The anxious emails from students are hitting my in-boxes once again: What time are office hours? Are places in the seminar still available? Where can they get advance copies of the syllabus?

I don’t have answers to these questions yet; by this time next week I will.

Another school year is ready to begin, and for the first time in decades I will be teaching full-time.

Unfortunately, I’m returning to a profession in crisis.  Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds has been blogging up a storm over what he calls the ‘bubble‘ in higher education.  Parents and students are shoveling more and more cash into degrees that, Glenn and many of those he links to warn, are not likely to pay off.

They are, unfortunately, right.  The bubble analogy is dead-on for some parts of the educational world.  In an age of outsourcing and technological change, a law degree (even from a ‘name’ school) is no longer going to be the kind of ticket to affluence that it once was.

A view of Bard College (Wiki).

More generally, the upper middle class benefited over the last generation from a rising difference between the living standards of professional and blue collar American workers.  This is likely to change; from civil service jobs in government to university professors, lawyers, health care personnel, middle and upper middle management in the private sector, the upper-middle class is going to face a much harsher environment going forward.  Automation, outsourcing and unremitting pressures to control costs are going to squeeze upper middle class incomes.  What blue collar workers faced in the last thirty years is coming to the white collar workforce now.

Yet as their financial prospects darken, students’ educational costs are exploding.  Like the health care system, the educational system is being overwhelmed by rising costs and rising demand.  And as misguided government policies contributed to the real estate bubble by artificially inflating demand, government programs are burdening students with unpayable loans and contributing to relentless and unsustainable inflation in school costs.

And so, dear students, welcome back!  Your generation is going to have dig its own way out of the hole my generation has dug for you (thanks for the Medicare, kids, and sorry about the deficit!), but here are a few tips that may help you get the best out of your college years.

1.  The real world does not work like school.

Life in school is life in bureaucracy.  You follow the rules, do what you are told, and rewards follow.

The real world was never very much like that, but the parts of the real world that look most like school (like for example law firms, universities and government and private sector bureaucracies) have their heads on the chopping block.  By the time today’s students are in their forties (and that is MUCH closer than you think, kids), most of those organizations are going to morph into something very different.  Or they will die.

Inmates who spend a long time in prison become institutionalized; they adapt so well to the conditions of prison that they can no longer function in the free world.  Something similar can happen to students.  From age six or even younger, students are immersed in a predictable world that runs by the rules.  Then you get out of school — and expect that this pattern will continue.  If you go to a good law school and do well, you will become an associate at a successful firm.  Do your job well, work hard, obey the rules and wash behind your ears and in due time you will make partner.

That’s the old system; the new one won’t work that way.  Creativity, integrity and entrepreneurial initiative will pay off; following the old rules and hoping for the old rewards is a road to frustration.  You have to fight the tendency of the educational system to turn you into a timeserving baby bureaucrat, following the rules and waiting for the inevitable promotion. 

As you go through college, think about ways you can fight the pressures of institutionalization.  Work or volunteer — not just for money, but to keep your hand in the real world.  Live off campus.  Start a business.  Shake things up.

2.  Most of your elders know very little about the world into which you are headed.

Your parents and your teachers want what is best for you (with the usual regrettable exceptions), but in many cases they don’t understand the challenges you will face.

Especially for those of you who come from white-collar families, the kinds of careers that your parents have had may not be around for you.

Even if you go into the ‘learned professions’ you are going to have to be entrepreneurial and flexible.  Technology is going to rock your world and economic changes and upheavals are going to change the rules on you over and over.  This is not how the  knowledge professions (law, medicine, teaching, the civil service) used to work.  In the old days, you got the right degree from the right school, got a job with a good employer and rose steadily through the ranks through a long and increasingly distinguished career.  At the end you had a safe pension.

Almost certainly, this is not going to happen to you.  At times, your career is going to feel like Eliza’s run for freedom across the half-frozen Ohio river — jumping from ice floe to ice floe with the hounds of hell behind you.  It won’t be all bad; there are rewards to this kind of life as well as risks, but you are going to need a different outlook on life and a different set of skills to cope.

Most faculty members, especially the tenured ones, have worked  and lived in a world that is passing away.  In many cases it’s hard for them to imagine the kind of lives you will live, and you need to keep this in mind.  Even if you want to make a career in education, you are likely going to have to deal with an environment in which tenure is disappearing, universities are shedding overhead, and both public and private universities face tough revenue squeezes.  Some especially vulnerable institutions (like mainline Protestant seminaries) are closing in droves; turmoil is likely to spread because the current financial path of the higher ed industry is as unsustainable as Medicare and the federal debt.

3.  You are going to have to work much, much harder than you probably expect.

I’m sorry to bring you bad news, but your generation faces the toughest competition any American generation has ever known.

