Pakistan, Palestine, and the USA: In search of common humanity
I woke up this morning to the news that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last week. The New York Times called it “the most serious charge that the United States has leveled against Pakistan in the decade that America has been at war in Afghanistan.”
The geopolitics of such matters are analyzed ad nauseum by Very Intelligent People in think tanks from Washington to Islamabad. The careerist participants in that debate are largely talking past each other, because each of them starts from the tendentious premise that the state that represents his or her society is the one that’s in the right. I don’t intend to contribute to that tedious and largely pointless conversation. I intend to do an end run around it, by reminding myself and anyone who might read this of our shared humanity.
Part of the problem is that both Pakistan and America are hyper-political cultures that, for historical and ideological reasons, both suffer from a damaging tendency to conflate the society with the state. Hence the unexamined terms “the United States” and “Pakistan” – the impoverished vocabulary of conventional journalism – in the quote above from the New York Times. What is “the United States”? What is “Pakistan”? To what version of these notional entities do I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, owe allegiance? Am I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, required or entitled to make excuses for things “the United States” or “Pakistan” do that we know to be wrong? Are we required always to support and excuse “us” against “them,” as though societies were necessarily rivals, like football teams?
This sort of thing has gotten much worse, and the stakes much higher, in recent years, but in truth it’s nothing new. Way back in 1767, Samuel Johnson observed that
In a time of war the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves, and ill of the enemy. At this time the task of news-writers is easy; they have nothing to do but to tell that the battle is expected, and afterwards that a battle has been fought, in which we and our friends, whether conquering or conquered, did all, and our enemies did nothing. Scarcely any thing awakens attention like a tale of cruelty. The writer of news never fails in the intermission of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins; and if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province.
In other words, don’t believe what you read in the papers. I began as a political journalist – a writer of news – like any other, but quickly became dissatisfied with the constraints and conventions of that kind of writing. It’s the opposite of poetry, in the sense that it systematically squeezes meaning out of language by resorting habitually to cant and to glib phrases like “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” (Haiti), “Himalayan kingdom” (Nepal), “Muslim separatist insurgency” (Kashmir). George Orwell would have – did have – a lot to say about phrases like those, whose purpose is not to enhance understanding but to disable thinking and human sympathy by pushing emotive buttons.
My personal declaration of independence from the treadmill of such intellectually and morally impoverished language was my 2004 book Alive and Well in Pakistan, whose title as well as form – first-person nonfiction narrative, following role models like Graham Greene and Paul Theroux – are acts of intentional resistance. Resistance is anything but futile; it is hard but necessary work that we must do in order to maintain our humanity.
But resistance to the states that presume to represent our societies, and to the propaganda organs that presume to define the terms of our conversation, is only the first step. The long-term task is to maintain our use of language at a level that enhances understanding, in both the intellectual and the empathetic sense. The kindest review of Alive and Well in Pakistan was by Alex Spillius in The Daily Telegraph, who wrote that “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity.” What “the media” would define for us as “the other” is not other at all; we’re all human beings, all in it together. We may not properly understand or agree with each other, but that only means that we need to work all the harder to find common ground, and then to hold it against the forces of division and enmity.
But just as it won’t do simply to blame the putative other side, blaming “the media” is an evasion and a cop-out. The ultimate responsibility lies in each and all of us. If you don’t like or believe what you’re told or what you see on television, do the work of reading and of joining the conversation. We can joke ruefully about how people don’t read books anymore, how we’re all too distracted to take the time to understand or care, but the solution is to make the time. There’s no more urgent task.
Is this post, then, a plug for my own books? Sure it is. I wouldn’t have written them if I didn’t believe that they do some of what needs to be done. And my occasional writings, my “blog” and my columns in Dawn, are a running addendum to my books. But my writings are only a starting point, and only one of many. If you’re an American and you want to understand Pakistan, read the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa or Mohsin Hamid. To understand what the most vulnerable immigrants to the United States endure, read the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat‘s brilliant memoir Brother, I’m Dying.
Meanwhile, in New York, Palestine has formally requested membership in the United Nations, and starting today you’re going to be asked to acquiesce in what “the United States” thinks about that. As a very partial antidote, maybe a starting point to thinking about it differently, I ask you to read my article “Israel and the Distortion of American Politics,” which I wrote last May after the deadly attack on the flotilla that was trying to deliver relief supplies to the Gaza Strip.
Don’t excuse yourself. And, to begin with, refuse to accept at face value whatever you read in the New York Times or hear on TV about what “the United States” – the state – accuses “Pakistan” – the state – of doing or abetting. The stakes are too high, and we’re all responsible for the damage that results from misunderstanding and mutual suspicion.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) andOvertaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti, will be published in March 2012. He lives in Seattle. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
After Ten Years, Walking Forward Together
I was asked to write the following article for the newsletter of the New York-New Jersey chapter of APPNA, to mark the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. An installment of my weekly Dawn column, “A long 10 years,” also marks the anniversary.
In 2004 I had the privilege of spending several days in Haiti with Dr. Paul Farmer, the celebrated Harvard Medical School professor and co-founder of Partners in Health. He told me then what an illiterate Haitian peasant woman had said to him in his apartment in Boston on September 11, 2001: “Poor [Americans], now you’re going to have to eat your own misery too.”
“I thought a lot about what she said,” Farmer told me, “and there are many ways to interpret it. It was obviously sincere sympathy for us, but the point she was making was that this is the way the rest of the world is: always subject to hazard and danger and violence, and your country’s been largely spared that. … I never asked her, ‘Is this what you meant?’ I know that’s what she meant.”
Aung Zaw, an exiled Burmese journalist living in Thailand, had said much the same thing days after the attacks, in an article I reprinted in a book. “If Americans want to feel safe again in their own country,” he wrote,
they must begin to understand the insecurity many feel in theirs. More importantly, they must examine their nation’s policies vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and ask themselves honestly if these policies have contributed in some way to this insecurity. Now that its own worst fears have been realized, America can no longer afford to ignore the fears of others.
The kindest, and also the most helpful, way to understand the anger, bigotry and confusion in post-9/11 America is to say that white Americans are on a steep learning curve about the world and our place in it. I use that line often in my writing and public speaking. Truth be told, all people are on a learning curve – learning to respect and make allowances for each other, learning to lay aside bitterness and a victim mentality, however justified these might be. Sometimes, what’s justified and what’s useful are not the same.
