I wrote the following long review essay for a class at the University of Washington in 2009. I’m publishing it now in preparation for writing and publishing a review of Ayesha Jalal’s more recent book Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia and because, however things might change in South Asia, I still find her earlier books highly relevant and thought-provoking. – Ethan Casey

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The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. By Ayesha Jalal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback edition 1994 (orig. pub. 1985). 310 pages. Paper.

The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence. By Ayesha Jalal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 362 pages. Paper.

Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective. By Ayesha Jalal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 295 pages. Paper.

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In every state power rests with the armed forces; and whoever controls these forces controls, in the last resort, the state itself. – A.J.P. Taylor, Bismarck

Discovering and obsessively reading A.J.P. Taylor, during my first visits to India and Pakistan in the mid-1990s, was part of this American’s early education in truths that non-Americans understand more readily. Taylor’s reputation might have diminished since his widely televised heyday, and his pronunciamentos might be more pithy and quotable than rigorous, but I remain both grateful and mindful of the fact that, in order to hear such a voice, I had to leave the United States. Taylor wrote as, in two senses, a European historian: a historian of Europe, and a historian who was European, i.e. closer than Americans are to recent historical experience. To read his controversial classic The Origins of the Second World War was to begin shedding the callow skin of Anglo-Saxon moralism, to learn that history is less often about good guys and bad guys than about forces and compulsions and contingencies that are beyond our ken, not to mention our control.¹

In the way Taylor was, for his generation and audience, a European historian, Ayesha Jalal is a South Asian historian. She also writes with a similar brio and ear for the telling phrase. Her books address the central cluster of conundrums facing the modern subcontinent – the causes, meanings, and consequences of the 1947 partition – with a thoroughness and trenchancy others struggle toward and from a perspective that, by definition, Indian writers cannot achieve. This is not to say that her authority is unearned, simply by virtue of her being Pakistani. But, as a Pakistani, Jalal claims the seamlessness of the subcontinent’s history and geography as her subject, and she demonstrates it across the artificial frontiers (both spatial and temporal) of 1947. Her choice might seem presumptuous to nationalist Indians and iconoclastic to Pakistanis, but that’s the point of it. Both the justification of her ambition and the size of her achievement are amply illustrated in the substantial and distinguished body of work that she has published over a quarter-century.

Taken together, Jalal’s books offer the satisfactions of sustained attention and a unity of theme and subject that underscore her intellectual project. The Sole Spokesman (1985), The State of Martial Rule (1990), and Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (1995) can be fruitfully read as a trilogy both chronological and thematic. The Sole Spokesman narrates and assesses the Muslim situation(s) in the subcontinent as events accelerated through the Second World War toward British India’s inevitable postwar independence and explores the ironies, complexities, and fallout of the fact that the ramshackle and makeshift country that the “Pakistan” idea became was dominated by the very Muslim-majority provinces, mainly western Punjab and eastern Bengal, that had been both least supportive and least in need of the leadership Mohammed Ali Jinnah offered. “Whatever the merits or demerits of the Muslim claim to nationhood orchestrated after 1940, the lasting relevance of Jinnah’s view of the imperative to renegotiate the union of India cannot be denied,” writes Jalal. “Jinnah had held that at the moment of the British withdrawal the unitary centre of the colonial state would stand dissolved. Any new all-India arrangements had to be based on an agreement among the constituent units.” That the agreement eventually reached – never, in fact, fully affirmed in good faith by all parties – was imperfect, to put it mildly, does not invalidate Jinnah’s claim. Jalal’s intention in The Sole Spokesman is to show how circumstances, rival compulsions and ambitions, and tragic misunderstandings forced events into a channel that led from Jinnah’s legitimate if lawyerly claim to the wounded and cornered version of Pakistan that lurched into being in August 1947 and has been limping along ever since.

The State of Martial Rule picks up where The Sole Spokesman leaves off and argues for the necessity of making Pakistan’s early history the starting point for any analysis of its present condition. “No understanding of contemporary Pakistan is possible without an historical analysis of the first decade after independence, a period of relative flux in the institutional balance of power between elected and non-elected institutions but during which the state structure was cast into an enduring, even rigid, mould,” writes Jalal. “This work focuses on the dialectic between state construction and political processes while weaving in the related economic, strategic and ideological dimensions. Beginning its independent career without the semblance of a central government apparatus, Pakistan is a fascinating laboratory for studying the construction of a state.”

In Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, Jalal extends her treatment to include post-1947 India. Ever since the partition, writers on Pakistan have been compelled to inject into their books apologias and caveats justifying their interest and insisting on the subcontinent’s underlying unity. “Although India has acquired a monopoly on imperial nostalgia, at the time it was the area that is now Pakistan which stirred the British imagination and won their respect,” writes journalist Emma Duncan in Breaking the Curfew, her anatomy of Pakistan in the late 1980s, around the time of the end of the Zia ul Haq dictatorship.² When I returned to Pakistan in early 2009, the then-recent November 2008 terrorist siege of Mumbai had brought home the dark side of the subcontinent’s unity in division, so I began my “Pakistan road trip” in Mumbai.³ I also took with me to reread The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin’s classic science-fiction novel about twin planets separated by ideology, mutual paranoia, and self-enforced exile: “The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return.”⁴

Which is to say that I chose not to qualify the verb in the first sentence of the previous paragraph with the adverb “boldly,” because Jalal’s extension of her analysis to India and post-1971 Bangladesh seems to me less bold than obvious. The borders between India and Pakistan, and between the colonial and the post-colonial subcontinent, are not only politically pernicious and dangerous, but intellectually unhelpful. Jalal’s decision to treat the three countries severally but comparatively in a single volume makes a statement that she considers important. She makes her case forthrightly in her introduction:

Among the more fascinating themes in contemporary South Asia has been the “success” of democracy in India and its “failure” in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yet studies of democratic politics in India and military dominated authoritarian states in Pakistan and Bangladesh have rarely addressed, far less explained, why a common British colonial legacy led to apparently contrasting patterns of political development in post-independence South Asia. The lacuna in the literature is surprising given the oft-heard scholarly laments about the artificial demarcation of the subcontinent’s political frontiers at the time of the British withdrawal. Many historians are coming to question the inclusionary and exclusionary claims of both Indian and Muslim nationalisms and, more guardedly, the appropriateness of the concept of the “nation-state” in subcontinental conditions. The spatial and temporal artifact that has been the modern nation-state in post-1947 South Asia nevertheless remains inextricably stitched on to the scholarly canvas.

“Analyses premised on historical disjunctions,” she continues, “even when acknowledged as arbitrary, tend to emphasize differences rather more than similarities. The loss of a subcontinental vision has not only compartmentalized South Asian historiography but deflected from any sort of comparative understanding of the common dilemmas of the region’s present and the interlocking trajectories of its future.” In straining to see over the horizon, beyond the nation-state, Jalal is striving to redefine South Asian history as both subject and discipline.⁵ Beyond her inarguably formidable gifts as an individual intellect and scholar, her special contribution as a historian of South Asia who is Pakistani is her angle of vision. And a discipline understandably dominated by a country that is by all measures many times larger than any of its neighbors needs practitioners who can see that country from the outside (but from within the region). Hence the “subcontinental vision” that Jalal advocates and is trying to achieve.

