken our culture. It’s time to build bridges.
Read Ben Owen’s bio
What does Pakistan have to do with Haiti?
Port-au-Prince, September 2 – Haiti is, as a friend of mine put it years ago, a place for big questions. I’ve been trying to understand it for nearly thirty years, and its politics, history and culture have many twists and turns that are still opaque to me. At the same time, it’s a place whose truths and foibles are different from those of your country or mine only in being more obvious, more in your face. Anything that’s true of Haiti is true of the world as a whole – and that’s a truth that’s not complicated at all, only hard to swallow.
Ethan Casey, Ben Owen, and Haitian friends at Saut Mathurin waterfall, southern Haiti, August 2010. Photo by Pete Sabo.
For me personally Haiti feels like home, because I was sixteen years old the first time I set foot here. It has taught me much, if not most, of whatever I now know about the world, and my early experience of Haiti suffused my later responses to very different countries, particularly during the five years I lived in Asia in the 1990s. I saw chronically desperate Cambodia, and tortured Burma, and deforested Thailand, with the eyes of one who had seen Haiti. In a phone conversation in 2004 Tracy Kidder, author of the celebrated book Mountains Beyond Mountains, told me something I implicitly understand and relate to: “I’ve learned so much about the world from Haiti – some of which I almost wish I hadn’t learned.”
Two things have been on my mind since Ben Owen, Pete Sabo and I arrived here on August 25. One is how, not quite eight months after the January 12 earthquake that killed perhaps 300,000 people, life here seems to have returned to something like normal. I hasten to add that that doesn’t mean everything’s fine – it’s not. Normal in Haiti is far from fine.
But my friend Gerald Oriol Jr., of Fondation J’Aime Haiti, notes how the tent cities that have taken over virtually all open spaces in Port-au-Prince have settled into a version of regular neighborhood life, with cyber cafes and hair salons. “It’s funny how an abnormal situation can be normal,” says Gerald, who belongs to Haiti’s elite class. “The only people who are truly shocked right now are people like me. But for the poor, things were so hard for them already that it’s just another way to organize themselves. Maybe it’s even better for them now.”
“The other difference is that many of them lost family and friends,” I pointed out.
“Yes, of course,” agreed Gerald. “I know a guy who lost his five children and his wife. But materially they are no worse off.”
Saut Mathurin waterfall, southern Haiti. Photo by Pete Sabo.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the disturbingly weird coincidence of the two countries that are most important to me personally being struck in the same year by appalling disasters. The outpouring of generosity towards Haiti after the earthquake was extraordinary and welcome, but it will remain meaningful only if Americans continue noticing Haiti and, beyond giving money, make the effort to understand its situation. The earthquake was a natural disaster, but it didn’t happen in a geopolitical vacuum. This country, these people, that we cared so deeply about circa January and February – who are they, and what are they all about? Haitians are more and other than charity cases. They’re human beings with a culture and a politics and a national history closely intertwined with our own. We owe it to them and to ourselves to know them.
I came here because I share the human tendency to forget, and I want to do my part to work against it. But just as I was preparing for this trip in late July and early August, I was distracted by the floods in Pakistan, about which suffice it to say that they’re proving as devastating in every way as the Haitian earthquake, with the difference that Pakistan is a nation of not 8 million but 170 million people. It’s also a Muslim nation with nuclear weapons, but that’s not the point. The point – which I fear many Americans have ignored or denied – is that Pakistanis are people who are suffering and will continue to suffer, as food shortages caused by the destruction of crops ramify through Pakistani society over the coming months and beyond.
My question for Americans is: If we failed or refused to understand at the time it happened that the flooding was not some divine comeuppance safely distant from us, but an immense human tragedy, will we understand a year from now when, God forbid, the ricochets from it hit us closer to home?
On the road outside Les Cayes, Haiti, August 2010. Photo by Pete Sabo.
Many Pakistani friends of mine responded immediately and with real sympathy, concretely expressed, after the Haitian earthquake. Todd Shea claims that, of the 200 or so physicians from North America who volunteered with him in Haiti, most were Pakistani. We have a golden opportunity to show similar human concern for Pakistanis, now and later.
