Drones Are the Napalm of Our Crazy Time
I was born in 1965, the year the first U.S. combat troops went to Vietnam. Growing up in middle-class America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I distinctly remember that “Vietnam” – the place name stood in for a great many things left unsaid – was not discussed, almost taboo, among my parents’ generation. I didn’t realize this at the time, of course. I could only smell it, like the residue of something the dog left on the carpet, through the layers of deodorant and disinfectant.
Americans who had lived through “Vietnam” were emotionally and politically exhausted and had declared a tacit truce among themselves. That suited them – all of them, on all sides – but it left my generation poorly served. How can young people learn the lessons of history, if no one is willing to teach them? I had to assemble the puzzle for myself later, through self-directed reading and actually going to live in Southeast Asia. My first clue that I would need to do this came when I asked an older friend what “the sixties” had been all about, and he blurted out in bitter exasperation: “It was about 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.”
And it still is. And now, even to get back to Vietnam to deal with it honestly, we would have to wade neck-deep through several more recent wars’ worth of moral and historical muck. I wonder what the chances are of that. We do have the excuse that we have immediate and pressing compulsions and distractions, as well as both genuine and bogus causes for optimism. But we always have those. We had them, for example, during “Vietnam” itself. “You would hear constantly, ‘Napalm will win the war for us,’ Clyde Edwin Pettit told me when I knew him in Bangkok in the mid-1990s, when he was returning annually to Vietnam. “F–king napalm was the greatest thing ever to come down the pike, you woulda thought. It was always something was winning the war.”
Pettit was the author of a prescient 1966 letter to J. William Fulbright that compelled that powerful senator to reverse his position on the war, and of the 1975 book The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China (alternate subtitle: The Book That Proves There Are None), which consists of 439 pages of nothing but direct quotations from politicians, professors, and pundits, all purporting to understand what was happening or to know what was going to happen in Vietnam, arranged chronologically. Read from cover to cover, as Ed insisted it should be, The Experts amounts to a narrative of mounting horror and increasingly tortuous self-delusion. If this sounds familiar, it should. If any document demonstrates the staying power of human self-delusion, it’s Pettit’s masterpiece.
It occurred to me recently that, if he were alive today, Ed Pettit might say that drones are the napalm of our time. The common element is death rained down from the sky, and drones take this a step further by leaving the inflictors of it safe back in the States. Anyone who understood as Pettit did that, far from being “the greatest thing ever to come down the pike,” napalm was both immensely destructive to civilians on the ground in Vietnam and counterproductive to American goals, would endorse the argument made by the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid in the May 23 issue of The New York Review of Books, that any hope of building a reliable partnership with the governments of countries like Pakistan depends on
support for the complicated and unique internal political processes that can build in each a domestic consensus to combat extremists – who, after all, typically kill more locals than they do anyone else. International pressure and encouragement can help secure such a consensus. But it cannot be dispatched on the back of a Hellfire missile fired by a robot aircraft piloted by an operator sitting halfway around the world in Nevada.
I’m troubled by the fact that devices called drones feature prominently in Vietnam veteran Joe Haldeman’s ominously-titled classic science-fiction novel The Forever War. I’m bothered by eyewitness accounts like that of William Dalrymple, author of Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42, who recently told a Seattle audience:
In movies there’s usually one drone, and these guys in their shirt sleeves in Virginia directing them. But in Jalalabad it’s sort of like a New York taxi rank: all these drones taking off, one after the other.
Above all, I’m haunted by my friend Uong Leap’s childhood memory of seeing Khmer Rouge fighters in the tops of palm trees, shooting AK-47s at U.S. helicopters in southeastern Cambodia in the early 1970s. “Oh, crazy time!” Leap told me, with a jarringly cheerful grin. Leap knows what came after that crazy time in Cambodia, because he survived it.
What will come after the current crazy time in Afghanistan and Pakistan?
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), called “intelligent and compelling” by Mohsin Hamid and “wonderful” by Edwidge Danticat. He is also the author of Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012) . His next book, Home Free: An American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. Web: www.ethancasey.com. Facebook: www.facebook.com/ethancasey.author. Join his email list here.
Boston: Does tribalism exonerate Islam?
Guest article by John Singleton
Fort Worth, Texas - Ethan Casey has challenged me to write a piece in response to Akbar Ahmed’s fascinating explanation of the bombings in Boston, published in the Christian Science Monitor. The well-researched article asserts that we’ll understand little about this by examining traditional “Muslim links to terror” theories. Dr. Ahmed proceeds with the suggestion that, instead, Chechen tribalism is at the core of the problem.
It seems, on appearance, a somewhat exceptional argument, at once absolving Muslim self-reflection in a direct way and simultaneously indicting the Chechen people. I don’t say that lightly or accidentally. I fully agree with those who say that the bombings are not related to Islam. It is not Islam, but specifically two practitioners, who have garnered world attention: practitioners who consider themselves Muslim. In order to have any form of transparent dialogue, that self-identification must be allowed.
If we are to consider Dr. Ahmed’s suggestion fairly, the United States has its own reference point to do so. The violence that was prevalent in the South after the Civil War, and which did not abate until after forced integration of schools, was partly attributed to the “poor and ignorant southerners” and their feudal customs. This violence had clear linkages to a shadowy, previously-nonexistent group known as the Ku Klux Klan. It doesn’t take much work to draw some clear parallels from the Klan to Dr. Ahmed’s Chechen tribes.
