“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

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Good Muslims and good Americans

By Ben Owen

Note: Ben Owen is my assistant and creative collaborator and a student at Seattle Central Community College. This piece is, I hope, the first of many by Ben that you’ll be reading on www.ethancasey.com. – Ethan

On December 2, I organized a small symposium at Seattle Central Community College on Haiti and Pakistan. The idea came about because of my recent trip to Haiti and the work I’ve been doing with Ethan Casey to help change Americans’ perceptions of Pakistan and Pakistanis. Through these experiences, and many conversations with Haitians and Pakistanis, I began to see how similar their struggles are. I wanted to recreate this experience for others. The symposium was a way to share these insights with a broader audience and allow others to make the connections themselves, and it was a huge success. We filled the Student Events Center to capacity, the speakers gave thoughtful, well-researched talks, and everyone walked away having had at least one “I didn’t know that!” moment.

The first speaker was Jafar “Jeff” Siddiqui, a real estate agent, former chairman of the Islamic School of Seattle, and founding member of American Muslims of Puget Sound. He was also one of the first Muslims to be a Presidential Elector, in the 2008 Presidential Elections. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer said of Jeff: “His mission is to counteract the image of Muslims as fanatical terrorists and extremists that, he believes, is propagated in the media, popular culture, and even the government.”

He gave a stirring and enlightening talk about Pakistan, discussing its political relationship with the United States and how it’s portrayed in our media. He put Pakistan in a historical and geopolitical context and, in doing so, opened the door for people to reexamine their beliefs and ideas about it.

Even with my recent involvement with Pakistan, I had many “I didn’t know that!” moments myself. I knew that the United States has had a vested interest in the region for some time now, but I had no idea the extent of it. In the late 1970s, Afghanistan had a coup. King Zahir Shah was overthrown, and his cousin took over in a pro-communist regime. Those were the days of the Cold War, and the United States was determined to stop the spread of communism and the Soviet Union, which was occupying Afghanistan at the time. So we went to war in Afghanistan, but we didn’t actually go to war. What we did instead was arm and fund Pakistan to go to war for us. We gave money and weapons to anyone with any political or opinion influence in Pakistan, in order to buy their favor. As Siddiqui put it:

We loaded Pakistan with so much weaponry that those weapons are still moving around in the streets of Pakistan today. They, in turn, quashed the public opinion in Pakistan, which did not want to get involved in a proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union. But the people of Pakistan were dragged into war anyways, kicking and screaming, by the generals, the CIA and the United States.

This was also when Osama bin Laden came to Afghanistan, also to fight the Soviets, but for different reasons. According to The Council on Foreign Affairs, Bin Laden became involved with Afghanistan “during the 1979-89 war against the Soviets. Bin Laden raised money and supplied heavy machinery for the anticommunist mujahadeen, or holy warriors, fighting the Soviet invasion. He also provided financing for the so-called Services Office, which recruited and trained a brigade of foreign Muslim militants that fought alongside the Afghan mujahadeen.” Soon after, more than 3 million Afghan refugees flooded into Pakistan, and the United States was there with all the money that Pakistan needed to support them. “We just asked for open access to channels of funding and weaponry to people in Afghanistan and training camps in Pakistan to train the Afghans to fight so they can go back and fight,” Siddiqui said. Hundreds of religious schools, called madrassas, were set up in Pakistan. They taught Afghan refugee children very intolerant versions of Islam, wrongly teaching that Islam directs you to kill unbelievers.

Siddiqui remembers that in those days people in Pakistan were saying, “For God’s sake! Don’t teach this to the kids! They’re going to grow up, you will be long gone, they will still be here, and we will have to deal with them.” But we had a mission to accomplish. Eventually, our plan worked. The Soviet Union pulled out, but we pulled out right behind them before the dust even had time to settle, leaving radicals like bin Laden behind with the rubble and destruction of a ten-year war. As Siddiqui said, “That was the worst thing the United States could have done. The easiest thing the United States could have done was invest $100 million to start industry, start schools, and start an infrastructure in Afghanistan. But as we’ve always insisted: we’re not into ‘nation construction.’ What we leave out is that we are into ‘nation destruction.’”

