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. …”
Why are Muslims annoyed with the West?
I’ve just gotten around to reading this good “Letter from Karachi” by freelance journalist Madiha Tahir published in Foreign Affairs in May. Occasioned by the embarrassing ban on Facebook in Pakistan, which in turn was occasioned by an ill-judged “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day” Facebook page set up by an artist right here in Seattle named Molly Norris, it offers a helpfully vivid glimpse of some of the fractures within Pakistani society. It also states the obvious about the larger global context succinctly and well:
“Like the defenders of the ban in Pakistan, many in the West also imagine a monolithic Islamic community. Incendiary Facebook pages, the French burka ban, and the anti-Islam advertisements placed on New York City buses by the right-wing blogger Pamela Geller and the Stop the Islamization of America campaign are just some of the West’s reactions to that community. All of this – combined with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan – has led many young Pakistanis to understand that they are being attacked because they are Muslims.”
Gulzar Ahmed: Peace starts with me
Better late than never, I want to share this op-ed written by my friend Gulzar Ahmed, who lives in Oregon:
“Peace starts with me,” OregonLive.com, May 7, 2010
“For the many American citizens of Pakistani origin living in the Portland metropolitan area, it’s incumbent upon us to come forward and condemn acts of terror in the strongest possible way. Our communities have to be willing to criticize ourselves and quit putting the blame on others. Let us not remain silent. A silent majority cannot allow an ideological minority to hijack the religion of Islam, which promotes peaceful coexistence among people of all faiths.”
Sentient beings in Pakistan
From filmmaker Mahera Omer in Karachi, who features prominently in Chapter 5 of my book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip:
“All creatures on earth are sentient beings. There is not an animal on earth, nor a bird that flies on its wings – but they are communities like you.” The Quran 6:38
Swiss animal rights lawyer Antoine Goetschel recently made international news when he defended a dead pike in a case of cruelty by a local fisherman who was overheard boasting about landing the fish after a ten-minute-long struggle. The basis of his argument was that fish are sentient beings and that the fisherman had caused the pike needless pain. Islam is a religion where the sentience of all animals has been declared in the Quran. However, the expected application of such a belief is sadly amiss in Pakistani society. In fact, many of the most vocal advocates for animal rights in the history of Pakistan have been non-Muslim.
Read more from Mahera on the website of the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society (PAWS Pakistan).
Ahmadiyyas and the Lahore mosque attacks, by Tahmena Bokhari
Click here to read the full comment from a friend of mine in Toronto, currently serving as Mrs. Pakistan World:
“As a social worker I have worked with hundreds of members of the Ahmadiyya community in Toronto to help them seek asylum and settle in Canada along with other social work issues. I was extremely passionate about this work but it did come with some criticism from a few members of the wider Muslim community. This criticism was mainly that Sunnis (dominant Muslim sect) should not be helping the ‘anti-Islamic’ Ahmadiyyas. My specific faith label is not the issue here, my values of social justice are, and I would claim that social justice are the very values my personal faith has taught me.”
Pakistani-American leadership by example
I recommend a great little LA Times write-up of Pervaiz Lodhie, CEO of Torrance, California-based LEDTronics and one of the founders of the Pakistan American Leadership Center.
Some of My Best Friends Are Pakistanis
by Ethan Casey
SAN DIEGO, May 4 – As I write this, the news that the man arrested for trying to blow up Times Square is a U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin has only begun to sink in. What is this going to mean for other U.S. citizens of Pakistani origin – and for me, as their friend?
This article’s headline is an ironic allusion to something people used to say to disavow bigotry: “Some of my best friends are Jews.” It’s also a straight statement of fact: some of my best friends are Pakistanis. And I want the world to know that, especially in these times and at this moment, because I think it’s very important for us to remember that not all U.S. citizens of Pakistani origin blow stuff up.
Assuming we’re being told the truth about 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad of Bridgeport, Connecticut, it might be fair to ask: With friends like these, who needs enemies? But it’s precisely because of the horrific misguidedness of a dangerous few that we need to stay calm and remind ourselves and each other that we’re all in this together. I said exactly this, in fact, on Sunday when I spoke in support of The Citizens Foundation at the South Asian American Arts Festival put on by Zanbeel Art at the Santa Monica Art Studios. I’ll say it again tonight, when I speak to the Pakistani Students Association at UC-San Diego.
The Citizens Foundation is one of several well-run nonprofits supported by the largely very suburban and middle-class Pakistani-American community that are quietly doing the most urgently necessary work: providing education, and thereby hope and self-respect, to the burgeoning young generation of the Pakistani poor. Too quietly: groups like TCF-USA must start tooting their own horns more assertively to the American public. I would go so far as to say that countering the impression of Pakistanis conveyed by the likes of Faisal Shahzad is not only an opportunity for the Pakistani-American community, but an obligation.