An August 23 note from Uzma Shah is typical of the many messages I’ve received since publishing my previous article “Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?”: “It’s hard to see pictures from Pakistan, and I can’t help but choke back tears when I see all that desperation. And amidst all the furor about all things bad and hard about Pakistan and ‘Islam,’ it’s comforting to read your article. Because at the end of the day, we are all human, living in one world, sharing the same life.”
It’s dismaying to me that I’ve gotten very few such messages from non-Muslims.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of the travel books Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in spring 2011. He can be emailed at ethan@ethancasey.com and his books and articles are available online at www.ethancasey.com/books/ and www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Until further notice, he is donating 20% of profits from sales of his Pakistan books to flood relief in Pakistan, and from his Haiti book to Fondation J’Aime Haiti and the Colorado Haiti Project.
Seattle TV interview on Pakistan floods
This morning at 7:30 I went to the studios of KIRO 7 TV in downtown Seattle to be interviewed by satellite by BBC World about the floods in Pakistan. The KIRO producer, Bridget Turrell – whom I’d like to thank and congratulate for her initiative in helping bring awareness of the floods to Americans – asked me to give them an interview too. Anchor Chris Egert did the 6 1/2-minute interview, and they played a short part of it on the TV news at noon. The full interview is online here.
Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?
SEATTLE, AUGUST 13 – Yesterday a non-Pakistani friend here emailed me: “I wanted to ask you which you think would be the best organization to make a donation to for the current crisis in Pakistan. We usually give to MSF, but their website doesn’t seem to offer the opportunity to give specifically for Pakistan. Can you offer advice?”
This friend is British and greatly prefers British media outlets, but I need to believe that there are many Americans who also want to help flood victims in Pakistan – or who would want to, if they knew the scale and severity of the disaster.
Why don’t they know? We can, and I do, blame “the media,” but that’s unhelpful and ultimately a cop-out. Each of us individually has the opportunity and responsibility to be aware of every tragedy in our world, and we should be willing to exert ourselves to redress them. We’re all in this together. But the real problem is that there’s too much tragedy, and it’s happening too fast, and these days Americans are distracted and confused and worried about serious problems close to home, like our own jobs and mortgages.
This is understandable. But you need to know that all indicators are pointing toward an enormous, long-term human tragedy unfolding in Pakistan, and we need to do something about it, for several good reasons. The New York Times acknowledged one of these when – belatedly, in its first significant coverage of the floods that I noticed – it headlined an August 6 article “Hard-Line Islam Fills Void in Flooded Pakistan.”
A related point is that we Americans owe Pakistanis a measure of basic human respect and compassion, as well as gratitude specifically for the sacrifices they’ve made at our behest in several wars in Afghanistan. When we repay this debt, it will also redound to our benefit. “It’s high time we showed Pakistanis the best of America,” disaster relief specialist Todd Shea told me last year. “If you’re a true friend, you don’t run out on somebody when you don’t need them anymore. … Pakistanis don’t trust America anymore. We need to show Pakistanis who we really are.”
Todd Shea runs a charity hospital in the Pakistan-administered portion of the disputed region of Kashmir, where he has been working since the October 2005 earthquake that killed 80,000 people. He also responded urgently and effectively to the World Trade Center attack, the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the earthquake this January in Haiti. He’s currently on the ground in Pakistan, running medical camps and providing drinking water, food, and other relief. An August 11 update on his organization’s website suggests the scale of the challenge:
In a recent statement appealing for more aid to Pakistan, UN humanitarian chief John Holmes said: “While the death toll may be much lower than in some major disasters, taking together the vast geographical area affected, the numbers of people requiring assistance and the access difficulties currently affecting operations in many parts of the country, it is clear that this disaster is one of the most challenging that any country has faced in recent years.“
Thousands of people are camped out on roads, bridges and railway tracks – any dry ground they could find – often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a plastic sheet to keep off the rain. ”I have no utensils. I have no food for my children. I have no money,” said one survivor, sitting on a rain-soaked road in Sukkur along with hundreds of other people. ”We were able to escape the floodwaters, but hunger may kill us.” …
There is a desperate need to send more well-equipped medical teams to the flood-hit areas to prevent the further spread of disease. The victims of the flood have lost everything and cannot cope with potential epidemics on their own.