By writing a comparative study of “formal democracy” versus authoritarianism both overt and “covert” in both India and Pakistan (and Bangladesh, which is interesting and necessary to include, though not central to the comparative aspect of her argument), Jalal is rendering visible a regional cluster of case studies of the actual structure of power, action, and intention beneath the tissue of the ostensible that is woven in every country from political language, cant based on nationalist mythology, and individual and collective self-deception. Her concerns have analogues worldwide, from the Japan depicted by Karel van Wolferen in The Enigma of Japanese Power⁶to the fictionalized Louisiana of Robert Penn Warren’s great American political novel All the King’s Men (in which the populist state governor Willie Stark asserts, “What folks claim is right is always a couple of jumps short of what they need to do business”).⁷ George Orwell comes to mind as well, not only the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, but the sensitive young colonial officer who learned a thing or two about authoritarianism during his years in Burma.⁸ Jalal is not writing about other countries or the world as a whole but about the subcontinent, but the point of alluding to these other authors is to argue that Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia belongs with their work on a shelf of books that explore the fundamental mysteries of political life in modern societies. This passage from her conclusion sums up Jalal’s argument as it applies to India:

The lack of electoral exercises in Pakistan is often cited as the main factor ensuring the infirmity of political processes. Yet the lessons from India serve as a warning against sanguinely interpreting periodic references to the people as sufficient evidence of a thriving democratic pulse. An investigation of the different phases in India’s political development reveals that changes in the centre-state dialectic, frequently reduced to an examination of Congress’s organizational strengths and weaknesses, were closely mirrored by shifts in the balance within elected institutions as well as between them and the non-elected institutions of the Indian state. A creeping if mainly covert authoritarianism served as the principal prop of a formally democratic political centre at the state and local levels of society. … The erosion of the Congress’s support base in a number of regions, first registered in the 1967 elections but gathering in momentum ever since, has fostered greater dependence by the political centre on the non-elected institutions, the civil bureaucracy in particular.

There are satisfactions to reading Jalal’s trilogy as such and in swift succession. Themes echo back and forth from one book to the next or the last, and a reader familiar with how things have turned out (so far⁹) in Pakistan enjoys many moments of vicarious epiphany. A passage in The Sole Spokesman, for example, unearths the origin of the chronically unresolved contradiction in Pakistan’s national-cum-religious ideology. I have often wondered whether Pakistan is a state for Muslims or an Islamic state. Here is the answer:

On the face of it, the “Pakistan demand” seemed to be the triumph of the provincial thesis of majority Muslims; but Jinnah’s strategy was not – indeed it could not have been – designed simply for the benefit of the Muslim provinces. If the “Pakistan demand” was to have the support of Muslims in provinces where they were in a minority, it had to be cast in uncompromisingly communal terms. This meant that those who wanted to establish “Pakistan” on Quranic principles of government could assert: “Quaid-i-Azam! We have understood Pakistan in this light. If your Pakistan is not such, we do not want it.” All Jinnah could do in the face of such challenges was to carefully avoid the issue.

Similarly, The State of Martial Rule speaks to the almost equally central issue of the dominance of Pakistan – later to be asserted with tragic consequences, especially in Bengal and Balochistan – by the numerically prevalent Punjabi ethnic group:

The Punjab could muster [circa 1948] a sufficiently potent form of provincial chauvinism to laugh the centre out of existence. … The dismissal of the Mamdot ministry and the provincial assembly was a blatant indication that the centre, dominated by Urdu-speaking refugee politicians [a.k.a. Mohajirs, a term that became tragically resonant in Karachi in the 1990s], considered all Punjabi representatives to be dishonest and corrupt. In the constituent assembly, Punjab alone among the provinces had less representation than its population warranted. To add insult to injury, no attempt had been made to fill its vacant seats. … All this was seen as proof apparent of a concerted attempt by the centre to weaken the Punjab as a political and economic force. Here was a mixture of Punjabi particularism tinged with paranoia, a lethal combination which in due course was to hit back at the centre with a vengeance.

The Sole Spokesman ends on a familiar ominous note: “If Jinnah was still hoping for a period of convalescence after the ‘surgical operation’, his hopes were shattered finally by the wholesale butchery which accompanied partition, particularly in the Punjab. … While Punjab writhed and turned under the impact of decisions taken in distant places, Mountbatten boldly claimed credit for having accomplished, in less than two and a half months, one of the ‘greatest administrative operations in history’.” Taking up the sequel in The State of Martial Rule, Jalal emphasizes Pakistan’s urgent need to start afresh, albeit by no means in a vacuum but in the aftermath of the partition bloodbath: “Unlike India, which inherited British India’s unitary central government in New Delhi, Pakistan had to create a wholly new central apparatus if it was to survive as a sovereign entity. The All-India Muslim League, the party that took over the reins of government in Pakistan, had no effective organisational machinery in the provinces which became part of Pakistan. … The popular view that religious solidarities formed the basis of Pakistan has distracted attention from the problems it faced in creating a central government from scratch.” Pakistan was from the start a Rube Goldberg booby trap, where pushing a button here would compel pulling a lever over there, which would cause something somewhere else to blow up: “Those responsible for managing the affairs of the new state were left making desperate, and often contradictory attempts, to prevent the ship from sinking before it had struck course. On the one hand they wanted all and sundry to appreciate the very real financial difficulties facing Pakistan; on the other, even before acquiring independent sources of foreign exchange, they were bidding for arms and ammunition in the world markets.” All of which, and more, Pakistan had to attempt in a context of indifference, at best, from Mountbatten and other British officials and festering resentment of its very existence from India.

The State of Martial Rule is not only a sequel to The Sole Spokesman but also a prequel to Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia. But the sympathy with which Jalal writes about Pakistan’s initial predicament shows clearly that her attitude is far from the tiresome liberal chant of “democracy good, military rule bad”. She has much more interesting things to say than that. “Nothing stood in the way of the reincorporation of the Pakistan areas into the Indian union except the notion of a central government whose structures of authority lacked both muscle and the necessary bottom,” she writes.

So in Pakistan’s case defence against India was in part a defence against internal threats to central authority. This is why a preoccupation with afforcing the defence establishment – not unusual for a newly created state – assumed obsessive dimensions in the first few years of Pakistan’s existence. … Pakistan’s ability to pay for its external defence was paralysed by a resource endowment which was insufficient to meet even the most basic internal security needs. The initiation of hostilities with India so soon after the establishment of the state entailed a diversion of very scarce financial resources – inevitably extracted from the provinces – into a defence procurement effort at a time when political processes in Pakistan had yet to become clearly defined.