I’m not saying that Pakistani Americans have to prove that they’re not terrorists. The rest of us must remember that there is no such thing as collective guilt, and that the presumption of innocence is a basic American principle. I am saying that the existing institutions of Pakistani America need to move – now – beyond inviting each other to the existing endless round of charity fundraisers, worthy and useful as those are. Pakistani Americans are a remarkably talented and resourceful community who pay a lot of money to the U.S. Treasury in taxes and contribute very substantially to American society as physicians, engineers, teachers and business people. For better or worse, Americans listen to people who insist on being heard, and if you don’t toot your own horn, nobody else is gonna toot it for you.
My writing and public speaking are all about emphasizing to Americans the humanity of Pakistanis, their experience of and views on contemporary history, the complexity of their political and geographical situation, and the enjoyable and interesting apects of my own experience of Pakistan, dating back to 1995. As my friend Todd Shea likes to say, Americans hear 2% of Pakistan’s story 98% of the time. I feel very fortunate to have experienced Pakistan directly at a relatively innocent time both in history and in my own life, before the country’s name became a dirty word in the West. We can’t go back to that time, but we can remember it – and we can and should take a deep breath, reach out to each other as allies, and work together to do what needs to be done.
What needs to be done? Young Pakistanis need to be given hope and self-respect by way of education and jobs. This is already being done by The Citizens Foundation, by Developments in Literacy – at whose San Diego fundraiser I’ll be speaking this Saturday, May 8 – by the Human Development Foundation, by Pakistani pop star Shehzad Roy’s Zindagi Trust, and famously by Greg Mortenson.
But why is Greg Mortenson’s the only one of these efforts that’s well known? Part of the answer, of course, is that he’s white: church ladies and Oprah watchers can relate to him as a virtual nephew or brother-in-law. This is fine. But we need to get beyond the toxic supposition that America is primarily a “white” and/or Christian country. It’s not, anymore, and that’s a good thing.
So the other thing that needs to be done is that the Pakistani community needs to ratchet up both its involvement in American society and politics and its visibility. Call up your local schools and churches, invite your neighbors to your home, all that good stuff, and by all means enlist me, Todd Shea, and Greg Mortenson as envoys. But also support Pakistani-American and other Muslim candidates for public office; insist on meetings with existing officeholders, not only but especially those you consider hostile to Muslims or Pakistan; and support and expand the lobbying work of groups like the Pakistani American Leadership Center and the Council of Pakistan American Affairs. Get in the American public’s face, as fellow Americans, and help us all begin having a more honest conversation about Pakistan, America, terrorism, and where our countries and world are headed.
And I ask two things of my fellow non-Pakistani Americans: Go to the trouble of educating yourselves about Pakistan – my books and inviting me to speak are, indeed, good places to start. And, when you see pictures of Faisal Shahzad over the coming days, keep in mind that, except for the buzz cut, Tim McVeigh looked a lot like me.
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).
Overtaken By Events in print! and events in Chicago, Tampa, San Jose
Dear friends,
My new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip will finally be in print in early April, which is also when I will (inshallah) return home from two weeks of hard travel, including five days in Haiti. If you haven’t yet ordered your copy of Overtaken By Events, please support my work by ordering it online or mailing a check for US$25 per copy, payable to “Alive and Well in Pakistan,” to P.O. Box 85315, Seattle, WA 98145-1315. Any copies ordered in the next two weeks will be shipped, with a personal thank-you note from me, immediately after I return to Seattle in the first half of April. Get books for your friends and family too, or to donate to schools and libraries.
I’ll be traveling a lot over the next couple of weeks, and wanted to let you know about the events I’ll be speaking at:
- An informational launch meeting for my good friend Fawad Butt’s community banking initiative, Crescent Bancshares Corp., Rosemont, Illinois, Saturday, March 27.
The Pakistani American Association of Greater Tampa Bay, Pakistan Resolution Day event, Sunday, March 28:
- The annual Chicago fundraiser for Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute, Saturday, April 3. I won’t be able to be at this event in person, unfortunately, but every attendee will be given a complimentary copy of Overtaken By Events, along with Greg’s book Stones Into Schools and other goodies.
- The South Bay Islamic Association and the Pakistani American Culture Center on Friday, April 2 in San Jose, California.
Please come to one of these events if you can make it. I’ll be offline while in Haiti, March 20-26, and only sporadically online before April 5. Many thanks to all of you for your longstanding and ongoing support for my work.
Best regards,
Ethan