Pakistanis understand the point that Aung Zaw and the Haitian woman were making, because you and your country of origin have lived its truth. And this elucidates something else I’ve been saying for a while: that Pakistanis and other Muslims are in a position to play a valuable leadership role in today’s America. To be sure, APPNA members especially are already leaders within the Pakistani-American community; but what I mean is that your leadership is needed even more urgently in the wider American society. Kindly see my articles “Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?”, published last October on my own www.ethancasey.com website, and “Pakistan & America Both Need APPNA’s Leadership,” in the summer 2011 APPNA Journal.
I was asked to write this article to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I prefer to do so by looking more ahead than back. What can we do now, after a decade of damage has been done? This is where you come in, as Pakistanis who are also Americans, and as Pakistani-American community leaders who are also respected professionals responsible for the health of Americans of all backgrounds. It really is true, as a teenager told us at a mosque in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey last October, that the principles of sharia and the principles on which the United States was founded are compatible to the point of being nearly identical. To say this in so many words might frighten Americans who are ignorant and fearful of Islam and Muslims, but there are other ways to say it. And the prescription for what ails America is a heavy dosage of such principles.
Many Pakistani-Americans I know talk about how they feel a need to “give back” to Pakistan out of duty and gratitude, and similarly to “give back” to America as the country that has welcomed them and allowed them to thrive. I would go beyond that and say that America needs you. My friend Dr. Farzana Naqvi of Irvine, California put it well when I asked what had prompted her to lead one of the first groups of volunteer medical professionals (from a range of ethnic and religious backgrounds) to Haiti after the earthquake: “I got a call, and I was told they needed a physician, and would I go. So the fact that I was needed was, I think, the reason I went. If somebody needs you to do what you are able to do, I think that’s reason enough to do it!”
I’ll end by reiterating something I said in my APPNA Journal article: that, inshallah, I will continue walking the walk with you. I know it’s helpful to Pakistani-Americans to have outspoken and/or well-positioned gora allies, and this is one way I’m trying to make myself useful. On September 11, I’m scheduled to be in Milwaukee. I’m sure that, very appropriately, there will be a moment of silence at the Brewers-Phillies baseball game I’ll be attending that day with teenagers from the Pakistani community. More interesting to me, though – because it’s forward-looking and constructive – is that I’ll be in Milwaukee at the invitation of the local APPNA chapter, to speak to non-Pakistani Wisconsinites at a bookstore and a high school.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Review: Open, by Andre Agassi
Tennis became important to me in my thirties, when I lived in England and had the privilege of helping raise a boy – who has since become a very fine and promising young man – and the challenge of finding ways to help him develop self-discipline, self-confidence and other traits young people need to acquire. The main vehicle for these things, for this particular boy, turned out to be tennis.
I learned to play myself so I could play with him, and I became a halfway decent weekend player, if I do say so myself. One of my proudest and happiest moments was when he beat me in a set for the first time; I remember the astonishment and joy on his face when he cried “Game … and first set!” He must have been eleven or so at the time and for me, athletically speaking, it’s been downhill ever since.
But tennis has enriched my life immeasurably, above all because it cemented the love and mutual respect between me and my stepson, but not only for that reason. I discovered that there is no more transparent or vivid vehicle for the expression of individual human personalities. When I spent a semester teaching at a university in Pakistan in 2003-04, I seized the opportunity to play doubles on the grass courts at the Lahore Gymkhana, where the full gamut of the foibles and rivalries of the Lahori elite was on daily display. Rather impertinently but, I hope, to good effect, I wrote extensively and (mostly) fondly about the Gymkhana gents in my book Alive and Well in Pakistan.
Another thing tennis became for me was a balm and a refuge from the perpetual fussing and worrying, thinking for that matter, to which writers are prone, and the maddening ambiguity of language. The great early-19th-century English essayist William Hazlitt – one of my heroes – put it well:
I am so sick of this trade of authorship, that I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket-player, than the best prose-writer of the age. The critics look askance at one’s best-meant efforts, but the face of a racket-player is the face of a friend. There is no juggling here. If the stroke is a good one, the hit tells. They do not keep two scores to mark the game, with Whig and Tory notches.
Where we lived in England was only a few stops on a suburban train line from Wimbledon, and we spent quite a bit of time there. This was the era when the irrepressible and endlessly entertaining Croatian lefty Goran Ivanisevic, widely dismissed as washed up, entered the tournament in 2001 as a wild card and declared: “God vant me to vin.” Which turned out, apparently, to be the case, as he defeated the classy Australian Patrick Rafter in an epic five-set final. All the kids in those days were fist-pumping and yelling “Come on!” in imitation of the brash young Lleyton Hewitt. We got to see Martina Navratilova and Justine Henin and the Williams sisters play in person on the outside courts at the All England Club, and lesser names on the storied Centre Court and Number One Court. And we witnessed the late stages of the careers of two of the greatest male players of all time, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi.
In terms of sheer accomplishment – 14 Grand Slams – and talent, Sampras was indisputably superior. But Agassi, who began as a seemingly arrogant and unlikeable wild child, turned out to be much more interesting, both as a tennis player and as a human being. The two go hand in hand and therein, I think, lies the key to Agassi’s greatness. Professional tennis players grow up in public, and none moreso than Agassi. When he infamously yelled an expletive for all to hear in his 2001 Wimbledon semi-final loss to Rafter – I was in a pub in central London at the time, watching it on the BBC – and then made no excuses in his post-match interview, you knew and felt exactly where he was coming from. And when he bowed out for good at the 2006 U.S. Open after metaphorically leaving his blood and guts all over the court in one last titanic match against Marcos Baghdatis and then losing – because he had nothing left to give – to the unknown Benjamin Becker, we were all there with him.
Life is not a contest in quite the same way that tennis is, but it’s instructive to contrast the autobiographies of Agassi and Sampras. Sampras’s book – and its title, A Champion’s Mind – are like his game: bland, effortless, unrevealing. He grew up, he played a bunch of tennis matches, he married a starlet, he retired. There must be more to Pete Sampras than that, but you wouldn’t know it from reading his book.
Agassi’s book, like his game, is the antithesis of Sampras’s, and its title signals his intention. Agassi’s philosophy is that if you’re going to play, or write, at all, you might as well leave it all on the court or on the page. On the last page, at the end of two pages of fulsome acknowledgements, is perhaps the most moving passage in an extremely moving book:
One day, while I was working on the second draft, Jaden had a playmate over to the house. Manuscripts were piled high along the kitchen counter, and Jaden’s friend asked: What’s all that?