It has long since become a cliche to note that Pakistan has spent as much time under military as under civilian rule, and that it alternates between the two roughly every decade. Elite and expatriate Pakistanis one meets at dinner parties and banquets are too quick either to blame the military and helplessly bemoan its role or, alternately, to excuse authoritarianism with platitudes about how Pakistan is supposedly “not ready” for democracy. The sense of futility is palpable, widespread, and chronic. In another prescient passage (The State of Martial Rule was published nine years before Pakistan’s third coup brought General Pervez Musharraf to power in 1999), Jalal writes:

By October 1958, the disjunction between the political process and state-building was to lead to direct intervention by the army. The responsibility for the military takeover is commonly laid at the door of Pakistani politicians. It is true that, during 1954 and 1958, the quality of politics – never very high to begin with – went from bad to worse. Yet to attribute the first military coup to the doings of politicians in the main is to credit them with a result which, upon sifting the evidence, grossly overstates their ability to influence events in the climacteric last four years of “parliamentary government”. … Factional in-fighting among politicians far from impeding the exercise of state authority by the centre appeared, at each step, to be facilitating its consolidation under bureaucratic and military direction.

Fast-forward three decades to the abrupt end of General Zia ul Haq’s regime and the election that brought in Benazir Bhutto as prime minister carrying her father’s mantle, and Jalal writes, in Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia:

The consequences of [Zia's] politically stabilizing, economically revitalizing and morally regenerating regime are there for all to see – seething hatred among linguistic communities despite the common bond of religion, economic chaos, the practical collapse of the civil, police and judicial services and widespread corruption at every level of society. … The symbolic connotations of Benazir’s advent were clearly widely at odds with the structural constraints which she inherited. By far the most important of these was the long-standing imbalance between elected and non-elected institutions in the Pakistani state.

Once a pattern has been set – once, as Jalal puts it, a state structure has been “cast into an enduring, even rigid, mould” – changing the pattern or breaking the mold can become difficult and complex to the point of being effectively impossible. This is why Jalal’s earlier books are so attentive to the details of the Pakistani state’s establishment and construction; she wants to understand how and why the pattern got set. Replace “Benazir’s advent” in the passage quoted above with “Obama’s advent,” and it might be a sobering thought experiment to reflect on the difficulty the U.S. president faces in achieving anything in the direction of democracy, demilitarization, or health care reform, even if we assume his sincerity and competence. Ayesha Jalal is more interested in state structures than in personalities; she would say that it’s not about Benazir or Obama. No captain can turn around an aircraft carrier any way but slowly, even if he wants to, even if she tries really hard.

But this is where I wonder if Pakistan’s small and besieged, albeit articulate and generally admirable, liberal faction might have got the wrong end of the stick – or might have subtly crafted a perpetual excuse for its own failures. Jalal’s argument about Pakistan’s state structure and the imbalance between its elected and non-elected institutions is all too convincing. Given that, now what? Can we hope to change it? If not, what can we do? What should we do? In the weeks in late 2007 between her second return from exile and her assassination, Benazir’s symbolic connotations were impressively evident; she seemed, again, to be channeling her nation’s hopes. Yet, only four years earlier, my Beaconhouse National University colleague Taimur-ul-Hassan had treated me to the following rant:

Emotions were high because we had been through hell in Zia’s days, and we thought Benazir Bhutto might be able to change things. She is so arrogant. She doesn’t take any counsel. She thinks she is a wisdom unto herself. She could have opted to sit in opposition and wait her time [after the 1988 election], but she chose to compromise with the establishment. So where do we stand? Where do people like us stand, who thought she would take on the establishment? She cannot say anything to people of Pakistan. People of Pakistan brought that woman twice to power. People of Pakistan owe nothing to Benazir Bhutto. … At least she could have organized the Pakistan People’s Party at the grassroots level. There was not a party office in Lahore, when she was in power. … [Zulfiqar Ali] Bhutto’s picture is still in my wallet. But this woman is dishonest, corrupt, revengeful, reactionary, and incompetent. She may be a good opposition leader, but she cannot run a good government. If you talk about merit, I think Musharraf has served the interests of secular classes more than she did. She really disappointed us. She took that dream away from us.¹⁰

When General Musharraf overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in October 1999, he was ostensibly unjustified in doing so; the prime minister had the constitutional right to dismiss the army chief. But Nawaz’s decision to do so for the second time in twelve months was the last in a string of culpably foolhardy confrontations with rival national institutions ranging from the judiciary to the media to the National Assembly to, fatefully, the army – which had left him isolated and paranoid. What choice did Musharraf have? Military takeovers happen when civilian political situations break down, as I witnessed at firsthand in Cambodia in July 1997 and in Pakistan in 1999.¹¹ Civilian politicians in any country disregard the truth of this review’s epigraph from A.J.P. Taylor at their own peril.

Musharraf and the army are also indisputably culpable, of course. That is the tragic elegance of Pakistan’s plight: every individual or institution can point the finger at someone or something else. Failure to accept responsibility is a national pastime. This includes the military, to be sure, but it also certainly includes Pakistan’s civilian political class. And this is where, I think, personalities do matter. Was Benazir Bhutto the shining hope of a nation, a role model for women, and a Western-oriented liberal, or an arrogant plutocrat with an entitlement complex? Is Musharraf a patriot and a paragon of Pakistan’s meritocratic and secular middle class, or an egomaniacal dictator? Or all of the above?

It is very arguable that, legitimate or not, Musharraf was Pakistan’s most competent and effective ruler in at least three decades. “The Pakistani people’s disillusionment with the civilian governments was so profound that Musharraf was very popular when he first took over,” writes the BBC correspondent Owen Bennett Jones in the updated third edition of his book Pakistan: Eye of the Storm. “… And then, as the years went by, his political objectives were subsumed by the sheer difficulty of staying in office. … He was neither dictatorial enough to impose his will nor democratic enough to be legitimate.”

The remorseless, familiar cycle of Pakistani politics has turned once more. As democracy returned, however, there was more of a sense of relief that Musharraf had gone than jubilation about his successors. To many Pakistanis the idea that the civilian politicians could deliver what they most want – jobs, decent schools and the rule of law – was simply ludicrous. They had not done so before and there was no reason to believe that anything had changed. I ended the first edition of this book with the comment that, far from being the solution, the army had not realised that they were in fact part of the problem. This is still true. But exactly the same can be said of the “democratic” politicians as well.¹²

So my argument is that Pakistan’s civilian politicians are at least as responsible for the woefully dysfunctional state of the country’s politics as are the unelected military and bureaucratic establishments, and that individual personalities matter, because individual responsibility matters; and civilian politicians don’t get the moral high ground purely on the grounds that they’re civilians and “elected”. In 2007, I was a panelist at a seminar at which Ayesha Jalal was the keynote speaker.¹³ During one session, when Jalal and others¹⁴ voiced arguments about state structure like those Jalal makes in her books, I rejoined with critical comments about the fecklessness, arrogance, and toxic rivalry that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif foisted on Pakistan during their alternating periods in office during the 1990s. I was told that my argument was “merely anecdotal” – that the point was that the state was structured the wrong way. (Or, as Jalal puts it in The State of Martial Rule: “Those who are content to attribute the dominance of the Pakistan army to weaknesses in political organisation or to a poorly developed political culture are justifying a phenomenon without fully understanding its origins.”) But what if it’s too late to change the state structure? What if the country must choose between a corrupt elected civilian leader and a competent, honorable military ruler? Many Pakistanis would say that, even given their long and largely unhappy experience with military rule, the characters of Musharraf and of Pakistan’s current president show that the answer is not obvious.