This stood out to me as an important point. Currently, we’re fighting a war in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. These two wars have cost our country hundreds of billions of dollars. And, as Siddiqui noted, “According to a poll taken just a year ago, public opinion about Muslims is worse today than it was on the one-year anniversary of 9/11.” There is no way to know how things would be different today had we invested in rebuilding Afghanistan after the Soviets left. But we can put ourselves in the shoes of the people there. Imagine that we lived in a country that was not the world superpower, and a proxy war between two foreign countries was fought on American soil, leaving thousands of innocent civilians dead and our infrastructure in shambles. Would that not create a bitterness and resentment within the heart of every American patriot? Radicals would spring up from the Atlantic to the Pacific, denouncing the entities that brought such suffering to our land. Why would we expect anything different from the people of Afghanistan?

Although I found all this profoundly interesting, I started to think, “Isn’t Jeff supposed to be talking about Pakistan?” And at that moment, as if he had read my mind, he said:

Now, all of this has a major impact on Pakistan. Afghanistan garnered its intolerant Muslims from the madrassa schools which also trained Pakistanis. The people who learned from them became even more intolerant and trained even more intolerance into Pakistan. Pakistan right now is a chaotic country. If I have the most weapons, then I am king. And nobody can say anything. And If I invoke Islam, then I can get away with anything I want.

What we have to remember is that violent people are often the ones who rise to power, especially in environments like Pakistan today. The “leaders” of a country, more often than not, are not representative of the people they rule over. Yet the media here in the US (and many of our citizens) demonize all Muslims and Pakistanis because of the actions of a few radicals that our government (not us) indirectly supported and helped to thrive. We must remember that it is Pakistani and Afghan citizens – people like you and me, with friends and families – who are suffering the most. By demonizing them and judging an entire people based on the actions of a few, we do an injustice not only to them, but to ourselves.

Siddiqui closed by showing how all this affects us here in America:

Since 9/11, the biggest industry in the world has been the fear industry. In the name of fear, in the name of security, we have given up our civil liberties. We have been deprived of our civil rights, but we are no closer to security. … In the name of security, in just the first year after 9/11, 14,000 Muslims in the US had been put in jail and were kept in jail – fourteen thousand! And when the question was brought up in the Senate, Senator John Ashcroft said, ‘Individually, these people are like pieces of a mosaic; they don’t show anything. But we’re trying to develop a pattern from this mosaic. That’s why we’re holding so many people.’ And people shut up, because it was a matter of national security.

I couldn’t believe that such a ridiculous justification was used for such a blatant violation of human rights and civil liberties that we hold so dear in the United States, so I looked it up. One of the first citations I found was a 2005 study in the Yale Law Journal titled “The Mosaic Theory, National Security, and the Freedom of Information Act,” which concluded: “Though essentially valid, the mosaic theory has been applied in ways that are unfalsifiable, in tension with the text and purpose of FOIA, and susceptible to abuse and overbreadth.” The paper discusses the many uses of this theory by our government – particularly the Bush Administration – to justify invasive and unconstitutional policies and actions.

We have all averted our eyes from injustice and discrimination against Muslims in our country. I have. I have listened to people make ignorant statements like, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims,” and I have kept my mouth shut. We cannot afford to keep our mouths closed or our eyes shut any more. We live in a diverse country that was founded on the principles of freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of the people to pursue happiness. And no one will be happy as long as we allow fear of Muslims to be perpetuated in our communities. We listen to the bigotry and single-sided perspectives spouted through the “news,” and we take it in and swallow it whole.