Present in both cases was immense societal upheaval from outside the region. Dr. Ahmed makes an excellent case in presenting the forces that have torn Chechnya apart, and similar forces (both industrial and military) were at work across the South. Also present in each case is the iconic language of ideology, with terms like “respect for elders,” protecting “our women,” and “honor” as not only a symbol of respect but also a legalistic and vague set of beliefs that potentially act as triggers for violence. Dr. Ahmed makes the case that a question such as “How long have you been a Muslim?” would have been insulting to the men by way of “violation of the code.”
More striking in both cases—the emergence of the Klan in the South and the emergence of shadowy Muslim groups in war-torn regions across the globe—is the horrific use of religious texts to justify actions clearly contrary to the faiths of Islam and Christianity. In each case violence emerged from regions of marginality (economically depressed; exploitative, harsh labor conditions; socio-geographic extremes of climate, poverty and ethnic strife): areas that also suffer high rates of illiteracy, unemployment, infant and youth mortality, etc. These same regions provide fertile recruitment for what are loosely termed “hate groups” in the US and “terrorists” globally.
What motivated me to compare these groups is the existence of “apologetic” interpretations that shift the focus from uncomfortable areas, such as the role of Islam in condemning acts of violence or the role of Christianity in challenging the existence of hate groups across the US, groups that occasionally link or market themselves directly as Christian-based.
When I read Dr. Ahmed’s column, suggesting that links to Islam would not prove productive and that we should turn to “tribal” Chechnya to understand this, I felt he was half-correct and remembered a formative childhood experience of my own.
I was twelve years old when an essay or some project I was involved in garnered me the opportunity to travel to New York for a United Nations seminar on apartheid. I was the only kid on the trip, from a tiny town in a once-remote region of the Appalachian Mountains. I knew I wasn’t expected to participate and I mostly didn’t, instead watching from the back of the bus, the back of the plane, and the backs of rooms as Methodists and other Christian groups “discussed” this world issue.
That is relevant now only given that, as I remember, a bishop’s wife was turning red-faced on hearing several anti-apartheid leaders speak of the way in which verbal platitudes and other non-action from the West were hindering the demise of this awful system. “You certainly have a terrible image of Christianity,” the bishop’s wife noted dryly. To which the young South African activist responded: “Hardly. I have great faith and respect for Christianity. It’s Christians I’ve learned not to trust.”
There is much to respect in Dr. Ahmed’s article; my comment might be seen as no more than a footnote, as perhaps it should be. That perspective is enriched by studies of numerous tribal communities across the world. I will maintain my footnote anyway. To pursue a nuance—tribalism being the nuance here—is academic at best, and cultural sleight-of-hand at worst, when the faith of Islam is tarnished by the actions of its practitioners. If the Muslim world can be enraged—which I fully respect their right to be—over a cartoon in Denmark, acts such as the bombing in Boston must equally enrage them, or the West will continue to interpret such actions as the bombings not as exceptions but as the practice.
The Boston bombers will likely ultimately be labeled as unorganized and disconnected and will remain “unclaimed” by a variety of communities, and Americans will say, “You see what happens when we let them in here.” That is unfortunate, and it represents our own form of self-denial and sleight-of-hand, as we fight diligently to protect our own global self-image as the ones who do good, who help the poor, who care about humanity. We do those things, just as the followers of Allah do those beautiful things. But doing good work does not absolve us, either as Christians or as Muslims, from self-reflection and criticism when our brothers and sisters openly choose dark paths.
John Singleton coordinates the Kinomonda World Cinema project and works as Director of International Services at TCU. He can be reached for comment at j.singleton@tcu.edu.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the American public
On my Facebook page on May 1, the second anniversary of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, I re-posted the link to an article of mine originally published in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. In the distress of that extraordinary moment, pulling an all-nighter in a motel room in Fort Worth, Texas, I had written:
As I watch over and over the mobs in New York and Washington, I fear two things. One is that too many Pakistanis are too traumatised to lay aside their anger and frustration. “WE HATE AMERICANS!!!” a Pakistani I don’t know personally told me on Facebook, just as I was finishing this piece. When I pointed out that I’m American and asked if he hated me, he replied, “I hate all of u!!” The other thing I fear is that too few Americans appreciate the difference between global war and a giant football game.
I had titled my article “The urgent importance of mutual respect.” Last week, my re-posting of it elicited this response from Bryan Zaydel, a mailman in Detroit:
Know what’s more important than “mutual respect”? Destroying those that wish to destroy us. Fortunately, you bleeding heart liberals are far outnumbered by people who don’t give a rats a#$ about what the world thinks of us.
I don’t know Bryan Zaydel, though it happens somehow that, through the magic of Facebook, he and I know someone in common. It wouldn’t matter what he has to say, and I wouldn’t call him out by name, except that these days, such words reverberate instantly worldwide, and impressionable young people read them and, like the Pakistani quoted above, respond in kind. All of which accomplishes less than nothing, because it stokes an atmosphere in which more violence by “us” against “them” (and vice versa) can seem justified.