Where Pakistan can or should go from here is a highly fraught question, particularly given the global situation in which the country’s always fraught politics are currently playing out. How it got to this point is a long and complex story, and a proper understanding of that story is urgently necessary. In her brilliant trilogy, the South Asian historian Ayesha Jalal does justice to its complexity and demonstrates that it’s the story not of Pakistan alone, but of the full, borderless subcontinent before, during, and since the craven British withdrawal and its attendant bloody partition.

ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, to be published in 2013, is Home Free: An American Road Trip. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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Wednesday’s news, broken by the Los Angeles Times, is that U.S. troops in Afghanistan posed for photographs with body parts of dead Afghans. By the time you read this, no doubt everyone in America who is paying any attention at all (many are not) will be aware of this news, and all too familiar ideological battle lines will have been drawn all over again.

“Still think that ‘most’ of our troops are honorable, Ethan? The mounting evidence is starting to suggest otherwise,” a friend asked me by email on Wednesday.

Did I say that? If so, I’m rethinking it. Not because the latest news is surprising, or unprecedented. Surely U.S. troops in Vietnam – and any troops in any war – indulged in similar morally and physically disgusting horseplay. Of course, during past wars there were no digital files or Internet to transmit them instantly worldwide. But the presumption that in the past the truth was suppressed doesn’t imply that to suppress it now would be the right thing. What’s wrong now was wrong then, and vice versa.

So, can incidents like the one that came to light Wednesday be justified or excused? No. So where does that leave us Americans, in whose name “our men and women in uniform” are fighting in Afghanistan? In addition to the indisputable moral wrongness of the actions in question, it leaves it clearer than ever that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is neither politically nor materially sustainable. When we leave – and it is a question of when, not if – we will leave behind a mess. But could it possibly be a bigger mess than the one we’ve created and are currently wallowing in?

I don’t have a full article in me to write about this incident, because there’s nothing new to say except that it’s more of what we already knew was going on. The question facing Americans is: What are we prepared to do, say, or acknowledge, in the face of the factual and moral truths that we can no longer deny?

I wrote two articles on related subjects in January and gave a speech at the United States Air Force Academy on February 23. Here are excerpts and links:

“Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?” (Jan. 13, 2012):

Ultimately it’s not – and shouldn’t be seen as – being about what Americans or Indians do to Muslims, but what any of us are willing to do, and be seen doing, to each other, and – framed more constructively – what we might still do to reclaim our humanity.

“What Are We Doing to Ourselves?” (January 16, 2012):

We can’t deplore (such a milquetoast word) enlisted Marines urinating on people we’ve defined as our enemy without acknowledging that (another lame phrase) “our political leaders” – which is to say all of us, especially if we still believe in democracy – are guilty well prior to the Marines themselves. What could the Taliban do to us that’s worse than the things we’re already doing to ourselves and each other? And is allowing ourselves to commit atrocities preferable to leaving ourselves vulnerable?

“Some Things Are Just Plain Wrong” (U.S. Air Force Academy speech, Feb. 23, 2012):

It’s helpful to remember that some moral dilemmas aren’t actually dilemmas at all. We all know darn well, as my late grandmother would put it, that some things are just plain wrong. For example, you don’t have to be a theologian or moral philosopher to know that it’s wrong to urinate on other people, no matter who those people are or what bad things they might have done. You can be an uneducated farmer’s daughter like my grandmother and know that.

ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, to be published in 2013, is Home Free: An American Road Trip. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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You could certainly argue that Guillen should have known better than to say anything at all, on that particular subject – Fidel Castro and Cuba – in that particular city – Miami. On the other hand, you could say that the rebranded Miami Marlins should have understood what kind of man they were hiring, i.e. not a company man or a yes man, when they hired Guillen to be their celebrity manager for the inaugural season in their expensive new stadium. Guillen has a well-earned reputation as the Billy Martin of our time. Did the Marlins really expect him to refrain from expressing his opinions?

And so what if he did, anyway? What he said was that he respects Castro for staying alive and in power for so long. Apparently that’s beyond the pale, at least in Florida.

The problem for the rest of the country is that Florida is not separate from the other forty-nine states, at least not fully and not yet. The array of wacky and horrific things that happen in Florida, from Elian Gonzalez to Quran-burning pastor Terry Jones to Trayvon Martin, affect the rest of us all too much. Like many people I prefer to keep my politics and my baseball in separate pigeonholes, but there are times when that’s not feasible or allowable. That was the point of my recent article “Why Fenway Park’s 100th Birthday Leaves Me Cold,” in which I pointed out that we should also be celebrating Tiger Stadium’s hundredth birthday, and that it’s not okay that we’re not.

So, notwithstanding whether Ozzie Guillen was unwise or tactless to open his trap in the first place (he was both), the fact that the Cuban-American community of South Florida has successfully bullied him into apologizing and the Marlins into suspending him for five games matters, well beyond both the state line and the foul lines. Indeed it matters as far from Miami as Seattle, where I live and where I write this.

I’m setting myself up for grief by drawing the following analogy, but it’s too obvious to ignore: the way the Florida Cubans bully the rest of us into either silence or acquiescence with their blanket demonization of Castro is a lot like the way the Jewish lobby aggressively stifles any and every attempt at honest discussion of Israel. In both cases we have communities that are among the more affluent and influential sectors of American society having it both ways: at once exercising quite frankly the power that they know darn well they possess, and playing the ultimate American trump card: claimed victim status.

So you could choose to read this article as a companion or sequel to a piece I wrote in June 2010 titled “Israel and the Distortion of American Politics.” Despite being none of the above – neither a Jew nor an Arab nor a Muslim nor a Cuban, nor even a Floridian – I absolutely do claim a stake, as an American, in debates over both Israel and Cuba, exactly because the American lobbies that consider those two countries so damn important are perpetually shoving them in my face. And, like the Republicans, both lobbies have a penchant for politics as a winner-take-all form of societal warfare, as when the Cuban-American Bar Association announced on Wednesday that, despite Guillen’s apology and the team’s at least equally craven decision to suspend him, they are taking their ball and going home rather than take part in the Marlins’ otherwise innocuous Lawyer Appreciation Night.

