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.
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.
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.
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.
Gaza and the Need for Muslim Activism in America
Galveston, Texas - I’d rather be telling you about my driving trip around America and promoting my next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, but I feel compelled to say something about the appalling, and tiresomely predictable, subject of Gaza. Or rather, not Gaza per se but the baleful effect that the decades-long festering sore that is Israel-Palestine has on public life here in the United States.
American Muslims demonstrating against the Taliban attack on Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai in Orlando, Florida, November 12, 2012.
I’ve written about this before, never eagerly but willingly, because, as a non-Jewish, non-Muslim American, I don’t appreciate the way my country’s politics is distorted, and its public discussion muffled and wrapped in euphemism, whenever the matter at hand is Israel’s behavior in the Palestinian territories. My previous expressed views are on record in a June 2010 article with the candid title “Israel and the Distortion of American Politics”. After publishing a more recent article I lost a friend (I thought he was a friend) for making the obvious point that, far from being victims, Jewish Americans are an affluent, privileged, and influential community.
Whether those are good or bad things for a community to be depends on the uses such a community makes of its affluence, privilege, and influence. But part of the problem is that too many non-Jews in America say nothing rather than risk being branded, as I essentially was by my ex-friend, tantamount to a Holocaust denier.
All this is prelude to my real point: that both the situation in the Middle East and the quality of American public life will improve when American Muslims become more audible and visible. I do know, because they’re friends of mine, that many of them are trying hard to be heard. At a dinner party attended by privileged white people recently in South Carolina, I was made to answer the myopic or tendentious question, “Why don’t Muslims object when Muslims commit terrorist attack and atrocities?” The answer I gave was that they do; we just don’t hear them. Less than two weeks later I was asked to speak at a public demonstration organized by Muslims in Orlando, Florida against the Taliban attack on Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old girl who had become an outspoken advocate for girls’ education in Pakistan. In my remarks I got applause for saying that, if Malala can do what she has done, at real risk to her personal safety, such a rally is the least that we in America can do.
The point is not that we should be pleased with ourselves for holding a rally, but that that really is the very least that we can do. We need to do much more. Applause is gratifying, but it’s the merest baby step toward the much more assertive activism that I believe is urgently called for. The Muslims who attended the Orlando rally, and others like them all around America, are affluent and privileged. What they’re not is publicly influential, for two reasons. One is that, understandably though unfairly, they’ve been stigmatized and forced onto the defensive ever since 2001. But the other side of the same coin is that they’ve acquiesced in their own marginalization. In America, communities get attention and respect when they step forward and make noise, nonviolently to be sure but by all means assertively and politically. If you don’t toot your own horn, you can’t expect anyone else to toot it for you.
I’ve written before that the civil rights movement offers a model. Another model is the remarkable success that gay Americans have enjoyed in advancing their concerns and aspirations in recent years. The point is that such success doesn’t just happen. Gay people have a dedicated day every July when they descend on Disney World en masse, all wearing red t-shirts. The statement they’re making is: We’re here among you, we have money and influence, and we respectfully require you to deal with it.
There’s a lot of confusion and overlap, but the issues are essentially not religious but political. To my Muslim friends, I respectfully suggest that life will improve for Muslims in Palestine and Pakistan, and for all of us in America, the day that thousands of American Muslim families show up at Disney World all wearing green t-shirts.
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.
Home Free: The Colorado Killer Is Not a Muslim
As I write this on Friday morning, safe (or am I?) at home in Seattle, we don’t know much about the mass shooting incident overnight at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. No doubt by the time you read this, we’ll know more. I don’t need to know more, though, in order to say what I have to say, because I know one essential fact: the killer is not a Muslim.
Because he’s not a Muslim, over the coming days excuses and caveats will be incorporated into our national “narrative” about the incident, etcetera, etcetera. We’ve seen this movie before. The President of the United States has already said something suitably solemn. No doubt he’ll fly into Denver, as he flew into Tucson last year, and speak eloquently at a memorial service. But we need more and better than that – not only or primarily from the president, but from ourselves and each other.
Some readers surely will object to my pointing out what the alleged killer is not. But the fact that James Holmes is not a Muslim – indeed that, as a former San Diego neighbor put it, he “seemed to be a normal kid” – is all too relevant. Not that Muslims aren’t normal; they’re no less normal than you or me or James Holmes. What the Aurora rampage should bring home to normal Americans is that the clear and present danger to American society is not only among us, it is us. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine one of the makers of the show South Park (I forget which one) describes the Denver suburb of Littleton, site of the infamous Columbine massacre and not far from Aurora, as “painfully normal”. I’ve been to both towns, and I concur.