Also last week, I had the pleasure of hearing William Dalrymple speak at the Seattle Asian Art Museum about his new book, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42. As I said in my Huffington Post review, any summary a reviewer could offer would be the merest potted version of what took the author years of research to stitch together, so I prefer to urge you to read the book itself. And please do read it, especially if you’re American; there are things in it, facts as well as truths, that you need to know. In Seattle, Dalrymple said things that I’m sure he says every time he gives his slide show:
Russia crushes liberty [according to British propaganda]. The British, despite having crushed liberty in the princely states in India, do not see themselves in quite the same light. For freedom’s sake, they must conquer Central Asia. … The reality is that it’s a pipe dream. … [A misunderstood and overblown intelligence find] allows an ideologically driven group of hawks to have the war that they’re already determined to have. … And, rather like Wolfowitz in 2001, it all looks as if it’s a done deal. And in that smugness lie the seeds of their undoing. … Another thing that happens – of course this would never happen today – is that they think they’ve secured Afghanistan, so they go off and invade someplace else. … The regiments that are deserted by their British officers in the Khord Kabul [Pass] are the regiments that rise up first in 1857. … But the British can’t let this go, because they know that if they do, they’ll lose their Indian empire.
The relevance to more recent history comes through loud and clear in both Dalrymple’s presentation and his book. I hope it’s also clear what all this has to do with Bryan Zaydel in Detroit. Like me or, for that matter, like William Dalrymple, the only power Zaydel has to influence public events is through his words. Freedom of speech is a right but, if any of us uses words publicly in a damaging or dangerous way, the rest of us are both free and obligated to hold him or her to account.
At the same time, what the juxtaposition of Dalrymple’s Seattle visit and Zaydel’s vitriol brings home is that, important though it is, the earned wisdom of someone like Dalrymple will reach only those Americans who want to be reached – or, more optimistically, who know that they need to be reached. In the U.S., there really are three distinct publics: officialdom and the East Coast “policy elite”; the liberal coastal cities and sundry university towns; and the rest of the country. On his recent U.S. tour, Dalrymple reached two of those: audiences in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, plus a briefing at the White House. Officialdom will be receptive or not, depending on their political predilection of the moment. Affluent, literate, largely white and somewhat smug liberal audiences like the one in Seattle are appreciative and buy books, but don’t need to be influenced.
William Dalrymple lives in India and can’t be everywhere, except through his books and other writings. I’m also, for my part, doing what I can. So are many others. But the challenge is as big as America itself, and the question is: How can the Bryan Zaydels of the world or – more feasibly – the millions who live in places like Detroit and Fort Worth and are well-meaning but frightened and bruised by all the recent history we’ve lived through, be persuaded that “they” don’t all “wish to destroy us”?
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), called “intelligent and compelling” by Mohsin Hamid and “wonderful” by Edwidge Danticat. He is also the author of Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012) . His next book, Home Free: An American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. Web: www.ethancasey.com. Facebook: www.facebook.com/ethancasey.author. Join his email list here.
On the Road in America with Ethan Casey
Ethan Casey with his rented Prius in the French Quarter, New Orleans, Nov. 12, 2012.
On September 5, 2012, I got in a rental car in front of my house in Seattle and drove east. It was the start of a 3 1/2-month, 18,000-mile adventure that took me through every region of the contiguous United States, during and just after the presidential election, before ending back in Seattle on December 18.
The purpose of the trip was to see today’s America for myself, in as much of its variety, confusion and potential as I could cram into an ambitious yet inevitably arbitrary itinerary, then to write an American road trip book that would – so I hope – be both entertaining and edifying, reflecting a portion or version of 21st-century America to itself for further discussion, or at least for fun. The tradition I was joining includes famous books like the bestsellers Travels with Charley (1962) by John Steinbeck and Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon (1982), as well as Henry Miller’s fascinating just-back-from-Europe travelogue of 1945, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (which for starters is a terrific title). Among other things proven by this list of predecessors is that it’s impossible to write a definitive travel book about the USA – each one is distinctive of its time as well as its author.
There’s a lot to tell about my trip, which is why I’m writing a whole book about it, to be titled Home Free: An American Road Trip. I’m writing it even as I write this, in fact. I plan to publish and promote Home Free independently – the same way I’ve published and promoted my previous similar books on Haiti (praised as “heartfelt … an informed perspective” by Paul Farmer) and Pakistan (“intelligent and compelling” – Mohsin Hamid; “wonderful … a model of travel writing” – Edwidge Danticat). You can follow Home Free, both before and after I publish it this fall, on my website. You also can join my email list or like my Facebook page, where I post links, events and musings.
You can support my independent project most concretely by pre-purchasing the book itself for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping within the US, using the button below to charge your credit or debit card or PayPal account. Your copy will be sent to you, with my thanks, as soon as the book is in print, probably in September:
As I said, I’m currently writing the book, selecting and shaping material from half a dozen notebooks and many audio recordings. I’m hesitant to share much of that online for now, partly because I need my time and energy to finish the book itself, and – a related point – partly because, as I recently wrote elsewhere in a different context, I believe in writing and reading at book length, because narration is a truer facsimile of historical reality than bullet points or video or tweets. The book is the document that I want you to buy and read. And yes, it will include photographs, and it probably will also be available as an e-book, but the physical book is the real book.
For now, here are a few glimpses – bullet points! – of the people and stories I encountered on the road around the USA in the fall of 2012:
- Farmer Barry Ott and physician “Bry” Wyman in Wisconsin, both of whom I’ve already written about online.
Bill Steigerwald, Pittsburgh, Oct. 9, 2012.
Pittsburgh journalist Bill Steigerwald, whose own recent masterpiece of American travel writing, Dogging Steinbeck, proves conclusively – because Steigerwald asked the right questions and did the legwork – that Steinbeck fictionalized much of Travels with Charley. Over lunch at De Luca’s diner, Steigerwald told me: “Now, you can’t go on US 10 across Montana, because they put the Interstate on it. So I sought out some old stretches of US 10. It’s just been frozen in time. Buildings are there that were there when Steinbeck was there. I realized before I got out of New England that I was looking at the same crossroads, the same towns, the same buildings that Steinbeck saw. When Steinbeck went through America there were 180 million people. Now there are 310 million. I don’t know where they all are – they’re not on the Steinbeck highway. In cities, I guess.”