And don’t get me started, as a friend of Haiti and Haitians, on how and why Cubans are at the top of the South Florida totem pole and Haitians are at the bottom, or for that matter on the 2000 presidential election. I love Miami, and I have relatives there who are part Cuban, but whenever I’m there I have to grit my teeth and bite my tongue. So, it seems, does Ozzie Guillen. And, unfortunately, that’s not a local or parochial matter, or only – or even really at all – about baseball.

I wish that my fellow Americans of all shapes and sizes, colors, ethnicities, whatever, could realize that we’re all in this together and start pulling in the same direction to make this society better for all of us, before it’s too late. As long as some consider it instead to be a battle, though, I’m prepared to fight (politically and nonviolently) for the America that I want to live in. If that puts me on the opposing team against all the Cubans in Florida, so be it.

ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, to be published in 2013, is Home Free: An American Road Trip. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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Ethan Casey with cadets Angela Fox and Mahhad Nayyer at the United States Air Force Academy, February 24, 2012. Mahhad is the first Pakistani exchange cadet to study at the USAFA since 2004.

Guest article by Mahhad Nayyer

My life changed completely after I arrived in the United States in June 2010. Unlike most other foreigners, I came to a community where there were no other Pakistanis. After spending five days with a hospitable sponsor family, I joined the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) as an exchange cadet from the Pakistan Air Force. Initially I had no sense of belonging, but gradually I became part of this place and made valuable friends that I will cherish for the rest of my life. Ethan Casey is one of them.

One of the hardest things about living here is the criticism without much realistic knowledge about Pakistan. The remarks about Pakistan are commonly negative and unrealistic, mostly because of the controlled media. The bin Laden raid, accusations about the ISI supporting the Taliban and Al-Qaida, target killings, and suicide bombings made this worse every day. I know that there are wrong things happening in my country. At the same time there are logical reasons for such things to happen, because of the political interests of the different parties involved. There are also great things about Pakistan that no one knows and no media relates. That’s how judgments are made and thoughts are evaluated.

My intention in writing this article is not to discuss political issues, but to present a brief account of an event that happened recently at USAFA: The 19th Annual National Character and Leadership Symposium. Soon after coming to the United States Air Force Academy, I discovered the Center for Character and Leadership Development (CCLD), which was supportive of my ideas for taking initiative and making things better at the Academy. Every year, the CCLD hosts the National Character and Leadership Symposium (NCLS), for which it invites speakers from all over the U.S. to challenge and inspire the cadets. In my efforts to tell people more about Pakistan, the CCLD offered me the opportunity to invite a speaker for the NCLS, provided he or she fit the theme for NCLS 2012, which was “Walk the Walk: Leaders in Ethical Action.”

I spoke with a few professors at the Academy, and one of them, Dr. Schuyler Foerster, told me about Ethan Casey. I couldn’t have been happier to have found an American with sound knowledge of Pakistan, hands-on experience of Pakistan’s culture, and two published books about his journeys in Pakistan. Many thanks to Dr. Foerster for introducing me to Ethan and connecting us, and it was not hard at all for me to convince the CCLD that Ethan Casey fit the NCLS 2012 theme.

I met Ethan for the first time on February 23, when Ethan spoke to two different cadet audiences. I thought he would talk about relations between the United States and Pakistan and give the audience a better picture of Pakistan, but he focused more on the footprint of U.S. forces in other countries, in both the past and the present. Ethan’s message was broader and more influential than the message I had been expecting.

As the world’s superpower, the United States has immense responsibility toward the human beings who live in the countries where the U.S. is engaged. The most valuable message Ethan gave was that, as he put it (quoting his grandmother), some things are just plain wrong. No matter how good your intentions are, urinating on dead people or burning copies of someone’s religious books are things that are simply wrong and shameful to humanity. I was personally satisfied and happy for the message that Ethan gave, instead of talking only about Pakistan. His talk was provocative, and it made a lot of cadets think about such issues as they never had before.

The time I spent with Ethan was valuable. We shared stories and experiences, exchanged a lot of ideas, and vowed to connect each other to people who can help us in our purposes in different spheres of life. My cadet partner, Angela Fox, shared her perspectives too. And, thanks to Ethan, a Pakistani family in Denver has contacted me and invited me there.

I would also like to talk about my experience in the United States Air Force. I am generally an outgoing and extroverted person, and I like to talk with all kinds of different people. The USAF has helped me make a lot of friends and exchange ideas with them. My vision has definitely broadened since I came here.

Many people ask me if I like Americans. My answer has always been yes, because there are all kinds of people in all countries of the world. It is our differences that make us respected and unique. All of us are human beings after all, and we share common humanitarian feelings. Once you find the common point of bonding with another person, a whole new world opens for you. I have had good as well as bitter experiences with people here, but I have always remained open-minded, and that has helped me through difficult times.

If I have one suggestion to offer people in America, it is to learn more about other countries and cultures and to evaluate their judgments and decisions by putting themselves in other people’s shoes. Another thing I would like to say to people, not only in America but everywhere, is not to base their judgments on media. Media today is vastly controlled by powerful people, and to have a realistic approach towards the critical issues in the world, one needs to refer to other sources of information like blogs and articles by independent journalists. Ethan is very special in the same way, as he left his comfort zone and discovered the different aspects of other societies by practically experiencing them and spreading his message through his independent writing.

I have learned a lot of new things since coming to the United States, and I am thankful to all the people who helped me become part of a community that I could never have thought about. I am committed to telling people from other countries about America and my experience here, and to helping eliminate the misconceptions that people have about American people.

Mahhad Nayyer is the first Pakistani exchange cadet to study at the United States Air Force Academy since 2004. He can be contacted via his Facebook page.

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As a working journalist, my policy is to seize every honorable opportunity I’m offered to speak to audiences that I want to reach, and always to make the most of it while I can. The wisdom of this policy was underscored when, also last week, Current TV fired the political talk show host Keith Olbermann, who had interviewed me on March 12 about the massacre of women and children in a village outside Kandahar, from his show Countdown.

I have no opinion on the merits of Olbermann’s firing or of Dawn‘s budget. I’m grateful to both for inviting me onto their forums. But I’ve learned not to count on sustained support from media or other institutions, because all institutions and relationships are so unstable these days.

A case in point, of course, is the relationship between Pakistan and the United States. The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has a new book just out (I’m reading it now and will be reviewing it here soon), whose title is to the point: Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It’s written with urgency and without illusions, and it correctly blames everyone. “At times,” writes Rashid, “both sides seem to have an underlying death wish – both have had enough of the relationship, both are defiant, yet each needs the other; neither wants to revive the relationship under false pretences, yet neither can muster enough vision or assume enough responsibility to discuss a new paradigm.”

Rashid writes from a position of both unusual access to institutional sources on all sides and unparalleled, hard-earned authority as a ground-level reporter. His frank memorandum to politicians and generals in both Pakistan and America should be heeded; I hope it will be. At the same time, I’m concerned to continue doing what I can do to be helpful, from my different vantage point. I believe that an important part of that is to help maintain a productive and mutually respectful conversation among non-official Pakistanis and Americans, including – an important group – Pakistani-Americans.