After Jared Loughner killed six people and almost killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson on January 8, 2011, I wrote an article asking “Is America Any Different from Pakistan?” The article drew parallels between the Giffords shooting and the then-recent assassination of the liberal Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer. It also drew predictable rhetorical fire, such as this:
Yawn yet another typical leftie more than willing to jump on the bandwagon of blaming the right, America, and any other group he/she opposes for the actions of a mentally insane person. Jared Loughner appears to have been a psychotic, I suspect a schizophrenic.
I might be accused again now of politicizing a tragedy. So be it. The insistence that something is not political is itself a political gambit, in fact a bullying tactic. And, as a free American, I’m sick and tired of being bullied and told to live in fear.
If I’m sick and tired of it, I can only imagine how my Muslim friends must feel, after more than a decade of being made to feel less than American. This is very relevant at a time when prominent right-wing politicians are getting away with making McCarthyist insinuations about who gets to count as American and who doesn’t. Jared Loughner was dismissed (as above) as a lone nut; no doubt James Holmes will be too. When a troubled young U.S. citizen named Faisal Shahzad tried to blow up Times Square, TV coverage ran provocative taglines like MADE IN PAKISTAN. (I felt compelled at the time to write an article titled “Some of My Best Friends Are Pakistanis”.) It’s not fair. And it’s past time we acknowledged that troubled young men like Loughner and Holmes are made in America.
This particular incident may not be directly political, but it certainly is symptomatic. In terms of the news cycle, it will have its day, then America will, as we say, move on. Americans are good at moving on, the way Mr. Magoo used to move on through mayhem of his own making. Before we do, we might want to reflect on what the phenomenon of lines around the block for midnight screenings of a film like The Dark Knight Rises says about our society. Much was made in the pre-release hype of the film’s 9/11-esque scenario. And then the real-life gunman who kills at least twelve and terrorizes an entire movie audience and a nation beyond turns out to be a normal American. Hmm.
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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). 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
The Judiciary: What can Pakistan learn from America?
Guest article by Athar Osama
That Pakistan is in the midst of a judicial crisis is no secret to anyone living in Pakistan and those abroad who like to follow the country’s history, which reads almost like a tantalising political thriller. What is much harder to understand is how to get out of it.
The current Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government came to power primarily as a result of the “sympathy” vote gained after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. It was also a result of an “illegal” agreement made by late Benazir Bhutto with Pakistan’s then President and Chief of Army Staff, General Pervez Musharraf. The ironically named “National Reconciliation Ordinance” (NRO) pardoned all charges against any political leader willing to cut a deal with the general.
Needless to say, the current ruling coalition was the major beneficiary. Musharraf was interested in holding on to power at any cost, and it didn’t matter if he had to cut a deal with the politicians, put a sitting Chief Justice under house arrest (as he did in March 2007), or sack the entire superior Judiciary (in November 2007).
A “lawyers’ movement” to reinstate the sacked judges ensued and ultimately, in coalition with like-minded political parties and civil society at large, resulted in the restoration of the constitution and reinstatement of the judges. An emboldened, free, and empowered judiciary found the NRO in violation of the constitution in 2009 and asked the government to re-open corruption cases against the pardoned politicians, including the sitting President and Benazir’s widower, Asif Zardari.
It has been three years since that judgement, and the cases have made their way through the judicial system, right to the top. Through these years, the government has done everything within its means to stall and subvert inquiries set up by the Supreme Court and the Court’s attempts to get its orders implemented. Everything within legal means, that is, to try to come clean with following the letter of the law but not the spirit.
Until recently when they crossed some red lines and, as they say, “the shit hit the fan.” The Supreme Court found an elected prime minister in contempt of court, and that resulted in his sacking. This obviously doesn’t end here. The Court’s order and intent to ensure implementation of its orders remains as it is. The new prime minister will either comply with the Court’s order to re-open corruption cases against his boss – the President – or run the risk of becoming another fall guy to protect the man at the top.
Despite the four-year-long nightmare, I have no doubt that democracy can be the only way forward, and that different institutions must not only co-exist but also effectively play the role of keeping checks and balances on each other.
I am certainly no fan of this government, nor do I bestow a “holier than holy” status to the judiciary. Even though, I believe that the judiciary’s actions may not have been without some moral and legal justification, I find its insistence on continuing to play musical chairs with prime ministers, ministers, and president over these past eight months a bit hard to digest. While some applauded the Supreme Court’s decision to disqualify Prime Minister Gilani, I am concerned that, even though it may be right, should it continue to go down this path, it may end up squandering the trust and goodwill it has created over the years.