I’m writing this article because I live and work between two worlds: the mainstream North America that I come from, and the Pakistani immigrant community. My job is to help bridge the gulf in awareness and sympathy between those worlds. What I’m seeing right now is that Pakistani-Americans and their admirable and effective nonprofit groups are jumping once more into the breach, as they always do. And, as always, they’re confined – and confining themselves – to soliciting funds from each other.
The flooding is “well timed” in the sense that the fasting month of Ramadan has just begun, and many Muslims will be directing their annual zakat charity contributions toward flood relief. Pakistani-Americans are generally an affluent community, but there’s a limit to what they can do. Wealthy Pakistanis in Pakistan also need to help, and surely are helping. Just as important, we non-Pakistani Americans and Canadians must help. We also must somehow self-raise our own awareness, given the paucity of decent media coverage. This is important both for obvious-enough political reasons, and simply because it’s the right thing to do.
I see troubling contrasts between the outpouring of generosity and attention that followed the earthquake in Haiti and the averting of eyes from the flooding in Pakistan. I see several reasons for this: Haiti is nearby; the earthquake killed 200,000 or more people all at once. In addition, though, there’s the fact that Haiti is not a Muslim country. The earthquake fit right in with the story we were already telling ourselves about Haiti, which is all about poverty and tragedy. Dr. Paul Farmer sums it up pithily in the title of his book The Uses of Haiti. The uses of Pakistan are different. We need to move beyond the uses of both countries and toward understanding them accurately and respectfully, in their own terms. Our awareness of Haiti should be more political and of Pakistan less so, or differently so.
Anyway, back to my friend’s question. The short answer is that, as always, grassroots groups are more nimble and effective, and your money will be put to better use if you give it to groups that are nearer the ground. This is why the nonprofit groups founded and run by Pakistani-Americans are crucially important. I’m including links to several of these below, and I recommend them all.
I was jolted the other day when another friend suggested that being asked to donate to the excellent Islamic Medical Association of North America “could possibly turn some people off.” He’s probably right, but we goras need to get over our knee-jerk aversion to the word “Islamic.” Your doctor might be a member of IMANA. As a Haitian woman told Paul Farmer years ago, “Tout moun se moun” – all people are people. We’re all in this together.
Please contribute to flood relief in Pakistan through one of these organizations (listed in alphabetical order):
ETHAN CASEY is the author of the travel books Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in spring 2011. He can be emailed at ethan@ethancasey.com and his books and articles are available online at www.ethancasey.com/books/ and www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Until further notice, he is donating 20% of profits from sales of his Pakistan books to flood relief in Pakistan, and from his Haiti book to the Colorado Haiti Project.
Ahmed Rashid on the ISI’s failure to control the Taliban
I heard Ahmed Rashid speak a year or so ago at the wonderful venue Town Hall Seattle. Although I had previously met him several times and read his authoritative 2008 book Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia as well as many of his articles, I was mightily impressed anew by his command, in person in front of a live audience, of events past, present and future in the region he covers.
This is to say that, while he is fallible like any of us, I take – and we all should take – any assessment or prognostication by him quite seriously as part of the conversation on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Below is part of what he says now about the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, and what its involvement in Afghanistan might portend for the region. Especially damning is his claim about the ISI and the Taliban – i.e. not the well-attested truth that it was involved in nurturing the Taliban in the first place, but his subtler but equally disturbing point that the ISI has never, at any crucial moment, been able to control the Taliban.
The quote below comes from Ahmed Rashid’s July 14 post “Petraeus’s Baby” on the New York Review of Books blog:
“The ISI knows it is holding more cards than any of the other regional powers—Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and there is little they can do about its interference in Afghanistan for the moment. Still, most of these countries would not tolerate an ISI-Taliban dominated government in Kabul, and eventually they will gang up against Pakistan, creating still more turmoil in the region.
“Moreover it is highly unlikely that the ISI will ever be able to control the Taliban. It failed to control the outcome of the fall of Kabul in 1992 or the rise of the Taliban in 1994, and it lost all control of the Taliban just before September 11. …”