That’s my Daddy’s book, Jaden said in a voice I’d never heard him use for anything but Santa Claus and Guitar Hero.
I hope he and his sister feel the same pride in this book ten years from now, and thirty, and sixty. It was written for them, but also to them. I hope it helps them avoid some of the traps I walked right into. More, I hope it will be one of many books that give them comfort, guidance, pleasure. I was late in discovering the magic of books. Of all my many mistakes that I want my children to avoid, I put that one near the top of the list.
Agassi tells his story conversationally, but anything but casually. He wants to make sure you know, and understand, everything he went through, every choice and decision he made, especially the bad and stupid ones. He’s almost cringe-inducingly frank about his tortured relationship with his father, an Armenian from Iran who poured all his own anger, frustration and ambition into his children, especially Andre. In a hospital room after open-heart surgery, and after Andre has rushed to his side following a loss to Sampras at Indian Wells, the father mumbles incomprehensibly through a breathing tube and makes obscure brushing motions with his hand, until the son figures out what he’s trying to tell him: You should have hit more to Pete’s backhand. “I stand and feel an overpowering urge to forgive,” Agassi tells us,
because I realize that my father can’t help himself, that he never could help himself, any more than he could understand himself. My father is what he is, and always will be, and though he can’t help himself, though he can’t tell the difference between loving me and loving tennis, it’s love all the same. Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent. My father is nothing if not consistent.
In this passage we see why so many of the greatest American tennis players, from Connors to McEnroe to Sampras, Agassi and Chang to the Williams sisters, have been the children of recent immigrants and/or of parents from ethnic communities who used their children to make a point or a statement. And what a statement: just listing the names in the preceding sentence brings home how much Americans have not only changed international tennis during the open era but enhanced it. So McEnroe was a brat – so what? Have you watched his magnificent fourth-set tiebreak against Borg in the 1980 Wimbledon final lately?
Agassi’s descriptions and assessments of others, but above all of himself, are unsparing and often hilarious because they ring true. Agassi has purchased the right to be frank about others by being so frank about and demanding of himself. He writes respectfully and fondly of Sampras but calls their relationship a “quasi-friendship” and Pete himself “robotic.” Of Brad Gilbert, the journeyman player who became his longtime coach, he writes: “I can’t shake the idea that Brad looks like Early Man, that he just jumped from a time machine, slightly out of breath from discovering fire.” At the Wimbledon Ball after his 1992 final victory over the heavily favored Ivanisevic, he and his girlfriend Wendi
walk smartly into the ball. We’re instantly set upon by silver-haired British couples. The men have hair in their ears, and the women smell like old liqueur. They seem delighted by my win, but mainly because it means fresh blood in the club. Someone new to talk to at these dreadful, dreadful affairs, someone says. Wendi and I stand with our backs to each other, like scuba divers in a school of sharks. I struggle to decipher some of the thicker British accents. I try to make clear to one older woman who looks like Benny Hill that I’m quite excited about the traditional dance with the women’s champion.
That women’s champion is Steffi Graf, and the dance doesn’t happen (read the book to learn why it doesn’t), but of course he goes on, after Wendi and famously after Brooke Shields, to marry Steffi and make what seems a very happy and fulfilling life with her. She retires and becomes his staunch partner in senses that go far beyond tennis, helping him extend his career to age 36, in part so he can make more money to endow the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy for disadvantaged children in his hometown of Las Vegas.
Ultimately, the story Agassi wants to tell is that tennis might be a metaphor for life, but even the greatest tennis careers end and life goes on, and the ultimate point is not to play well but to live well. Near the end of the book, he shares with us an encounter at Agassi Prep:
Not long ago, while walking through the high school, I was flagged down by a boy. He was fifteen, shy, with soulful eyes and chubby cheeks. He asked if he could speak to me privately.
Of course, I said.
We stepped into an alcove off the main hallway.
He didn’t know where to start. I told him to start at the beginning.
My life changed a year ago, he said. My father died. He was killed. Murdered, you know.
I’m so sorry.
After that, I really lost my way. I didn’t know what I was going to do.
His eyes grew cloudy with tears.
Then I came to this school, he said. And it gave me direction. It gave me hope. It gave me a life. So I’ve been keeping an eye out for you, Mr. Agassi, and when you came by, I had to introduce myself and tell you – you know. Thanks.
I hugged him. I told him that it was I who needed to thank him.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
“What’s a Drone Attack?”: A Statement
I write a weekly column on the website of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. The latest installment, titled “Drone attacks are wrong and cowardly, regardless” and published Tuesday, July 19, has drawn far more readers and comments than any other. (It was republished on the Huffington Post, in the hopes of reaching an American readership, as “Pakistan: Drone Attacks Are Wrong, Regardless.”) I plan to write a column-length follow-up next week, but in the meantime I want to say some things.
The subject is too urgent and important for any of us to indulge in the predictable point-scoring and recriminations that are evident in many of the comments on my article. “He just wanted to sell his book,” alleged one commenter. Well, yes, I did and do – wouldn’t you, if you had written a book? – but believe me, I don’t do any of this for the money. It’s not about me or my writing, but I take the range of comments on my article as discouragingly representative. We urgently need to be having a much more robust and intelligent debate.
In order to have a debate, first we need to know what exactly it is we’re debating. The most urgent need is simply for more Americans to know that the drone attacks are happening. One of the most poignant messages I’ve received this week was from Tayyab Qader, who wrote:
Thank you for publishing the fact that drone attacks in Pakistan are killing innocent people and are counterproductive. They must be stopped before it becomes too late. I would very much appreciate if you could also publish this in some of the mainstream U.S. media to bring this to the attention of U.S. public.
That’s easier said than done, given the dreadful state of U.S. media and the many distractions Americans face. These range from the trivial (the usual insipid popular culture) to the earth-shaking (millions losing jobs and homes). But Americans need to know what’s being done in our name and the effects that it’s having, both on the ground and on Pakistani public opinion. As I’ve said many times to audiences and in previous writings, I believe strongly that trying to get Fox News, CNN, or “even” the New York Times to report more fairly and helpfully on Pakistan is largely a waste of effort.
The alternative is a grassroots campaign – “taking it to the people” through the Internet and in-person gatherings. Those of you who have been following my work, or working with me, know that this is what I’ve been advocating and doing. We should be doing it on a much bigger scale. If you agree, then please contact me and let’s do it together. If we do, then fewer Americans will ask the basic question that a woman at a Seattle church once asked me: “What’s a drone attack?”