I have no illusions about our ability to influence policymakers or help end the war in Afghanistan or the violence in Pakistan. But I’m concerned with doing whatever we can, regardless, and we can achieve a lot more by taking initiative to talk and work together than by worrying and complaining. And it’s precisely because relations at the state level are so poor that private people must do all we can to build and sustain a conversation and relationships within our own realms of influence.

So this article is an appeal to you – this means you, whether you’re Pakistani or American or both – to stay in conversation with me, and with each other, whether through my writings or directly. I’ll always welcome any opportunity to write for both Pakistani and American publications, or to appear on television, but I can’t control when or whether those opportunities will happen. In the meantime, in the wake of losing Dawn as an outlet, I intend to write much more often on my own website and to build both it and my new email newsletter into places where the necessary conversation can continue to happen, and on a bigger scale.

I also do as much public speaking as I can, all around the United States and Canada. I often describe this to Pakistanis as reaching out to mainstream America “one church basement, one Rotary Club, one university class at a time.” This is the way it needs to be done, but it can be done more efficiently and with greater impact. My Pakistani-American friends in Wisconsin are showing real leadership in this; my April 19-29 visit there, when I’ll be speaking at public and private high schools, churches and mosques, bookstores, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a model for how I believe Pakistanis and “mainstream” Americans can and should be reaching out to and getting to know each other.

This is not a matter of only feeling warm and fuzzy in an intangible way about how we’re all human and in this together. It’s a matter of taking action together to make the world and our societies better, especially because the governments of both countries are not doing this (and are in fact doing a great deal of damage). We could debate which government is more at fault, but that would be a distraction from the effective work that we ourselves should be doing. For example, millions of Americans have no health insurance – and I happen to know that the influential Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America (APPNA) is taking steps to set up free clinics in cities around the U.S., staffed on a volunteer basis by its members. That’s the kind of U.S.-based and concrete leadership that’s good for everyone, including the Pakistani-American community and, by extension, Pakistan.

I need material support, which means financial support, in order to continue and build on what I’m already doing as an advocate in mainstream America for the humanity and interests of Pakistanis. I’m going to continue candidly asking you for that support and telling you what forms I hope it will take. If you’d like to know how you can support me, please ask. But much larger than my needs is the urgent need we all share to pull up our socks and make ourselves useful in both Pakistan and America.

I want to work with anyone who wants to do this. For starters, please subscribe to my email newsletter (scroll down to the “Join Our Mailing List” link, or go directly here) or join my Facebook page. You also can reach me directly through the Contact page of my website.

Ethan Casey

Seattle, April 3, 2012

www.ethancasey.com

ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, to be published in 2013, is Home Free: An American Road Trip. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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As you may or may not remember, Comiskey Park, built in 1910, was torn down for no good reason in the early 1990s and replaced, at enormous public expense, by a new stadium erected literally across the street. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf got his way by threatening to move the American League charter member team to St. Petersburg, Florida, where hopeful local boosters were building what was then being called the Florida Suncoast Dome (now Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays).

Reinsdorf’s people approached Mary Frances Veeck, widow of legendary former White Sox owner Bill Veeck, to ask her blessing to name the new stadium Bill Veeck Park. Mary Frances said hell no, so instead they named it New Comiskey Park, later shortened to just plain Comiskey Park, as if that somehow made it like or a version of the real thing. It’s now known by the euphonious moniker U.S. Cellular Field. It’s an okay place to see a baseball game, but it’s no Comiskey Park. If you look closely, somewhere in the middle of the parking lot where Comiskey Park used to be, you’ll see the outline of home plate painted on the asphalt.

The story of the battle to save Comiskey Park is told, very well, by Douglas Bukowski in Baseball Palace of the World (1991). Michael Betzold and I chronicled the all too similarly unedifying tale of the fight to save Detroit’s equally historic Tiger Stadium in Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Working with Mike on Queen of Diamonds was an apprenticeship by fire in the craft and calling of journalism, and an important early episode in my political education.

One thing I learned was that the issues at stake went far beyond baseball history and aesthetics (although these in themselves were sufficient reason not to vandalize a classic building), to questions like whether hundreds of millions of dollars of public money should be spent to build a demonstrably unprofitable new physical plant for a commercial business, in a city with a Third World infant mortality rate. To me the answer to that question is obvious, but maybe it’s less so if you avert your eyes. I remember saying to Mike: “We shouldn’t have to be writing this book.”

They don’t make them like that anymore, literally. For example, Tiger Stadium’s right-field overhang – the second deck literally extended above the playing field – was only the most famous of many features that will never be replicated in Detroit or anywhere else, no matter how many faux-retro filigrees They tack onto new stadiums such as the tweely-named The Ballpark in Arlington, Texas, where They put in a few unnecessary vertical posts in the outfield specifically to simulate Tiger Stadium. Mike aptly called Tiger Stadium’s overhang “a touch of whimsy born of necessity”; during the stadium’s expansion in the 1930s, owner Walter Briggs insisted on it, and an equivalent overhang at the back of the section above Trumbull Avenue, as a way to maximize seating.

Nowadays They minimize seating; most baseball stadiums built since 1990 hold fewer than 45,000 fans, certainly fewer than 50,000. This does not foster intimacy, as we’re asked to believe. Rather, its conscious purpose is to create a false scarcity, so teams can charge more for tickets. New stadiums are built with a premium on, well, premium seating. By stark contrast, and appropriately in a city of working people, Tiger Stadium had nearly 11,000 four-dollar bleacher seats. Its structural posts, much maligned by new-stadium advocates during the bitter political fight of the 1980s and 1990s, had the effect – intentional, at the time of construction – of putting the stadium’s upper deck as close to the field as possible. The front of the upper deck at Tiger Stadium was closer to home plate than the front of the lower deck in most new stadiums.

The posts did obstruct views from about 2,500 seats in Tiger Stadium’s lower deck. On the other hand, as architectural writer John Pastier observed pointedly in a letter to the editors of The Sporting News after baseball’s sometime “Bible” published a hatchet job, it also had 49,916 seats with unobstructed views – more than the total number of seats in most new stadiums.

And all new stadiums are designed (most of them by one firm, Kansas City-based HOK) with the upper deck cantilevered behind the lower deck. This avoids posts, but the affordable seats in the upper deck sure are far from the field, aren’t they? They’re even farther from the field than they otherwise would be, because usually there’s at least one layer of luxury boxes between the lower and upper decks.

All this is old news to anyone who was paying honest attention to what was happening to the landscape of baseball during the 1990s. What does it have to do with Fenway Park, and why do I feel churlish about its hundredth birthday? Well, pardon me for pointing out that Fenway Park is in uppity Boston, and the similarly venerable friendly confines of Wrigley Field are on Chicago’s fashionable North Side. I’m glad they’re still there, but I wish Tiger Stadium were too, and there’s no good reason for it not to be. Twenty years ago there still existed four specimens not only surviving but functioning very effectively, thank you, from the early-20th-century classic era of ballpark construction. Two of those were torn down; the two that remain are revered and extolled and treated as pilgrimage sites.