Timothy Snyder, Yale University, Oct. 18, 2012.
Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University, whom I sought out because of two insightful pieces he had written about the Midwest, particularly his home state of Ohio, on the New York Review of Books blog. “Dayton kind of blew apart,” he told me. “When I was growing up there, it had fantastically high murder rates. And the way that you navigated it, as a kid from the suburbs, was with great care and a certain amount of knowledge of times and places. And it hasn’t really made it back. Like a lot of big American cities. Ohio just has more cities like that than other places. Cleveland has made it back. Cincinnati’s doing okay. Columbus is doing well. But the mid-tier, the Toledos, the Akrons, the Cantons, the Daytons, tend to show how we do need manufacturing.”
- Dr. Aamer Shabir, a Pakistani-American cardiologist in Macon, Georgia, who recounted a conversation he had with an elderly patient in Mississippi in 2001: “That was a few weeks after 9/11. He told me that if anybody gave me any trouble, he would come over to my place and bring his shotgun with him. I was not aware that the danger was so much. I said, ‘Is it really that bad?’ And he said, ‘You don’t know.’ I don’t know if he was demented, or if he knew what was going on. I was surprised to hear that from him, but at the same time, I felt better.”
- Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat in Miami (I haven’t yet transcribed that long and excellent conversation).
Edwidge Danticat, Miami, Nov. 9, 2012.
- Former Enron Corporation vice president Sherron Watkins, who told me over breakfast in Houston: “It was so complicated. During Ken Lay’s trial, his defense lawyers stacked up binders, like seven binders, on the witness stand, to say, ‘Did you look at any of these? These were the legal documents. Did you look at any of these before you concluded that it was fraud?’ It was the silliest, stupidest softball question I’ve ever seen. They were tryin’ to be melodramatic in front of the jury. But I said, ‘That’s silly! That’s like looking at the swindler’s plan to weave that cloth for the emperor.’ Why look at it? You can see the cloth doesn’t exist!”
If you enjoy or support my writing on Pakistan or Haiti, please spread the word about Home Free, because Americans who read and/or meet me through this book can also be persuaded to read my books Alive and Well in Pakistan and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti. If you want to read an entertaining and interesting account of some of what’s going on in today’s America, and support independent reporting and publishing, pre-purchase Home Free: An American Road Trip for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping within the US, using this button:
Ethan Casey with Sherron Watkins, Houston, Nov. 21, 2012.
I plan to travel extensively and do a lot of public speaking in support of Home Free. If you’d like me to visit your city or institution, or if you can help me arrange anything, please drop me a note.
Seattle
April 30, 2013
What does it mean that the Boston bombers are Muslims?
Seattle, April 20 - Following previous terrorist incidents and mass shootings, I’ve pointed out the disparity between how Americans look at the incidents and their perpetrators, depending on whether the culprit is a Muslim or a white guy. I’m far from the only writer to have done this, but it needs to be done, so I keep doing it. This time, though, we’re forced to face a hard question: What does it mean that, presumptively, the culprits in the Boston Marathon bombing turn out to have been Muslims?
For starters it’s not enough to say, as many Muslims are quick to say at such times, that they are “not real Muslims” or “don’t represent Islam”. That’s a legitimate starting point, but unless we go further it’s also an excuse. For Muslims to disown Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, or (for example) the would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, is just as disingenuous and unhelpful as when mainstream Americans dismiss (say) Tucson assassin Jared Loughner and Colorado movie theater killer James Holmes as “lone nuts”. No man is an island; no nut is lone.
This forces us to face the role of that amorphous entity known as “society”. This means you and me. Whether we like it or not, each of us is intangibly but meaningfully responsible for human violence, whether random or political. And if we choose to define ourselves as members of more particular communities, then analogously we bear responsibility for the actions of our fellow Muslims or Americans or Chechens or Pakistanis. By any reasonable definition, the bombing of a major sporting event in the heart of a major city has to count as terrorism. The perpetrators of that bombing, apparently, turned out to be young Chechen Muslim immigrants to America. What does that mean?
Pakistani Americans in Orlando, Florida, protesting the Taliban attack on Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yusufzai, Nov. 11, 2012. Photo by Ethan Casey.
It’s true that, as many Muslims and others say tirelessly, the actions of a few should not taint all Muslims. But communities of self-selecting identity do need to step up at times like this. This is as true for Muslims in this case as it is for all Americans in the case of drone attacks. Both terrorism and drones are wrong, and if we’re rightly appalled and dismayed by one of these, we have to deal with the other.
Professor Akbar Ahmed of American University is onto something in his new book The Thistle and the Drone, which posits a confrontation not between “the West” and “the Muslim world” per se, but between the impersonal, technology-driven civilization that the West has become and peripheral, tribal societies that are also Muslim. This is an awkward point (that’s how you can tell it’s also an important point) to bring up, because the disowning of terrorists by fellow Muslims is not unconnected to class snobbery. It’s easy to be scornful of Faisal Shahzad and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev if one is, say, a Pakistani-American physician or software engineer living in an exurban gated community, and one’s own son is a fine young man studying pre-med at Princeton.