Another message I received after my Dawn article was published was from a retired U.S. military officer, someone I like and consider a friendly acquaintance, who wrote:
I deeply disagree with almost all your points, and I speak as someone much more informed of the effects, results and impacts of the attacks than the average American, based both on my time in Afghanistan and my overall experience with “deep operations.” Next time you are in town we ought to talk [about] it some more.
I appreciate this person’s respectful willingness to engage me in conversation, which I’ve found characteristic of most U.S. military officers I’ve met. And I readily accept that there are people – both American and Pakistani – who know more than I do about what specifically is happening in Waziristan. But I won’t concede anyone’s right to make moral or political judgments on my behalf. If they want me to agree with them, they should share their privileged information with me and then hope to convince me. “Trust us, we’re the experts” or “We know best” doesn’t trump the individual citizen’s autonomous responsibility.
Finally for now, I want to acknowledge the excellent question that Muzaffar Ahmad, a leader of the Pakistani-American community in Indianapolis, asked on my Facebook page: “Ethan, if I am the U.S. president, what would you suggest I should do after I give orders to end drone attacks?”
I don’t have the answer to that; I’m not sure anyone does. History is inherently tragic, and the guilt of one party doesn’t let other parties off the hook, and sometimes there is no right thing to do. This in itself is reason enough to be gentle and cautious in our dealings with each other, i.e. not to do things like drone attacks.
Anyone who reads this statement should feel free to post a comment or to write to me directly. I don’t have any answers, but I do know that drone attacks are badly damaging the relationship between Pakistan and America, as well as what goodwill still exists between Pakistanis and Americans, and that makes me very sad. Both countries’ establishments had better wake up and smell the coffee, and soon.
I want to end by quoting in full the best of all the comments on my Dawn article:
Just as drone attacks are wrong and cowardly because [they kill] innocent people indiscriminately, the same holds true for terrorist attacks/suicide bombing, which are also a cowardly killing [of] innocent men, women and children. I’m an Indian and I sympathise with innocent people killed, whether they are in Pakistan or in India.
Hear, hear.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His account of his February-March 2011 trip to Pakistan, titled “After the Flood,” will be added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events. He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Pakistan and America Both Need APPNA’s Leadership
Central Punjab, March 2011. Photo by Pete Sabo.
The following article was commissioned for the APPNA Journal (Vol. 13 No. 1, Summer 2011, pp. 20-21), by its editor, Dr. Mahmood Alam:
This is a very difficult time for Pakistan, for Pakistanis and other Muslims living in America, indeed for all friends of Pakistan and of humanity and peace. Drone attacks, Osama bin Laden, Raymond Davis, the long-term damage from last summer’s severe flooding – which I saw for myself in February and March in the Swat valley and in rural areas of Punjab province – there’s no rest from the litany of crises Pakistan faces.
The Pakistani-American community, led by APPNA and other organizations I admire and support, is remarkably steadfast in addressing the acute and chronic humanitarian needs of Pakistani society. Year after year, crisis after crisis, fundraiser after fundraiser, my Pakistani-American friends walk the walk. I admire you enormously for knowing and doing what needs to be done for the men, women and, above all, children of Pakistan, regardless of the constantly changing and increasingly alarming geopolitical situation. And I want you to know that I will continue walking the walk with you.
One way I think I’m positioned to help is by educating the American public about the Pakistan I’ve come to know and love, since I first went there in 1995. We all know Pakistan is far from perfect, but the point I try to get across to mainstream America is that the real Pakistan is very different, and much more interesting and likeable, than the Pakistan they see on TV. That’s an easy and enjoyable thing to do if you know and like Pakistan as I do, and it needs to be done, because the American public’s attitude toward Pakistan greatly affects our ability to support all the urgently needed humanitarian work that must be done. This is so because, as I and others have diagnosed, the Pakistani-American community suffers from chronic and worsening donor fatigue, and the wider American public represents a largely untapped source of funds for nonprofits working in Pakistan. But even prior to that, we need to elicit the positive interest and human sympathy of non-Pakistani, non-Muslim Americans, for everyone’s sake.
And more than that, I believe the very future of Pakistan itself depends on the Pakistani diaspora’s ability and willingness to reach out assertively to mainstream America. I believe that the best defense is a good offense, and that if you want something done right – in this case, if you want Americans to have a correct impression of Pakistan and of Muslims – you’ve got to do it yourself. This is where I believe APPNA and its chapters and individual members can play a powerful leading role on behalf of the Pakistani-American community as a whole – and thus, by extension, on behalf of Pakistan.
To mainstream America, APPNA members are potentially the human faces of Pakistan and of Islam. I say potentially, because unfortunately the faces that the words “Pakistan” and “Islam” still conjure up to many Americans are those of people like Osama bin Laden and Faisal Shahzad, the disturbed young man who planted a bomb in Times Square in New York last year. This will change only if we make a concerted effort to change it – but we can change it. What’s called for is a very assertive public diplomacy initiative, to replace those faces with the faces of accomplished professionals, good neighbors, and active citizens – people like you. Each of you lives and works somewhere in America, many of you in very provincial and even remote cities and towns. And it’s exactly in those places that the need is greatest.
APPNA has the membership and institutional infrastructure to make a big difference throughout American society. What if APPNA were to do this systematically, encouraging and supporting members and chapters who take initiative locally by reaching out to churches, schools, civic groups like Rotary, and universities? And even if this were not feasible on an APPNA-wide scale, there’s no reason it can’t be done by regional or state chapters or individual members. It just takes initiative, resourcefulness, and imagination, all of which I know Pakistanis possess. Pakistanis are among the most resourceful people I know; you’ve had to be, because for 64 years your country has faced one enormous challenge after another. As author Emma Duncan pointed out more than 20 years ago, nothing is ever settled in Pakistan. That’s chronically frustrating, but it has also been good practice for our current and coming crises, both in Pakistan and in America. The Pakistani-American community, led by APPNA members, has a lot to teach other Americans about how to rise to a challenge.