Apparently, both history and the public interest can be trampled with impunity on Chicago’s blue-collar South Side or in inner-city Detroit. Meanwhile, obnoxious Red Sox fans infest stadiums as far from Boston as Seattle, where I live, because it’s so hard to get tickets at Fenway. I was in Boston recently, and on my friends’ kitchen table was a copy of the 2012 Red Sox media guide. The cover sported a vintage photo commemorating Fenway’s anniversary, of course and understandably. A couple of months before that, I was in Detroit. The only vestige of Tiger Stadium still standing is the center-field flagpole, complete with flag. What statement that makes, you can decide for yourself.

That’s the way it is, but it’s not okay, and it’s important to say that it’s not okay. At the very least, it’s important to remember that the turnstiles began turning not only at Fenway Park but also at Navin Field, which evolved into Tiger Stadium, in April 1912.

ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, to be published in 2013, is Home Free: An American Road Trip. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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The shooting early Sunday took place in Panjwayi district outside Kandahar city, in a village called Alkozai. U.S. military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was believed that the assailant had suffered a mental breakdown.

There are so many questions raised but not answered here. We can and will learn more details over the coming days, but the thing is, I’m not confident the real questions will be answered satisfactorily. Why did he suffer a mental breakdown? Will he, and he alone, be held responsible? Another way of asking that is: Will he be made a scapegoat, like the enlisted personnel at Abu Ghraib? Might one of these incidents prompt some real soul-searching higher up the American chain of command – maybe even a high-profile principled resignation by, say, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Defense?

I do know there are many good people in the U.S. military  - I’ve met them – and that they take moral and ethical issues seriously. Less than three weeks ago I had the honor of being heard out respectfully when I gave a challenging speech (titled “Some Things Are Just Plain Wrong”) at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. What I do know is that this incident requires a real, soul-searching moral response by the American military hierarchy.

But the military does the bidding of civilian society, and that’s where the real soul-searching needs to take place. I know Americans have a lot on our plate these days, what with the mortgage crisis, the election, etc. But Afghanistan is not far away; it’s right here, bleeding all over American society. Afghanistan is one of the things on our plate, whether we like it or not.

Americans have become great excuse-makers. When Jared Loughner killed several people and almost killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords outside a Safeway in Tucson last year, people like me who saw the incident as inherently political were shouted down by the many who glibly claimed he was a “lone nut.” (One of the articles I wrote at the time is online here.) That excuse didn’t cut it for Loughner, and it won’t cut it in this case either.

I can’t say all that needs to be said in one hastily written article. Nor should I: there needs to be a real, honest conversation about Afghanistan among Americans. Finger-wagging by one writer, or even by a few writers, won’t suffice.

For now, I’ll try to draw our attention back to a question that’s behind so much recent history – so far behind that it usually goes unasked: Do we Americans want to have a relationship with the rest of the world, or do we just want to use other societies and nations for our own purposes?

I recently completed a small research project about coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan after and before 9/11 in Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. As far as I can tell, the last article fully devoted to Pakistan in Foreign Affairs before 2002 was “The New Phase in U.S.-Pakistani Relations,” by Professor Thomas P. Thornton of Johns Hopkins University, published in – get this – 1989. It’s a memorandum from an era now long past, and any number of passages from it could be quoted for ironic or darkly comic effect:

The United States must consider how to react to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan: Should we use this favorable situation to enhance our role in the region along the Soviets’ southern flank? Or should the United States reduce its heavy commitment in such a distant region and postpone thinking about South Asia until more pressing problems elsewhere have been taken in hand? … The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan reduces the need for an intimate relationship with Islamabad.

I believe that it was a direct recognition that in the eyes of the U.S. leaders at the time, they were barbarians, subhuman, not worth it. And I would submit that they are human beings, that if U.S. leaders had treated them as important in a human way, 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. When the [Berlin] Wall came down and we were waving flags and saying “America, America,” why weren’t we waving Pakistani flags? I remember seeing the Wall come down and all that, and I don’t remember hearing anything about Pakistan.

And yes, it has everything to do with Vietnam, with which American society never did come to terms. As an older friend once told me, what the Sixties were about was how “the blood of the war got on everyone’s hands, and we couldn’t wash it off. It’s still all over the place.”

But it’s possible to see clearly, even through the fog of war – if we want to, which means shouldering responsibility for things from which we’d rather avert our eyes. In Bangkok on January 13, 1966, a young journalist and sometime U.S. Senate staffer named Clyde Edwin Pettit, who had recently been in Saigon where he had spoken “intensively to over 200 people from colonels to privates, journalists and businessmen, Vietnamese, and English and French colonials,” typed a long letter to Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Fulbright read into the Congressional Record and later publicly credited with having compelled him to reverse his position on the war. In the letter, Pettit asserted that it was “vitally incumbent that we speak and speak with sincerity” to the Vietnamese:

I question both our original involvement and the deepening of our commitment. … I am very frightened. I could talk about bright spots; there are many. I do not think they override the stark, terrifying realities of a stalemate, at best, purchased at inconceivable cost and coupled with humiliating setbacks and losses. Then always, and I do not say this lightly, there is the unlikely but ever-present possibility of catastrophe. The road from Valley Forge to Vietnam has been a long one, and the analogy is more than alliterative: there are some similarities, only this time we are the British and they are barefoot. … I would rather America err on the side of being overly generous than on the side of military miscalculation of inconceivable cost. For what, the world might well ask should we win the gamble, have we won?

ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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Very soon I’ll be launching an HTML newsletter. While that’s in the works, there are a few recent things I want to share with you.

One is that my new book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, has at last been published. It’s the best book I’ve written or am likely to write. Its official publication date is March 1, but I’ve already been promoting it on trips to Southern California and Colorado in February. An excerpt from Bearing the Bruise, and the wonderful endorsement of it by Dr. Paul Farmer, are on this page. If you haven’t yet purchased your copy, please do, through this page:

http://www.ethancasey.com/books/bearing-the-bruise/

From time to time people ask me whether they can buy my books on Amazon. I do intend to make them available through Amazon, but I also urge you to remember that you can support my work as an independent journalist and author much more effectively by purchasing my books directly through my own website. You also can sponsor individual or multiple copies of my books to be given away, as for example I’ve just done with 57 copies of Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip that I donated last week to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. On every book page there is a button for sponsoring copies.

Ethan Casey with cadets Angela Fox and Mahhad Nayyer at the United States Air Force Academy, February 24, 2012. Mahhad is the first Pakistani exchange cadet to study at the USAFA since 2004.