The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid drives a related point home forcefully in his book Pakistan on the Brink, published last year:
One-third of Pakistanis today lack drinking water, another 77 million have unreliable food sources, and half the school-age children do not go to school. The literacy rate is 57 percent, the lowest in South Asia and not much better than the 52 percent that prevailed at the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Half the population are not even looking for jobs, since they know they won’t be able to find them. The country needs at least a 9 percent annual growth rate to employ its under-twenties, who make up 60 percent of the population. The 37 percent of Pakistanis who are under the age of fifteen give Pakistan one of the world’s largest youth bulges.
Law enforcement and security must be deployed, surely, to prevent and counter terrorist threats. But the worst mistake we can make is to fetishize security and neglect the need to maintain just and healthy communities. It’s in the enlightened self-interest of every society to ensure that its young men – I do mean young men in particular – have dignified and productive options going into adult life. Or else. If that sounds like a threat, it is. And the threat is named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Jared Loughner, and Faisal Shahzad, and James Holmes.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), called “intelligent and compelling” by Mohsin Hamid and “wonderful” by Edwidge Danticat. He is also the author of Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012) . His next book, Home Free: An American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. Web: www.ethancasey.com. Facebook: www.facebook.com/ethancasey.author. Join his email list here.
Muslims and the Boston bombing: A statement
Seattle, April 17 - The bombing two days ago in Boston was horrible and despicable, period, regardless of who perpetrated it. That needs to be said before anything else, and of course I’m far from the only one saying it. Those who follow my work know that one purpose of my writing and public speaking is to emphasize the humanity of Muslims and Muslim societies to Western readers and students, especially other Americans. Another, related purpose is to counter the post-9/11 American tendency to scapegoat Muslims as a category whenever we’re attacked or feel threatened. I believe that tendency is both unfair and unworthy of our own dignity as Americans and, more fundamentally, as human beings.
It’s also unhelpful to all of us, because issues between Americans and Muslims are not a matter of “us” versus “them”: millions of Americans are also Muslims, and vice versa. We’re all in it together, whether we like it or not.
Pakistani Americans in Orlando, Florida, protesting the Taliban attack on Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yusufzai, Nov. 11, 2012. Photo by Ethan Casey.
I don’t have anything new to say in the context of the Boston bombing. That’s why this statement is short. But each new incident represents both a need and a fresh opportunity to say the same things over again: We’re all in it together; there is no “us” versus “them”; Muslims and Americans are not each other’s enemies; the fact that terrorism is wrong does not excuse bigotry. All of these things will remain true even, and especially, if the perpetrators of the Boston bombing turn out to be Muslims.
Here are links to a few of the things I’ve written in the wake of similar incidents in the recent past:
- “Newtown Is a Village in Pakistan,” Dec. 18, 2012 on my website and on Huffington Post
- “The Wisconsin Sikh Killings and an America Worth Fighting For,” Aug. 6, 2012 on my website and on Huffington Post
- “The Colorado Killer Is Not a Muslim,” July 20, 2012 on my website and on Huffington Post
- “Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?”, Oct. 24, 2010
- “Some of My Best Friends Are Pakistanis,” May 4, 2010, the day of the Times Square bombing
My concern with and interest in the Muslim world is a function partly of the times we live in, but it also has a particular origin in my friendship with Pakistanis, and with Pakistan as a society, which dates back at this point almost 20 years. On March 23, in a speech to the Pakistan Association of America in Troy, Michigan, I said:
The Daily Telegraph‘s reviewer of my book Alive and Well in Pakistan understood my real purpose – perhaps even better than I did at the time – when he observed that “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity.” I’m still on that journey, still on that search. And I’m glad to report that I have been finding the common humanity that I went looking for.
As God says in the Quran: “I made you nations and tribes, that you might know one another.” Common humanity is not always a lovely thing to find, when we do find it, but finding it in each other is the first step in remembering that terrorism, danger, evil and other bad things are not unique to any particular human category.
One last thing – but an important one – to keep in mind is that ordinary people in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world are much closer to the physical, political and other dangers inflicted by terrorism than most of us in the U.S. will ever be. Bomb blasts are an ugly but common fact of life – not quite routine, but far from exotic or unusual – in South Asia, and they have been since long before 9/11. April 19 will be the 18th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. In Delhi a few days after that incident, a Kashmiri friend exclaimed to me: “There was bomb blast in America!” What surprised him was not that there had been a bomb blast, but that there had been a bomb blast in America, of all places.
We should remember two things about Oklahoma City, which took place more than six years before 9/11: That it was widely assumed at first that the bomber must have been a Muslim, and that Timothy McVeigh turned out to be a white American. Terrorism is not Islamic.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), called “intelligent and compelling” by Mohsin Hamid and “wonderful” by Edwidge Danticat. He is also the author of Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010) and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012) . His next book, Home Free: An American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. Web: www.ethancasey.com. Facebook: www.facebook.com/ethancasey.author. Join his email list here.
History rhymes in Afghanistan: Dalrymple’s crowning achievement
Should Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42 be read as an account of the first Afghan war in its own right, or as a cautionary tale in the context of Afghanistan today? The question is pointless – the answer is “Yes” to both options – because all history is written with at least implicit reference to its author’s own times. And William Dalrymple is helpfully willing to be quite explicit on this point: He acknowledged to Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian that there was “an element of calculation” in the book’s timing; and near the end of the book itself he writes that, “despite all the billions of dollars handed out [since 2001], the training of an entire army of Afghan troops and the infinitely superior weaponry of the occupiers, the Afghan resistance succeeded again in first surrounding then propelling the hated Kafirs into a humiliating exit.”