I want to continue rising to our shared challenges with you, because I believe we’re all in this together. On June 1, I gave a speech at a prestigious TEDx event sponsored by the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey. In it I pointed out, to a mostly non-Pakistani audience, that many Pakistani friends of mine – many of them physicians who volunteered their time and lifesaving skills – responded immediately and with real sympathy, concretely expressed, after the earthquake in Haiti. I also said that I felt American society had missed the opportunity to show similar human concern for Pakistanis last summer, when 20 percent of Pakistan was under water. And I quoted from a message I received from Dr. Uzma Shah of Boston, after I had published an article titled “Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?” on the Huffington Post and on my website. “It’s hard to see pictures from Pakistan,” Uzma wrote, “and I can’t help but choke back tears when I see all that desperation. And amidst all the furor about all things bad and hard about Pakistan and ‘Islam,’ it’s comforting to read your article. Because at the end of the day, we are all human, living in one world, sharing the same life.”
This is the point we must keep making, as often as necessary. It’s easy to explain away America’s failure to respond adequately to the floods: Americans suffered from “compassion fatigue” after Haiti; Pakistan is farther from the U.S. than Haiti is; a flood is a slow-moving disaster whose effects are less immediately dramatic than an earthquake. But it’s also hard to avoid facing the effects of a decade-long national climate that has made Muslims the only group in America against whom it’s considered permissible, sometimes even fashionable, to be bigoted. I believe, though, that – like all people – Americans are capable of responding to what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, if they’re invited and given the opportunity to do so. Many of you know this from your own experience. As my friend Dr. Shahnaz Khan of Zephyrhills, Florida told me, “It becomes personal. [My patients] actually tell me they think of me when they listen to the news. In fact, a lot of them probably didn’t know I was from Pakistan before 9/11, or didn’t even care. They say, ‘Be careful, Dr. Khan. Come back safely. Don’t get lost, don’t get hurt.’ It’s a good feeling, a lot of goodwill.” Just as the real Pakistan is better and more interesting than the Pakistan we see on TV, so is the real America.
So how can we effectively engage with and influence the real America? One thing I do is give away copies of my book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, to students, libraries, religious and political leaders, and others in positions of influence in American society. The Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa understands what I’m trying to achieve; she says its “personal perspective … lends the book much of its charm and veracity and makes Overtaken By Events so compulsively readable.” The program’s potential is well illustrated by an email I received from Texas Christian University student Paul Jorden in January, just after I spoke to his World Religions class taught by Professor Mark Dennis. “Dear Mr. Casey,” Paul wrote,
Thank you very much for the copy of your book. I am thoroughly looking forward to learning more about life and the hardships of those in Pakistan and how terrorism shapes our (Americans’) perception of Muslims. Thank you for taking the time to speak to our class. I sincerely appreciate the importance of issues such as this, especially during times when it seems that our lives are permeated by a constant fear of terrorism via the news. Best of luck with promoting awareness.
The American mainstream media isn’t going to do the task for us, because – as Paul Jorden shows he understands in the quote above – the media is a major source of the problem. By all means, let’s try to influence politicians, policymakers, media moguls, and celebrities, but let’s not be seduced by the polite hearings and photo-ops that they offer us from time to time. We need to go over the heads of the American media and establishment, by reaching out directly to the American public. My public and classroom speaking and book sponsorship program are among the ways I’ve thought of to do this. I’m able to give away books thanks to the support of Pakistani-Americans like you, who sponsor multiple copies of Overtaken By Events. The more books are sponsored, the more I can give away. For example, I have an opportunity to give away 300 copies when I’ll be the keynote speaker at the annual Region III convention of NAFSA: Association of International Educators in Oklahoma City in October. I will also be at this year’s APPNA convention in St. Louis, speaking at the Fatima Jinnah Medical College alumni dinner on Friday evening and at the Social Welfare and Disaster Relief meeting on Saturday. Please find me there, or contact me any time on my cell phone (206-226-0509) or by email (ethan@ethancasey.com).
I’m finding young Americans the most receptive to learning about the Pakistan I know and love, and this brings to mind another asset we have to work with: your own community’s younger generation. When I spoke at the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit in January 2010, I was so moved by the efforts and accomplishments of the young volunteers there that I felt compelled to include in my speech this line: “We all know that America is a nation of immigrants. As an American whose ancestors came here in the 19th century from Ireland and Germany and France, I want to thank you for contributing not only your talents and material resources, but also your impressive children, to help build a new, improved America in the 21st century.” I’ve re-used that line many times since then. On this important level, America’s gain doesn’t have to be Pakistan’s loss. In my observation, Pakistani and other Muslim families give their children precisely the confidence, moral education, and sense of purpose and direction that are sorely lacking in all too many other American families. Your children are poised to become real leaders of American society, and that bodes well for all of us. And they are already in positions of influence with their peers at many of this country’s greatest universities. Congratulations – and let’s continue enlisting and empowering them.
And let’s continue working together to reach out to mainstream America, with the confidence that this country is in great need of your visible and vocal presence and leadership. I say that as an American who worries about my own country at least as much as I worry about Pakistan. By virtue of your profession, you enjoy a position of prestige and trust in American society, in cities and towns from coast to coast. If you invite me to your city, I’ll do my best to visit. And I invite you to make use of me, as a gora who enjoys sharing his friendship and appreciation for Pakistan and Pakistanis with other goras. Together we can change the relationship between Pakistan and America – one church or synagogue, one Rotary Club, one high school class at a time.
Ethan Casey is the author of the books Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He is currently writing a new chapter, “After the Flood,” to be added to the next edition of Overtaken By Events. He is also writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in 2012. He is on the Web at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com.
Osama article, college visits, TEDx: Ethan Casey newsletter
Dear friends and fans of Ethan Casey,
Thank you for your support, and welcome to the first installment of a new regular newsletter you can expect to receive roughly every two weeks.
Join the Ethan Casey page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Recent Events:
At the tail end of a ten-day trip during which he spoke at Harvard, MIT, Cornell and the inaugural fundraiser for the Dallas chapter of The Citizens Foundation, Ethan was in Fort Worth meeting with contacts at Texas Christian University when he heard the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. He stayed up all night writing an article for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. We have republished the article on Ethan’s website, with permission:
“Capturing Osama: The urgent importance of mutual respect”
http://www.ethancasey.com/2011/05/capturing-osama-the-urgent-importance-of-mutual-respect/
(Ethan will be writing a weekly column for Dawn starting next week, by the way.)