Speaking of the Air Force Academy, I gave a speech there last Thursday, titled “Some Things Are Just Plain Wrong,” as part of the two-day 19th Annual National Character & Leadership Symposium. Other speakers at the symposium included H. Ross Perot and Sherron Watkins, the former Enron vice president who blew the whistle on that company’s infamous scandal ten years ago. My speech is one of the most forthright and, I think, important statements I’ve been in a position to make as a witness to recent history, and it prompted spirited and at times tense discussion. Please read it (and comment on it) at:

http://www.ethancasey.com/speaking/some-things-are-just-plain-wrong/

Also, just for fun, here is my short review of John Grisham’s most recent novel, The Litigators:

http://www.ethancasey.com/2012/02/review-the-litigators-by-john-grisham/

Best regards,

Ethan

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What Grisham is, is a hardworking popular storyteller and social moralist who takes those roles seriously, without taking himself too seriously. He told Guardian interviewer Nicholas Wroe that, on an early book tour, “A very young executive with a big book chain just said in passing that ‘the big guys come out every year.’ He meant the likes of Clancy, King, Crichton, Ludlum, Follett. I heard that loud and clear.” And just as Greene, who was similarly prolific, wrote (in Ways of Escape) of emulating Victorian writers’ courage by publishing everything and letting others sort it out later, so Grisham is not fussy about offering a slight but enjoyable book like The Litigators.

Not every Grisham book can, or should, be as ambitious as The Chamber or The Testament, or as exquisitely rendered and personal as A Painted House. Grisham’s apparent commitment is to giving us pretty much one book every year. Put together, they’re quite an accomplishment, and his lunchbucket approach to his craft, responding to that young executive’s advice, has made him bigger than all of the above, maybe even put together. Good for him.

You don’t need me to summarize the plot of The Litigators, and I won’t anyway because I don’t want to wreck the story for you. There’s no reason you need to read it unless, like me, you’re a Grisham completist, but if you want to read it you’ll be glad you did. I made my statement about Grisham’s value as a writer in “The Case for John Grisham,” which doubled as a review of his last novel, The Confession. The Litigators doesn’t add anything substantial to his legacy, but it’s a lot of fun. Its origins as an idea for a sitcom are apparent, and it’s intriguing to imagine what might have been done – or might still be done – with its characters in that format.

It’s also good to see Grisham venture outside his cultural comfort zone of the American South, as he does from time to time; The Litigators is set in a gritty fictional Chicago. It’s also a nostalgic throwback to some of the more ephemeral earlier Grisham novels like The Street Lawyer and The Runaway Jury. If you like being led through a thriller-by-the-numbers in which the plucky young lawyer keeps or reclaims his integrity, triumphs for the little people, and makes a bunch of money, you’ll enjoy The Litigators. I did.

ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010) and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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Nearly as striking to me was how many commenters scolded me for having compared Imran to Obama. I hadn’t even mentioned Obama by name. What I had written was: “Relying on a single charismatic leader to change everything for the better is a setup for embittered disappointment and disillusion. Pakistanis and Americans are very similar, not least in being idealistic; and I’m sorry to have to remind you and myself of how much hope we Americans put in a charismatic figure who promised definitive change here, four long years ago.” As far as I can tell, the readers who scolded me had no real reasons to offer for why Imran and Obama have nothing in common, only wishful assertions. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

There might well be real differences in the personal character and mettle of the two men. I think there are, in fact, and those favor Imran. He has been toughing it out in the political wilderness for more than fifteen years, through many changes of circumstance and regime, when he really didn’t have to. He has earned his credibility the hard way, above all through his tireless and successful work building and funding the justly famous Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital in Lahore. Obama had accomplished nothing comparable to that before becoming President of the United States, and he still hasn’t.

But what the commenters failed – willfully, I would venture, if understandably – to appreciate is that I wasn’t comparing the men, but the phenomena. The questions both raise are: Why do desperate societies feel a need to invest their hopes in a single charismatic would-be leader? What is the best result we can hope for, when that happens? What are the dangers? If (more likely when) the leader disappoints us, is that his or her failure, or our own? Above all, what are we entitled to hope for?

I write these days under two rubrics: twice monthly on Fridays in Dawn on topics directly to do with Pakistan, and every Monday on my own website (excerpted in Dawn) in a series called Home Free, which will also be the title of the book I’m working toward, reporting from the grassroots and commenting on the current and coming crisis here in the USA. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see the line where one ends and the other begins, and indeed one of my standing aspirations is that anything I write should, ideally, speak in some way to anyone who reads English, anywhere in the world. This installment is a case in point.

So these musings are prompted in part by what I see as the dangerous over-investment of hope many Pakistanis are placing in Imran Khan. Expecting too much from him is not fair to him or good for the Pakistani nation and society. At the same time, what’s been on my mind is how the Republican presidential primaries have been dominating mainstream news coverage in the U.S. for far too long now. What that shows is not only the infamously interminable quality of American elections in general, or even Obama’s all too real failure either to be the leader we elected him to be or to assert himself politically. Beyond proximate contexts and personalities, what I’m sensing is a greater than usual disconnect between the ostensible and the actual, as American society atavistically clings to the vestiges of its formerly functional institutions.

A litany of these reads like a roll call of the institutions that defined the America I grew up in, from once-prestigious book publishers and record companies to General Motors to the nightly news to Hollywood to Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous. The truth we’re disinclined to face in our national politics is that not only have the Republican and Democratic parties become similarly vestigial and pointless, but maybe so has the presidency itself. What’s been lost along with all of the above is something intangible but that, now that it’s gone, we know to have been crucial. Call it community or share purpose, or at least a tacit agreement that we’re all on the same page. Also lost is a sense that we’re all in the same boat, traveling together to a destination that we believe to be worth the journey.

The veteran political writer Elizabeth Drew begins a new entry on the New York Review of Books blog, ominously titled “Can We Have a Democratic Election?”, thus:

Beneath the turbulent political spectacle that has captured so much of the nation’s attention lies a more important question than who will get the Republican nomination, or even who will win in November: Will we have a democratic election this year? Will the presidential election reflect the will of the people? Will it be seen as doing so—and if not, what happens? The combination of broadscale, coordinated efforts underway to manipulate the election and the previously banned unlimited amounts of unaccountable money from private or corporate interests involved in those efforts threatens the democratic process for picking a president. The assumptions underlying that process—that there is a right to vote, that the system for nominating and electing a president is essentially fair—are at serious risk.

Drew’s questions are bracingly candid, but even she feels compelled to couch them in fairly conventional language, at a moment in history when the conventions we’ve lived by either have fallen or are fast falling away from beneath our feet. The answer to her main question clearly is no. We’ll have an election, and it will have a result, but – whether that result is a second term for Obama or one of the Republican buffoons who are mediocre and silly enough to want the job – it will solve no real problems and will leave at least tens of millions of Americans feeling disaffected, unrepresented and un-led. Just like in Pakistan. The question then will become: Now what?

So, to answer my original question: We’re entitled to hope for what we ourselves, individually and in collaboration with each other, and with clear vision and hard work, possess the capacity and willingness to accomplish. Whatever that is, we’re not entitled to ask either Obama or Imran Khan to accomplish it for us.

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:

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