It’s hard to be much more explicit than that but, perhaps aware that Americans sometimes need things to be spelled out very explicitly indeed, just three days before the book’s April 16 U.S. publication date, Dalrymple published a New York Times op-ed in which he quoted a recent Taliban press release that claimed: “Everyone knows how Karzai was brought to Kabul and how he was seated on the defenseless throne of Shah Shuja. So it is not astonishing that the American soldiers are making fun of him. … It is the philosophy of invaders that they scorn their stooge at the end.” But in order to appreciate the effectiveness of that nugget of Taliban propaganda, you need to know who Shah Shuja was. “We may have forgotten the details of the colonial history that did so much to mold Afghans’ hatred of foreign rule,” commented Dalrymple, “but the Afghans have not.”
In Return of a King, Dalrymple has done again what he did magnificently for two other telling episodes of British imperial history in White Mughals (2002) and The Last Mughal (2006). He told Jeffries that he sees the three books “very much as the East India Company trilogy,” and that is a very correct and useful way to see them. Until further notice, the trilogy must be read and assessed as the crowning achievement of Dalrymple’s career.
Any summary a reviewer could offer would be the merest potted version of what took the author years of research to stitch together, so I prefer to urge you to read the book itself. A professor who assigned The Last Mughal in a university class I attended a couple of years ago described it as “a ripping good yarn,” which is a way of saying that Dalrymple has a narrative gift. The aesthetic enjoyment we find in such books is a good thing in itself, and of course it’s important at the same time to keep in mind both the horrific reality of the events they depict and their enduring relevance: Mark Twain’s hoary but true adage that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Another professor recently told me he’s already getting blank stares from students when he refers to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Our choice as a species is either to yield to the understandable ignorance of each new generation, and our proclivity to indulge and enforce forgetfulness of our embarrassments, or to resist these. This is why the study of history is important. Dalrymple makes it enjoyable by writing well and engagingly, but it’s up to us as readers to meet him halfway. I would add that it’s important to write and read at book length, because narration is a truer facsimile of historical reality than bullet points or video or tweets.
The history of human folly rhymes back through Saigon in 1975 and Dien Bien Phu in 1954, through Delhi in 1857 and Kabul in 1842, Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, etcetera, all the way back to the fall of Rome. Indeed there’s something Gibbonian about Dalrymple’s three history books, much less in the tone – Dalrymple is not orotund but friendly and patient – than in the fondness for footnotes and, more basically, in the cautionary intention.
Americans need to refer first not to Rome, though, but to Vietnam, which our society never dealt with honestly before plunging into similar tragic follies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed reading Return of a King, with its author’s insistence on documenting the myopia of many of the British political and military leaders of the time, kept bringing to mind The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China (1975) by Clyde Edwin Pettit (alternate subtitle: The Book That Proves There Are None), which is nothing but 439 pages of mostly myopic quotations, artfully selected and arranged to constitute a chilling and implicitly incisive narrative. The fact that Pettit’s masterpiece is largely forgotten is very much to the point, and so is the fact that it shouldn’t be.
“Evacuation of CIA station personnel by Air America on April 29, 1975. Photo: Hubert van Es/UPI” – caption from Wikipedia entry on “Fall of Saigon”
(Speaking of Saigon, and the South Vietnamese who were abandoned as the helicopters lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy almost exactly 38 years ago – on April 30, 1975 – just as I was finishing this review I saw this headline featured prominently on the New York Times website: “Afghan Interpreters for the U.S. Are Left Stranded and at Risk.”)
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), called “intelligent and compelling” by Mohsin Hamid and “wonderful” by Edwidge Danticat. He is also the author of Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010) and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012) . His next book, Home Free: An American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancasey.author. Join his email list here.
Drones: What are we doing to ourselves?
Aiken, South Carolina, February 23 - We’re hearing more in the media these days about drones, which I suppose is an improvement on 2009, when an audience member at a church in Seattle asked me, “What’s a drone attack?” I don’t have much to say about drones that isn’t being said, except that – as my late grandmother, may she rest in peace, would have put it – they’re just plain wrong.
I’ve been wanting to say that for a while, but it’s hard to get a word in edgewise, what with all the other people who have things to say about drones lately. I happen to be writing this in South Carolina, home state of Senator Lindsey Graham, who just the other day caused a ripple in the national and international media by telling a small-town Rotary Club, “We’ve killed 4,700 [with drones]. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al-Qaeda.”
The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph described Senator Graham’s comments as “the first time a politician or any government representative had referred to a total number of fatalities in the drone strikes, which have been condemned by rights groups as extrajudicial assassinations.” Graham may or may not regret having spoken unguardedly, and I don’t doubt that he does hate the fact that drones kill innocent people. I do too, and so do you, whatever your views on the issues drones are supposed to be helping address. Drone pilots do too, which is why, as the New York Times tells us, they “get mental health problems much like those of pilots deployed to combat.” One or more of the big pharmaceutical companies might well be working on something to help drone pilots deal with their “stress disorders” (I quote the quasi-medical cant phrase from the Times‘s headline), but no pill can fix their – or our – real problem, which is not medical or instrumental or even political, but moral. Drones and drone strikes are just plain wrong.