During the following week, Ethan was interviewed by the BBC and by KING 5, a Seattle TV station. The KING 5 interview is two and a half minutes long and does a nice job concisely encapsulating Ethan’s views:
“Bin Laden raid could make U.S.-Pakistan relationship tougher”
http://www.king5.com/video?id=121217089&sec=549122
Before bin Laden, there was the controversy spurred by the 60 Minutes coverage of Greg Mortenson. If you haven’t already read Ethan’s article on that, which was read widely and republished on the Huffington Post, you can read it here. Ethan challenges us all to look beneath the surface of the media hype and examine the deeper issues:
“Greg Mortenson Redefines ‘Doing One’s Best’”
http://www.ethancasey.com/2011/04/greg-mortenson-redefines-doing-ones-best/
Ethan has also begun publishing book reviews on his website, most recently this appreciation of Tony Judt who, as Ethan puts it, “was a rare specimen, an endangered species: an intellectual who refused to let his facility with language or pleasure at hearing his own voice overwhelm his honesty and integrity.” Read the review here:
“Review: Reappraising recent and current history”
http://www.ethancasey.com/2011/05/review-reappraising-recent-and-current-history/
Coming Events:
Ethan is home in Seattle at the moment but will be hitting the road again soon. In the coming weeks Ethan will be visiting Chicago, New Jersey, and Baltimore. At the University of Chicago, he will be speaking at and judging a competition of 40 young social entrepreneurs called RISE Pakistan. On June 1, Ethan will be giving a TEDx talk at the Princeton Library.
Thank you all for all the support you show by reading, commenting on, and sharing Ethan’s work. With all the attention Pakistan has been getting lately, Ethan’s work and your support are more important than ever.
Join the Ethan Casey page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Best regards,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ben Owen
Assistant to Ethan Casey,
author of Alive and Well in Pakistan
P.O. Box 85315
Seattle, WA 98145-1315
Voice: (206) 249-9749
Website: www.ethancasey.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Capturing Osama: The urgent importance of mutual respect
I wrote the following article overnight on May 1-2 for the Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn. It’s republished here with permission.
FORT WORTH – As I begin writing this it’s 2 am where I am and 3 am in New York and Washington, where exuberant crowds have gathered at Ground Zero and the White House, belligerently chanting “USA! USA!” and singing the national anthem and an ugly country-western song called “God Bless the USA.” By the time you read this, you surely will have seen and heard some of that on television. It bodes ill.
The fact that Osama bin Laden was killed well inside Pakistan, by US Navy SEALs, is dangerously embarrassing to the Pakistani state and military. “He was right under the noses of the Pakistani military there,” said Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin, who noted that Abbottabad is a “well-known military town.” Lt-Gen Thomas McInerney, also on Fox, was even more ominously to the point: “We’ve got enough problems with Pakistan that if we had talked to anybody in that government, Osama would have gotten away. We have a problem with Pakistan. Everybody’s talking about it. This will highlight it.”
Equally worrying is the attitude Americans are expressing toward the US military. It’s one thing to be respectful, another to be worshipful, and Americans seem frighteningly oblivious to the cost to our society of its reverence toward the youngsters glibly known here as “our men and women in uniform.” Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot whose plane hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, said: “Thanks again to our wonderful military; a big hats-off to the CIA.” A US Marine in uniform told the buffoonish Fox correspondent Geraldo Rivera, “I know for the military, we’re motivated as hell right now.” A Republican former Congressman called the US military “the most important profession that anyone can be in” and said, “I think that this is one for the team.”
That phrase calls to mind the in-your-face symbolism of American football as a metaphor for war, and Noam Chomsky’s apt description of sports as “training in irrational jingoism.” Rivera gushed about the “patriotism worn on their sleeves” of the shockingly young crowd hooting it up outside the White House, but it’s more than ever important to reclaim that word from the right wing and to highlight the distinction that George Orwell insisted on way back in 1945: “Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. … Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”
By Orwell’s definition, I’m happy to call myself a patriotic American. And such a sentiment is consistent with the Holy Quran: “O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another.” Patriotism implies respect for others who are differently patriotic, and that should be fine with everyone. But the young Americans that Geraldo Rivera is celebrating, the children of 9/11, have spent the past decade being trained in irrational jingoism and are blithely unaware of the impression our country has left on the rest of the world. I recall something a thoughtful American friend said to me in Haiti in 2004, a year when that country was more than usually brutalized by American power: “When you see other people waving their countries’ flags you think, ‘That’s nice, they love their country.’ When you see the American flag, you know people are going to die.”
“Too many people still believe in the state, and war is the health of the state,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in 1934. Sixty-four years after its founding, and for explicable reasons, Pakistan is still in state-building mode, and the military is an effective and patriotic national institution. I visited Swat in March, and since then I’ve been praising what I perceive as its restraint and benevolence there to audiences around the US. But the fact that bin Laden was killed, by US forces, just down the road from a Pakistani military school in Abbottabad is a severe black eye to the Pakistani state. Pakistani citizens and media will be doing their country a patriotic service if, far from excusing it, they continue to hold the state’s feet to the fire for what clearly was either its incompetence or its complicity with bin Laden. Such assertion of Pakistani society’s independence from the Pakistani state will count for a lot in coming days and weeks as friends of Pakistan like myself, and others of goodwill, do our best to resist another surge of militaristic American nationalism.
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. Football players have no more individuality than cogs in a machine, and the role of the crowd in a football stadium is to channel the emotions of vindictive triumphalism and hatred. That’s what I’m seeing on US television as I write this. The legendary populist politician Huey Long is reputed to have said, prophetically, “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the American flag.” Or, as CNN quoted someone as asking pithily if pathetically on Twitter, “If Osama bin Laden is dead, can we please have our rights back?”
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His account of his February-March 2011 trip to Pakistan, titled “After the Flood,” will be published as a stand-alone electronic book and as a chapter added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events. He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti, to be published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Greg Mortenson Redefines “Doing One’s Best”
SEATTLE, April 17 – We need to believe that the world and/or our situation in it can be improved, or else there really isn’t much point in getting out of bed in the morning. That’s the real issue at the heart of the controversy being raised by the 60 Minutes story on Greg Mortenson. And the real question is: What are you doing to make the world a better place?
I got out of bed early today to write this article. I have other things to do – and, more to the point, so does Greg. But I welcome the opportunity to defend and, inshallah, maybe even help enhance the urgently important good that Greg and others are doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The news flash that is occasioning a heap of ill-founded insinuations is that neither Three Cups of Tea nor Greg himself is perfect. I have no affiliation with the Central Asia Institute, except as a supporter and friend, and can’t address questions about its management and finances any better than Greg himself has already done in an article in the Bozeman Chronicle. What I can do is share the comments of his outreach coordinator, Sadia Ashraf, who is a good friend of mine. Sadia and her husband Tauheed are a very ordinary young couple raising two children in a Chicago suburb, who somehow manage to accomplish extraordinary things in support of both CAI and Pakistani pop star Shehzad Roy’s Zindagi Trust.