I was largely unaware of the mass detention of Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11 because, to my discredit, I simply did not know very many Muslims. But there are large Muslim communities all across the US, American citizens who are doing their best to be “good Muslims” and good Americans, just as others are doing their best to be “good Christians.” Now, I personally know of a group of several hundred Pakistani doctors who did relief work in Haiti after the earthquake there. We have no excuse to live in fear of all Muslims. We have no excuse to be ignorant. Most likely, you have a Muslim co-worker or classmate. Why not ask him or her out to lunch or coffee? I guarantee that you’ll have at least one “I didn’t know that!” moment.

Blindly ingesting popular culture’s representation of Islam and Muslims is a choice. Only by actively pursuing knowledge about what we do not understand will we be able to overcome the fear and misconceptions that have overtaken our culture. It’s time to build bridges.

Read Ben Owen’s bio

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CA events: The least we can do for Pakistan

Dear friends,

Having just returned home to Seattle from an arduous but fascinating and encouraging three-week trip to Haiti, I’ll be taking part in several events over the next week-plus in California, in support of Pakistani groups and flood relief. One is a fundraiser for Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute, where I’ve been asked to host a table. If you’d like to sit at my table, let me know.

The ongoing misery in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake, and now the flooding in Pakistan, have me remembering the plenary talk I had the honor to give at a previous CAI fundraiser, in Chicago in April 2008. I saw parallels between Greg Mortenson and Dr. Paul Farmer and quoted from a conversation I had with Farmer in Haiti in 2004:

“If you’ve been working on poverty and hunger issues for twenty-something years [Farmer said], and you’re not making progress on some fronts, I think it does keep you humble. Knowing that the world is so dented and damaged must be humiliating, if not humbling – one or the other. If you cocoon yourself away from misery, then you can be delusional about how great and praiseworthy you are.”

From Farmer’s words and my own reflections, I drew this conclusion:

“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.”

The full text of that talk is online here:
http://www.ethancasey.com/speaking/the-least-we-can-do/

See below for events details. Hope to see you there!

Best regards, Ethan

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Website: http://www.ethancasey.com

Events in California:

Inside Pakistan and Palestine: Viewpoints from Humanitarian Workers – CodePink: Women for Peace
Wed, Sept 22, 7:15-9:00 p.m., First Unitarian Universalist Society
1187 Franklin Street (at Geary), San Francisco, CA 94109
$5-10 sliding scale, contact Nancy Mancias 415-355-0300 (www.codepink.org)

Fundraising dinner with Greg Mortenson
Sat, Sept 25, 5:30 p.m., Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
5101 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, CA 95054
http://www.ikat.org/bayarea/

Zindagi Trust event feat. Shehzad Roy and Bushra Ansari
Sun, Sept. 26, 6 p.m., Doubletree Guest Suites Anaheim Resort/Convention Center
2085 South Harbor Boulevard, Anaheim, CA 92802
http://zindagitrustoc10.eventbrite.com/

Walkathon for Children of the Pakistan Flood
Sat, Oct 2, 8 a.m.-noon
Central Park Amphitheater, San Ramon, CA
contact Jafar Safdar, 510-409-9758
http://www.mymashal.org

My two recent articles on the flooding in Pakistan:

Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?
http://www.ethancasey.com/2010/08/pakistan-floods-why-should-we-care/

What does Pakistan have to do with Haiti?
http://www.ethancasey.com/2010/09/what-does-pakistan-have-to-do-with-haiti/

*

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Some of My Best Friends Are Pakistanis

by Ethan Casey

SAN DIEGO, May 4 – As I write this, the news that the man arrested for trying to blow up Times Square is a U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin has only begun to sink in. What is this going to mean for other U.S. citizens of Pakistani origin – and for me, as their friend?

This article’s headline is an ironic allusion to something people used to say to disavow bigotry: “Some of my best friends are Jews.” It’s also a straight statement of fact: some of my best friends are Pakistanis. And I want the world to know that, especially in these times and at this moment, because I think it’s very important for us to remember that not all U.S. citizens of Pakistani origin blow stuff up.