So how might this situation be defused?
We are a nascent democracy, and the norms and traditions of judicial independence and propriety are still being shaped. I submit that perhaps there is room to learn from the experience of other countries.
Here Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry may be well advised to draw from U.S. constitutional history and the strategies and conduct of Chief Justices in the U.S. legal tradition, in particular from two decisions written almost two centuries apart – the first being Marbury v. Madison by John Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the United States, and the second, recently announced States vs. Sebelius (the Obamacare case) by current Chief Justice John Roberts..
In 1800, Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson defeated Federalist John Adams to become President of the United States. After his defeat and before he left office, Adams signed certain commissions for judicial appointments that were to come into effect before he left. Circumstances did not allow some of these to be delivered in time, however, and on taking office Thomas Jefferson refused to have them delivered. One of these, William Marbury, who was appointed as a Justice of the Peace, failed to receive his commission and went to the Court against Secretary of State James Madison, whose responsibility it was to deliver his commission.
On February 24, 1803, the Court rendered a unanimous (4–0) decision that Marbury had the right to his commission, but that the court did not have the power to force Madison to deliver it. The details of the case are not material to the situation at hand. What is important is the end result. In finding the government at fault, the Court gave a clear ruling on the case, rather than giving a confused or watered-down decision or beating around the bush.
However, even in accepting the limitations of his Court, CJ Marshall managed to advance the cause of an independent judiciary much farther. In his decision he examined, for instance, what happens when an Act of Congress conflicts with the Constitution.
Though not without its critics, Marbury v Madison is widely seen as a landmark decision that affirmed the principle of judicial review and helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separate executive and judicial branches of the American form of government.
Just over two centuries later, John Roberts presided over one of the most hotly debated and fiercely watched cases, on Obama’s healthcare reforms. Here, even though there was not a defiant executive, the sheer size and impact of the legislation, coupled with polarisation of the political scene in an election year, made this a very important case.
Like Chief Justice Marshall before him, Chief Justice Roberts handed down a stunning decision that required him to side with the government of the party opposite to his own political affiliation.
Like Marshall, he (almost) found the government on the wrong side but used political expediency and a lot of wisdom to steer clear of thrusting the country into a serious crisis. Like Marshall, he affirmed and created important legal principles, in this case the principle of judicial restraint. And like Marshall, Roberts did advance his own political agenda, but in a manner that enhanced rather than diminished the reputation of the Court.
Keeping Pakistan’s current judicial crisis in perspective, several important features stand out.
In Marbury v. Madison, the Marshall Court did not mince words in giving the verdict, thus preferring legal clarity over expediency, but then also plainly acknowledging its inability to enforce.
Second, it demonstrates how judiciary, when pitched against the executive that is unwilling to follow its verdict, must intricately avoid conflict with other branches, to avoid causing harm not only to the country but also to itself.
Finally, in its wisdom the Marshall Court transformed a handicap (its inability to enforce and a potential showdown with Jeffersonians) into an opportunity to advance the agenda of judicial independence, thus enhancing the power of the Court.
There are ample lessons in Marbury v. Madison and States v. Sebelius for the Honorable Justices of Pakistan’s Supreme Court to draw upon and find it within themselves to do the right thing in the final hours of this government.
John Roberts probably said it best in his majority decision on States vs. Sebelius when he wrote, “every reasonable construction must be resorted to, in order to save a statute from unconstitutionality,” i.e. the judiciary must go to great lengths to uphold the doings of a duly elected legislature, even if it has to look the other way.
In pursuing truth and justice against an executive unwilling to obey, Pakistan’s Supreme Court has inadvertently taken Pakistan to the brink. It must now also bear the responsibility of bringing the country back to at least a semblance of governance and normalcy.
The Court must weigh the benefits of what it is trying to achieve in the last eight months of this government against the political and economic costs of the musical chairs of ministers, prime ministers, and presidents that this country can ill afford.
The Chaudhry Court has been responsible for the rebirth of the High Judiciary in Pakistan, and it probably still has some time to pull a Marbury v. Madison that will – with much wisdom – take the country out of the current judicial crisis, while advancing the rule of law in the long run.
This Supreme Court has taught Pakistan how to stand before a ruthless, power-hungry dictator. It must also now lead the way in demonstrating how to do the delicate dance – of checks and balances and respect and accommodation – among the three pillars of a democratic government, irrespective of how bad it may be.
Dr. Athar Osama, an avid student of constitutional history, holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from The RAND Corporation and is the founder of UnderstandingPakistan.com. Email: Athar.Osama@gmail.com.