“Last year we had a disgruntled employee [in Pakistan] who made some fringe attacks on CAI,” Sadia told me. “Those allegations were based on his own frustrations about being released from CAI. Greg has always taken the high road and not wanted to expose that man.” Sadia cites an Urdu proverb: “When someone splashes mud on you, it’s better to stay away. Otherwise, you’ll get splattered.”
Ethan Casey with Greg Mortenson and Fawad Butt, Downers Grove, Illinois, April 5, 2008.
She also addressed the financial allegations, as Greg himself has done in the Bozeman Chronicle. “What we’re doing with that money is we’re keeping it,” Sadia told me, “so that every one of the CAI schools can have an endowment. The fact that I don’t have to worry about fundraising twenty years from now, because Greg is worrying about it now – that is genius. He still lives in that two-bedroom house. He still wears the same suit he wore a decade ago, and a tie that has the fashion sense of 1992. He wears an old pair of loafers that are worn down. Every single dollar that CAI earns is because of the outreach that Greg does. He spends 200 days a year away from his family, because he truly believes in the empowerment of women and girls.”
In a comment on one of the first reports on the controversy, U.S. Army Major Jason B. Nicholson makes a relevant point: “It takes a lot more money spent to raise money in the U.S. than it does to build schools in remote parts of developing countries.” This calls to mind a point we’ve been hearing Greg himself make lately: that it costs $1 million to maintain one American soldier in Afghanistan for one year, thus we could fund Afghanistan’s entire higher education system for a year by sending 240 troops home. The U.S. economy makes very heavy demands on the world’s resources, and the American public is chronically distracted, so to influence this society requires sustained and consistent attention and enormous material resources.
Sadia points out that, while educating girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan is CAI’s primary mission, equally “priceless” (her word, which I endorse) is the education and enhanced empathy of American readers and audiences. “Ignorance is everywhere, unfortunately,” she says. “There are people in America who don’t want Muslims to have a voice, and there are people in Central Asia who don’t want women to be empowered.” Or, as she puts it in a statement she emailed to me on Sunday:
The world is becoming a very small planet indeed. No more can we afford apathy or disinterest in the lives of those thousands of miles away. Like a butterfly effect, what happens in Egypt, Libya, Pakistan and Afghanistan creates ripples in our insular part of the planet. The success of Three Cups of Tea internationally testifies that readers around the world are thirsty for that knowledge.
I want to address two other points. One is that even world-famous humanitarians have a right and a need to draw an income to support their own livelihoods and families. I structure my own work as a for-profit business, but I make a very small fraction of Greg’s $180,000-a-year CAI salary. So what? What entitles anyone to question either Greg’s motivations or, hypothetically, mine or yours? From his salary, Greg covers his own extensive travel expenses. [Correction, April 20: The preceding sentence is apparently inaccurate. See item 8 in CAI's responses to questions from 60 Minutes.] It’s a non-issue. I’d rather talk about the obscene salaries and bonuses “earned” by Wall Street executives – wouldn’t you?
Then there’s the matter of the accuracy of portions of Three Cups of Tea. We could argue about where to draw the line between “a compressed version of events” (Greg’s words in the Bozeman Chronicle) and “a lie” (Jon Krakauer on 60 Minutes), but let’s note the double standard that’s too often applied to books and authors. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article about journalist Bill Steigerwald’s exposure of inaccuracies in John Steinbeck’s ostensible nonfiction classic Travels with Charley. It turns out it wasn’t just Steinbeck and his dog driving across America; Mrs. Steinbeck was with them much of the time. And he didn’t sleep in his pickup truck after all, but in hotels, sometimes nice ones. As Steigerwald pithily put it, “If scholars aren’t concerned about this, what are they scholaring about?”
Well, it seems Steinbeck scholars are blithely unconcerned. “Any writer has the right to shape materials,” rejoined Susan Shillinglaw of San Jose State University and the National Steinbeck Center, “and undoubtedly Steinbeck left things out. That doesn’t make the book a lie.”
Hmm. Shillinglaw is glib, and I’m pretty sure I disapprove of Steinbeck’s falsifications. But regardless, it’s not okay to give Steinbeck a pass but attack Greg Mortenson for what likely are much lesser literary evasions, inaccuracies, or whatever you want to call them. And on this point I would like to hear from David Oliver Relin, the writer who shares authorship credit and royalties 50/50 with Greg. Relin has rarely been acknowledged as he should be for having actually written Three Cups of Tea. Now would be a good time for him to step forward and shoulder the responsibility that goes along with authorship.
One reason we feel a need to set up heroes to worship is to let ourselves off the hook. If Greg Mortenson, or Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti, or Martin Luther King, or Aung San Suu Kyi, can do good on what seems a superhuman level, then somehow admiring them, and tossing them a dime now and then, seems enough for the rest of us. If we can show such a figure to be flawed, which is not hard to do, so much the better because we can tell ourselves such feats are impossible anyway. But as Tracy Kidder puts it in Mountains Beyond Mountains, the book on which Relin told me he modeled Three Cups of Tea, Farmer makes us uncomfortable by redefining the phrase “doing one’s best.”
This is what Greg Mortenson also does, and this is what I tried to say in my remarks at a Chicago-area CAI fundraiser three years ago:
One thing we all know darn well is that it’s just plain wrong for children in Baltistan or anywhere else to be without schools. Greg Mortenson allowed his experience of Baltistan, filtered through the personal character his parents had instilled in him in Tanzania and Minnesota, and refracted by human sympathy, gratitude, and friendship, to influence the choices he made about how and where to deploy his talents and effort during his time in this world. The choices he made have directly and demonstrably made the world a better place. What the rest of us are doing here tonight in support of his work is the least we can do.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His account of his February-March 2011 trip to Pakistan, titled “After the Flood,” will be published as a stand-alone electronic book and as a chapter added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events. He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti, to be published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Greg Mortenson honored Ethan with the 2010 Spirit Award at a Central Asia Institute fundraiser in Santa Clara, California, on September 26, 2010. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
On Wisconsin: The View from Pakistan
ISLAMABAD, February 22 – One of the stock lines I use in my public speaking around the U.S., when I’m trying to interest Americans in Pakistan and/or Haiti, goes something like this: “I grew up in an all-white town in Wisconsin. When I tell childhood stories, my wife says it sounds like Lake Wobegon. If you go from small-town Wisconsin to Haiti at age 16, as I did, you never go all the way back.” I say this not to caricature or lampoon my home state, but to share a sense of how much the world opened up to me once I left Wisconsin, how much I’ve learned by traveling outside the United States.