Assuming we’re being told the truth about 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad of Bridgeport, Connecticut, it might be fair to ask: With friends like these, who needs enemies? But it’s precisely because of the horrific misguidedness of a dangerous few that we need to stay calm and remind ourselves and each other that we’re all in this together. I said exactly this, in fact, on Sunday when I spoke in support of The Citizens Foundation at the South Asian American Arts Festival put on by Zanbeel Art at the Santa Monica Art Studios. I’ll say it again tonight, when I speak to the Pakistani Students Association at UC-San Diego.

The Citizens Foundation is one of several well-run nonprofits supported by the largely very suburban and middle-class Pakistani-American community that are quietly doing the most urgently necessary work: providing education, and thereby hope and self-respect, to the burgeoning young generation of the Pakistani poor. Too quietly: groups like TCF-USA must start tooting their own horns more assertively to the American public. I would go so far as to say that countering the impression of Pakistanis conveyed by the likes of Faisal Shahzad is not only an opportunity for the Pakistani-American community, but an obligation.

I’m not saying that Pakistani Americans have to prove that they’re not terrorists. The rest of us must remember that there is no such thing as collective guilt, and that the presumption of innocence is a basic American principle. I am saying that the existing institutions of Pakistani America need to move – now – beyond inviting each other to the existing endless round of charity fundraisers, worthy and useful as those are. Pakistani Americans are a remarkably talented and resourceful community who pay a lot of money to the U.S. Treasury in taxes and contribute very substantially to American society as physicians, engineers, teachers and business people. For better or worse, Americans listen to people who insist on being heard, and if you don’t toot your own horn, nobody else is gonna toot it for you.

My writing and public speaking are all about emphasizing to Americans the humanity of Pakistanis, their experience of and views on contemporary history, the complexity of their political and geographical situation, and the enjoyable and interesting apects of my own experience of Pakistan, dating back to 1995. As my friend Todd Shea likes to say, Americans hear 2% of Pakistan’s story 98% of the time. I feel very fortunate to have experienced Pakistan directly at a relatively innocent time both in history and in my own life, before the country’s name became a dirty word in the West. We can’t go back to that time, but we can remember it – and we can and should take a deep breath, reach out to each other as allies, and work together to do what needs to be done.

What needs to be done? Young Pakistanis need to be given hope and self-respect by way of education and jobs. This is already being done by The Citizens Foundation, by Developments in Literacy – at whose San Diego fundraiser I’ll be speaking this Saturday, May 8 – by the Human Development Foundation, by Pakistani pop star Shehzad Roy’s Zindagi Trust, and famously by Greg Mortenson.

But why is Greg Mortenson’s the only one of these efforts that’s well known? Part of the answer, of course, is that he’s white: church ladies and Oprah watchers can relate to him as a virtual nephew or brother-in-law. This is fine. But we need to get beyond the toxic supposition that America is primarily a “white” and/or Christian country. It’s not, anymore, and that’s a good thing.

So the other thing that needs to be done is that the Pakistani community needs to ratchet up both its involvement in American society and politics and its visibility. Call up your local schools and churches, invite your neighbors to your home, all that good stuff, and by all means enlist me, Todd Shea, and Greg Mortenson as envoys. But also support Pakistani-American and other Muslim candidates for public office; insist on meetings with existing officeholders, not only but especially those you consider hostile to Muslims or Pakistan; and support and expand the lobbying work of groups like the Pakistani American Leadership Center and the Council of Pakistan American Affairs. Get in the American public’s face, as fellow Americans, and help us all begin having a more honest conversation about Pakistan, America, terrorism, and where our countries and world are headed.

And I ask two things of my fellow non-Pakistani Americans: Go to the trouble of educating yourselves about Pakistan – my books and inviting me to speak are, indeed, good places to start. And, when you see pictures of Faisal Shahzad over the coming days, keep in mind that, except for the buzz cut, Tim McVeigh looked a lot like me.