The other New York Times headline that has me up writing this at four in the morning is “U.S. Opens Niger Drone Base, Building Africa Presence.” It’s necessary to live in the world as it is, and I know that whatever I say or write will have no effect on the deployment or use or effects of drones; they will now be used in Africa, and the Times is doing what the Times does as the house organ of the American establishment: just letting us know. As a friend of mine said in a different (but not so different) context years ago, “‘You are powerless, you have no power.’ That’s what they’re saying.”
The message is that drones are here to stay and that, by definition, if you’re not prepared to get with the program, you’re on your own. It can be dispiriting to be reminded of this, but it’s also a simple statement of the obvious. Evil deeds, such as terrorism and drone attacks, arise out of the dark depths of human nature, and each of us is intangibly but inevitably implicated in them. And They – whoever They are – are not asking for our approval or advice, but requiring our acquiescence.
So why not simply acquiesce? Because, as the American writer Wendell Berry said in a different (but not so different) context years ago, “Protest that endures … is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.” In other words, the requirements of self-respect should trump those of Them. My late mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit told me Vietnam had taught him that “all governments are bad.” Or, as he put it in the foreword to his 1975 masterpiece The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China, “The Vietnam War is a textbook example of history’s lessons: that there is a tendency in all political systems for public servants to metamorphose into public masters, surfeited with unchecked power and privilege and increasingly overpaid to misgovern.”
I included both of the quotes above in my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, which was published nearly ten years ago now. My point in both quoting them then and wheeling them out again now is that, amid all the sound and fury of this or any other time, some questions and truths are in fact unchanging, and if we don’t hold onto these, we risk destroying not only each other but ourselves. Such truths are universal, and they also have particular national and local applications. As someone who has been blessed for nearly two decades by the friendship of many Pakistanis and of Pakistan as a society, the word “sickened” is far too mild to describe how I feel about the damage drone attacks are doing in and to Pakistan. And as an American who loves my own country, I’m concerned with the question of whether America is a free country – which I was raised to believe was the point of America – or some sort of consensual military dictatorship.
Which is why I find myself left utterly cold – chilled, even – when, as happens routinely these days, airlines invite active-duty military personnel to board planes ahead of the rest of us, along with pregnant women and people rich enough to buy first-class tickets. Or when, as I did last Thursday night, I pass beneath a huge banner reading:
The State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta
Welcome Our Troops Home
I have at least one relative and several friends and acquaintances who are serving or have served in the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You probably do too. I don’t condemn them for being there, and whatever they think, in the privacy of their own thoughts, about what they’re doing is their own business. I look forward to welcoming them home safely. But I have enough hard-earned, ground-level authority in that part of the world and elsewhere to know how tragically unhelpful their continuing presence there is, and I don’t like being bullied into expressions of pious jingoism by craven politicians and commercial airlines.
But at least the soldiers are there in person. The rest of American society is using them to keep our dirty work at arm’s length, exactly the way a young man with a joystick in Nevada uses a drone flying over Pakistan. No wonder we’re all suffering from stress disorders.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), called “magnificent” by Ahmed Rashid and “wonderful” by Edwidge Danticat. He is also the author of Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010) and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012) and co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). His next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Join his email list here.
Home Free stories: Dr. John Bryant Wyman
SEATTLE – Since returning here two months ago today from my 3 1/2-month, 18,000+-mile road trip around the USA, I’ve been transcribing my notebooks and starting to write my book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip. Today I’m posting the first of what I promise will be a series of sketches of some of the interesting Americans I met. Think of it as the blog that I just plain didn’t have the energy to write during the trip itself, with all the driving and interviewing I was doing. I’ll post as often as I can, while I continue writing through the spring and early summer.
Dr. John Bryant Wyman in front of the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, September 2012.
You can reserve one of the first copies, and support the book’s publication, by pre-purchasing Home Free by credit card or PayPal for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping, using this button:
One of the first and most auspicious characters I met was Dr. John Bryant “Bry” Wyman, a physician – 79 years old but not retired – in Madison, Wisconsin. Bry is the father of my friend Jeb Wyman, who teaches at Seattle Central Community College. Jeb introduced me to his father and to several longtime friends in Marshfield, the town in central Wisconsin where he grew up. I was especially keen to meet Bry because, two years ago this month, Jeb arrived for a visit and, instead of driving to Marshfield as planned, prevailed on his father to join the historic occupation of the state capitol building in Madison, in sub-freezing weather, that began as a protest against Republican governor Scott Walker’s attempt to rescind collective bargaining rights for unionized state employees.
“I’ve been in the privileged class since birth,” Bry told me. “Somehow I got the idea of medicine in high school and just kept going. And I’ve always been on a salary. And all this came to my awareness, that many people don’t have this. So I’m grateful that Jeb grabbed me. He didn’t have to drag me. He just said, ‘Dad, we’re not going to Marshfield. We’re going to the Capitol.’ I think I said, ‘You oughta have a recorder, Jeb.’”
The occupation, he said, “was not joyful, but it certainly was happy. They would move in portable stands. When Jeb was here it was very pleasant: sunny, bright, not snowy. But then there were days when it was snowing, and man, I was buttoned up.”
“Were there counter-protests?” my wife, Jenny, asked him. Jenny traveled with me the first two weeks, from Seattle as far as Milwaukee.
“The Koch brothers brought in Sarah Palin,” he told her.
I asked why he had decided to join the occupation.