So I want to note how apt it feels that, nearly 30 years later and just as I’m hitting the ground on my latest visit to Pakistan, one of the most interesting places on our planet is Wisconsin. I feel proud of the public employees who, while taking care to say that they’re willing to negotiate on wages and benefits, are refusing to succumb to the Republican governor’s bullying over their basic right to be unionized. (No writer has articulated the stakes in Wisconsin better than Paul Krugman.) I’m proud of the tens of thousands of citizens who have been occupying the state capitol and the square around it, in sub-freezing weather, just at the far end of State Street from my alma mater.
And I’m proud of the Democratic state legislators who are currently in undisclosed locations in Illinois, helping force the issue by highlighting where responsibility for the situation lies. They’re doing honor to the great home state of Liberace and George Kennan and, more to the point, Fighting Bob La Follette. In 1964 Norman Mailer wrote, memorably, that “so long as there is a cold war, there are no politics of consequence in America.” Well, guess what? There are finally politics of consequence in America again, and it makes me proud to be an American and, equally and more specifically, a Wisconsinite.
I recently asked what the revolution in Egypt might mean for Pakistan. The answer(s), of course, is/are that you can’t draw a straight line from Cairo to Islamabad or anywhere else, and that history is perpetually surprising. As Mosharraf Zaidi rightly notes,
The intoxicating images from Tunisia and Egypt have inspired people all around the world, but that doesn’t mean every country that gets Al Jazeera on TV is about to ignite with popular protests against ineffective and corrupt governments, swarming into the streets and demanding change.
But as we watch with fascination and horror the carnage unfolding in Bahrain and now in Libya (at least I hope plenty of Americans are watching), we’ll do well to reflect that it has more to do with us than “only” its effect on the price of gasoline. I don’t mean to be glib along the lines of “Cairo in the Midwest,” as the New York Times has styled it. (East Coasters are always surprised when people from what they patronizingly call “the heartland” turn out to be intelligent and engaged and college-educated, and not just a bunch of hicks.) Protesters aren’t being gunned down in the American Midwest, though they have been before (Kent State, May 4, 1970).
The point is that no self-respecting human being likes to be bullied or humiliated, whether in Tripoli or in Madison. And in America, less urgently than in Libya but urgently enough, it’s high time we reclaimed an honest and legitimately popular politics. It won’t always be pretty, and it’s probably too late to forestall some severe disruptions in our economy and society. But taking matters into our own hands is vastly preferable to allowing the dinosaur that is the oligarchic and corrupt American establishment to continue lumbering along as it’s been doing.
In 1994 in Kathmandu (where I had been a student in 1986-87 with the University of Wisconsin College Year in Nepal program), I had the honor of interviewing Ganesh Man Singh, the late revered “Gandhi of Nepal.” Nepal at the time was undergoing its first political crisis since the semi-revolution of 1990. I asked Ganesh Man Singh how the military might figure in the coming events.
“It affects the people how much?” he replied. “That is the question. The police and army will make the people scared. If the government is successful, they will keep the people scared. But I don’t think we will be scared.”
I’ve always remembered what I learned that day: that the world is of a piece.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
What Does Egypt Mean for Pakistan?
One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received for my work was when a Pakistani journalist, a young woman, told me I’m not afflicted by what she called “Have pen will write syndrome.” I write when I have something to say, or a story to tell, that I believe others will find helpful and worth reading. Lately I’ve been itching a little to write about Egypt, but so far I’ve concluded that the world doesn’t need my gratuitous drop in the ocean of commentary, particularly given that I’ve never been to Egypt.
But I have been to Pakistan, many times since 1995, and I’m going there again for three weeks starting February 18. And I can’t help wondering what kinds of conversations I might have there in the wake or context of the Egyptian revolution.
This will be my first trip to Pakistan since the visit almost exactly two years ago that resulted in my book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. I flatter myself that, whatever its other merits, my book has a well-chosen title. As Zaka Shafiq, a young man I met in Karachi, told me at the end of the trip and the start of the book: “It’ll be out of date by the time it’s published.” But I’m not worried about being overtaken by events, because I’ve resigned myself to it as a condition of being alive in this world, especially these days. I figure my job is to listen, pay attention, and take notes. There’s a lot to be learned about where we’re at and where we’re headed, if you stay alert.
My coming trip hasn’t even started, and it’s already been overtaken by events. When I began planning it several months ago, its purpose was to witness and write about the grossly under-reported effects of last summer’s historically severe flooding – and that remains an important goal. But then, in early January, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated and, in a shockingly parallel incident, US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson. And, now, Egypt is in upheaval.
But what does Egypt have to do with Pakistan? Well, I’m hoping you can help me answer that question. Particularly if you’re Pakistani, but even if you’re not, I invite you to post a comment on this article or on my Facebook page or, if you prefer, to write to me privately with your thoughts. And please forward this article far and wide. I want to read and hear as many voices as you can help me gather about Pakistan’s future and the implications – for Pakistan, for the Muslim world, and for all of us – of the Egyptian revolution.
My starting point is that, in what I’ve been reading, Western writers are starting to speculate – ominously and/or hopefully, depending on their loyalties – on the wider implications of Egypt for the Arab world. Even factoring in the Western public’s fuzziness on the distinction between Arabs and Muslims, it’s striking to me that few seem to be wondering, in this context, about Pakistan. The American public has had a lot on its plate lately, what with Egypt, severe winter weather, and the Super Bowl all happening at the same time, but Frank Rich’s bracingly unsparing February 6 column acknowledges the stakes:
The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.
Rich notes the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir and remembers that, like the events in Cairo, the bombardments of Iraq that Rumsfeld ordered
were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We [Americans] lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.
So there is a lot of work to do, to continue educating the American public – I include myself – on our steep learning curve about the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular. What do Americans need to know about Pakistan? And, most pressingly at the moment, what are the similarities and differences between Pakistan and Egypt? And what might the events in Egypt portend for Pakistan?
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