ETHAN CASEY is the author of the travel books Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010).

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OBE on way; Facebook fan page; to Haiti and back

It’s been nearly a month since I posted here, but it’s been a busy month. Since March 17 I’ve been to Haiti and back and have also spoken on behalf of my new book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, in Tampa and San Jose, with other engagements scheduled in April and May in Seattle, San Diego, Santa Monica, San Francisco, and other cities. (I plan to visit the East Coast, Colorado and the Midwest in the fall)

Overtaken By Events is now in print, with about 3000 copies (out of 5000 in the first printing) currently sitting in my garage. I want the hundreds of you who pre-purchased it to know two things: that I’m grateful for your crucial early support, and that your copy will be in the mail to you within the next two weeks. I’m currently finalizing some printed cards that I want to enclose with pre-purchased copies along with a handwritten personal thank-you note from me, and to use for other purposes. Those should be ready by the end of next week.

If you haven’t yet purchased Overtaken By Events or Alive and Well in Pakistan, or pre-purchased my Haiti book in progress (to be published next spring), please support my work by doing so, from this site’s Books page.

I have plans to revamp this website, and I also will be launching a new companion www.ethancasey.com site to promote my public speaking and as a more appropriate long-term online home for my Haiti book and other projects. Stay tuned for more on these over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, if you’re on Facebook, please join the new Ethan Casey fan page being developed by my friend Asim Razzaq in Silicon Valley, which will be another way to keep up with my work:

http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

Facebook is an excellent way to spread the word about creative projects and independent writing around the Internet and the world, so please do help in this way if you can.

Many thanks,

Ethan

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Pakistani-led group returns from Haiti

If I haven’t posted a blog entry in more than two weeks, it’s because – as usual – I’ve been busy with other things. I spent a successful week in Colorado in early February, speaking at two churches and three colleges, including the Air Force Academy. And I just returned from a busy weekend in Orange County, California, whose main event was a fundraiser for Todd Shea’s organization SHINE Humanity (see its excellent new website). The short speech I was able to give there was very gratifying, because I’m very proud of and grateful to Todd as well as Pakistani friends for responding so promptly, intelligently and compassionately to the earthquake in Haiti. Haiti is a very old friend of mine, so my gratitude is personal. Here’s a short excerpt:

Todd is not the only American in this room who has worked in Haiti since the earthquake. I want to single out two others: Dr. Farzana Naqvi and Dr. Salman Naqvi. The story of how Farzana, Salman and others have stepped up as physicians, as Muslims, as Pakistanis who know the devastation an earthquake can cause, and not least as Americans, is a powerful message that the American public needs to hear.

I’ve published the full speech on this website under the “Speaking” tab, along with some photos that I showed that evening.

My new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip is at the printer and will (inshallah) be published later this month. I’m looking forward to introducing it at events in Chicago on March 27 and Tampa on March 28. More on those, and other travel and promotion, as the publication date nears. If you haven’t yet purchased your copy, now is a great time to ensure that your copy comes signed and with a personal letter from me by pre-ordering it from this website. I’ll be sitting down in early April to send out all pre-ordered copies.

More soon!

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When history hits home

When history happens in a place you know personally, it messes with your head. I visited Haiti for the first of many times in 1982, as a teenager; when the crisis over Aristide and the Haitian boat people hijacked the world’s front pages during the excruciating early months of the Clinton administration, I endured an agony of helplessness far away, in Bangkok. The place name Guantanamo Bay took on personal meaning for me then, as the place the U.S. Coast Guard took Haitians they intercepted fleeing to Florida. When the semi-revolution came to Kathmandu in 1990, it hit home because I had lived there as a student in the mid-1980s.