“Because my patients were not being cared for,” he said. “Couples would say, ‘This month is his turn to get medicine, and next month is mine.’ And that really disturbed me.” He showed us the sign that he had carried during the occupation. On one side it read :
SOME OF MY PATIENTS
CAN’T AFFORD THEIR PRESCRIPTIONS
and on the other side:
GOVERNMENTS EXIST
TO SERVE THEIR CITIZENS
“I didn’t go to any of the group meetings,” Bry continued. “I wasn’t involved in the decision-making or anything. My decision was, ‘What time am I going to go up to the Capitol?’ I would walk around once, and then I would stand or sit. And then people would signal me with the thumbs-up or whatever. Usually I wouldn’t go around more than once or twice, because of this knee. I get six or eight emails a day, still. I really can’t say I was much involved, other than walking around with a sign. I was just there as a body. And identifying myself as a physician, and thinking I would have more influence as a physician than as a union member. So that’s why I wore a tie. I thought that if a physician announced that he was unhappy, that it might influence more people who were not physicians.
“I’m disappointed,” he confessed. “I grew up with a liberal father. Even though Mother didn’t express herself, Dad did. And Dad said, ‘Wisconsin politics are clean. It’s nothing like Illinois.’ And you know, workmen’s compensation was developed in Wisconsin. So that’s how I grew up. I’m disappointed in what’s happening to Wisconsin now, with its long history that I was educated in by my dad.”
You can reserve one of the first copies, and support the book’s publication, by pre-purchasing Home Free by credit card or PayPal for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping, using this button:
Newtown is a Village in Pakistan
Redmond, Oregon, December 18 - On the Monday morning after the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, James Howard Kunstler wrote:
Next, of course, comes the empty ritual of pretending that we must make sure something like this never happens again. How? By some forensic inquiry into the psychology of the shooter, Mr. Lanza… his comings, goings, email musings, Netflix rentals, chemical composition of his fingernail clippings?
I suspect that we indulge in such tiresome parsings of each killer’s particulars because we want to avoid facing their much more widely damning societal, which is to say political, context. Five long months ago, just after James Holmes killed twelve people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, I wrote an article with the provocative title “The Colorado Killer Is Not a Muslim”. On the Huffington Post version of my article, reader Robert Arredondo objected:
This is not a point to be made. Those with political agendas who commit acts to perpetuate their social, religious, political goals by organize[d] means are considered terrorist. A lone gunman overcome by madness or anger is not.
Arredondo’s point is, strictly speaking, true enough. But we indulge ourselves and each other when we insist that incidents like Aurora and Newtown are not political. If such an incident doesn’t have a political context – a context, that is, that challenges us as a society to articulate and enforce our collective priorities – then what does?
For starters, we need to face the fact that we’re all too eager to parse a perpetrator’s psychology when he’s a white guy, but when he’s brown and/or Muslim that’s all we allow him to be. But Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist and, because Gabrielle Giffords was an elected official, Jared Loughner’s attempted killing of her had the effect, if perhaps not the intention, of terrorism. Furthermore, if Loughner, Holmes, Dylan Klebold thirteen years ago at Columbine High School, now Lanza, and others whose names escape our memory were troubled young men, so was the Pakistan-born U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up Times Square in May 2010.
What do troubled young white Americans here at home have to do with troubled young Muslims, whether here or overseas? Adam Lankford offers one thoughtful answer in a December 18 New York Times op-ed titled “What Drives Suicidal Mass Killers”:
It is tempting to look back at recent history and wonder what’s wrong with America — our culture and our policies. But underneath the pain, the rage and the desire to die, rampage shooters like Mr. Lanza are remarkably similar to aberrant mass killers — including suicide terrorists — in other countries. The difference rests in how they are shaped by cultural forces and which destructive behaviors they seek to copy.
Another insight comes from the authoritative Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in his recent book Pakistan on the Brink:
One-third of Pakistanis today lack drinking water, another 77 million have unreliable food sources, and half the school-age children do not go to school. The literacy rate is 57 percent, the lowest in South Asia and not much better than the 52 percent that prevailed at the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Half the population are not even looking for jobs, since they know they won’t be able to find them. The country needs at least a 9 percent annual growth rate to employ its under-twenties, who make up 60 percent of the population. The 37 percent of Pakistanis who are under the age of fifteen give Pakistan one of the world’s largest youth bulges.
“The Newtown Massacre to me is largely about the failure of men in America,” writes Kunstler,
and in particular the failure of men to raise up male children into men. … What matters now is that an epochal undertow of events is dragging this enormous nation into an economic convulsion that will inevitably turn political. I don’t think that our society can be redeemed in its current form. It has to pass through a tribulation that demands the reemergence of adult male humans who know how to be men in more than one dimension.
Children in Pakistan have in common with children in America that both are God’s children. In both countries, the urgent challenge is to provide young men with productive work to do and dignified, adult roles to play in their families and society. I specify young men in particular because it’s usually young men, not women, who shoot people and blow things up. Thus Newtown is a lot like many villages in Pakistan. What the children and adult citizens of Newtown suffered on December 14 is what children and adults fear, and all too often suffer, every week in Pakistan at the hands of the Taliban and other extremists on one hand, and of the American operators of unmanned drone aircraft on the other.
So if, as I argue, mass killings in America are unavoidably political, what of it? The “meaningful” gun control legislation President Obama is urging, and on which public opinion seems to be insisting, would be a good start and would signal our seriousness. And there’s no need to be timid or apologetic. Since, as Newtown all too brutally illustrated, none of us has any real physical security anyway, there’s no reason not to push back hard against the gun culture and the gun lobby. Better late than never. The alternative is to allow our society to be ruled by bullies.
ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published next year and is available for pre-purchase. 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. Join his email list here.