Those early experiences reinforced a predilection for taking history personally. Much water had yet to flow beneath the bridge in Haiti and Nepal, and in other places I traveled inflicting experience on myself: Burma, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Detroit. During the later Bush years, I returned full circle and saw truths I had learned elsewhere at play in my own country. You keep going back to places where you’ve experienced history because you feel that, somehow, there’s sense to be made of it. But when a place has been your home and something terrible happens there in your absence—well, it hits home.

So the feeling was familiar when Kurien walked into his flat in Mumbai and told Pete and me about the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.

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Nayaa Saal Mubarak: Alive and Well in 2010

Well, 2009 is finally over and it’s time to turn the page, with big plans and hopes for 2010. As my mother likes to say, life is a constant leaf-turning process. It’s an anxious and melancholy moment in our world, but we’ve gotten used to those, and I think the only effective way to combat the otherwise inevitable, and all too understandable, despair and paralysis is to insist on living in hope – by which I mean not just sitting around choosing to feel hopeful, but turning hope into meaningful and concrete action.

For me, 2009 was all about researching and then writing my new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. It feels as though it’s been a long, hard slog, but at the moment I’m feeling tired in a pleasant and gratifying way, with a big load off my shoulders. If you’re on my email list, you know that throughout the fall I was writing the book while also taking daily Urdu language classes and starting a master’s degree program in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I live, as well as traveling a lot to promote the book project in both mainstream and Pakistani communities across the United States and Canada. November in particular was a crazy month for me, with trips to Orange County and San Diego; Portland; Fort Worth (speaking along with my colleague Fawad Butt at Texas Christian University); and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

The point of all the travel has been to raise awareness of and support for the book ahead of its publication this March, and the point of the book is to encourage – and to participate in – a much-needed conversation between the Muslim world and the West, and specifically between Pakistanis and Americans. From fifteen years’ worth of direct personal experience of Pakistan, I know not only that it’s a country that faces severe challenges – everyone knows that – but that those challenges are different from what most Americans suppose them to be. And I know that Pakistanis are resourcefully rising to the occasion in meeting them, and other Americans need to know that too. And they’re challenges faced by Pakistani people – parents who worry about their children’s education, health and safety, for example, just as American parents do, geopolitics and religion notwithstanding. But of course those things can never quite be notwithstanding; they impinge too much on all of us, especially these days, especially in Pakistan.

If 2009 was, for me, the year of the book, 2010 will be the year of the blog. It’s understandable enough that I haven’t posted on this blog since November, but with the book finished and its publication coming soon, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog weekly. Authors I admire, such as James Howard Kunstler, whose important book The Long Emergency I recommend highly, do this very effectively. From reading Kunstler weekly, I’ve come to see how a blog can supplement and complement a book and vice versa. If, as I say, it’s all about initiating and continuing a needed conversation, then there can be few better ways to do that today than by blogging frequently and on a reliable schedule. For several reasons, I plan to publish a new entry every Tuesday.

I’ll be doing other things too, including plenty more travel around North America. My travel schedule is public on Google calendar as “Ethan Casey’s travel calendar,” or visit the Calendar page of this site. I’ll be in Southern California in late January, visiting several colleges in Colorado in the first half of February, in Texas (Dallas, Houston and hopefully Austin) in the third week of March, and in San Jose and Fresno in early April. If I’m coming to your city – or if you’d like me to – please drop me a note.

There are several concrete ways you can support my work. By all means, invite me to your city if you can – and, if your group’s budget is limited, we can work together creatively to make it worth everyone’s while. I’m starting to schedule my calendar for fall 2010 now. Also, now is a great time to pre-purchase your copy of Overtaken By Events, if you haven’t yet. There are buttons in the upper right corner of this page, and you can buy it singly, or in a package with my previous book Alive and Well in Pakistan, or multiple copies to give to family and friends. All pre-sold copies will be shipped, with a thank-you note from me, in late March or early April, immediately after the book is published.

You also can help by sending the link to this or any other blog entry far and wide, and by otherwise encouraging people you know to visit this website and follow my work.

That’s all for this week – talk to you again next Tuesday!

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