Your competition isn’t sitting in the next library carrel.  Your competition is in China and India – and your competition isn’t hanging out at frat parties or sitting around watching sitcoms with dorm-mates.  It isn’t getting stoned and it isn’t putting its energy into chasing the opposite (or apposite) sex.  Your competition isn’t taking lots of courses on gender studies; it isn’t majoring in ethnic studies, or (unless it is planning to go into movie making) the history of film.

Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning.  There’s nothing written in the stars that guarantees Americans a higher standard of living than other people.  Those of you who spend your college years goofing off in the traditional American way are going to pay a much higher price for this than you think.

4. Choosing the right courses is more important than choosing the right college.

Choosing the right college is over-rated.  Just about every college in the United States has more talented and interesting students than you will have time to get to know in four years.  At every college in America you will not be able to take all the great courses from great faculty, read every worthwhile book in the library, or participate in all the rewarding extracurricular activities.

Choosing the right courses, on the other hand, is under-rated.  In the old days you could take a lot of silly courses and guts and get away with it.  But your generation is going to have to scramble and you need every edge you can get.

Your generation can’t afford to throw these four years away; choose your courses carefully and seriously. Everybody has different needs; aspiring movie makers and aspiring physicists aren’t going to take all that many classes together, but there are some basic concepts that make sense.

5.  Get a traditional liberal education; it is the only thing that will do you any good.

Following this advice will be hard; a liberal education is no easy thing to get, and not everybody wants you to have one.  However, in times of rapid change, it is paradoxically more useful to immerse yourself in the basics and the classics than to try to keep up with the latest developments and hottest trends.  You can be almost 100% sure that the hot theories making waves in academia today will be forgotten or superseded in twenty years — but fifty years from now people will still be reading and thinking about the classic texts that have shaped our world.  Use your college years to ground yourself in the basic great books and key ideas and values that will last.

For the same reason, don’t worry too much about getting specific skills at this stage.  You are going to keep learning new skills all your life and you are going to find many of your skills obsolete as time goes on (when I was a kid I was very good at operating something called a mimeograph machine).  What you want to do now is to develop your ability to learn.

It’s a lot of work, but don’t panic; you are not going to get this all done in four years.  Becoming educated is a lifelong project; you can’t turn your mind off and stop reading books when you finish college and expect to get anywhere.  Here are some tips to help you get started.

First, getting a liberal education means you have to achieve literacy in math and at least in one science – and come to grips with the scientific method.  I’d recommend biology as the science you should spend the most time with; this is probably the science that’s going to be changing the world most radically during much of your life — and since you need some chemistry to make sense of it, you will be getting a grounding in two disciplines rather than just one.

Second, study the basic ideas, debates, books, people and events of the western world – with special attention to the Anglo-American subset of the western tradition.  You can’t understand other people’s cultures and traditions until you understand the one that surrounds you.  Art, literature and music are part of this.  Don’t neglect them.

Third, study the United States: its history, regions, culture, politics, literature and economy.  You would be surprised how many highly educated people have never seriously studied (or traveled much in) their own country.  Don’t make that mistake – and study the parts of the US you don’t know.  If you are a southerner, study the north.  If you are from the Midwest, study the two coasts; if you are coastal, study the interior.  If you are white, study African-American history.  Don’t just study this in class.  Seek people out in your school from different backgrounds and get to know them.

Fourth, study at least one language and at least one culture that is alien to you.  Pick a language that opens the door to a big world: Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, German, the Romance languages (if you get really good in one of these last you will have a surprisingly easy time dealing with others).  Beyond the language study, take a cluster of courses that give you at least an overview of one non-western civilization.  (This works better than taking a scattering of unrelated electives on many different cultures.)  The purpose of taking a language today has less to do with learning to talk to foreigners than it used to; foreigners seem to be learning English faster than we are learning their languages and computer translation software is likely to make reading texts in other languages much easier in your time.  But learning a foreign language is still a great way to explore another world: different languages organize the world differently and to learn a language is to learn a new mental map.

Fifth, learn to write well,.  This paradoxically is going to be more important than ever for the next generation.  I can’t tell you how many editors at how many famous magazines have told me over the years that most professors and academics simply cannot write, and bemoan the immense amount of time they must devote to impose some kind of intellectual structure and comprehensible prose on the crabbed drafts they get from, often, fairly well known people.

This will not last.  Publications are not going to be able to continue paying editors to spin straw into gold; if you want to have a public voice in the next generation you are going to have to learn to write well.  This is a hard skill to acquire, but it can be taught.  Most schools don’t do this well; it is expensive and academics generally don’t value clear and attractive prose writing as much as they should.  This is important enough that I would recommend you use it as a factor in choosing a college, but for those of you already enrolled, make a point of seeing what your school offers in this area.

Finally, unless you are following up on an interest that is already a deep and passionate one, try to take courses taught by great teachers.  The main purpose of an undergraduate education isn’t to polish up your knowledge and finish your learning.  It is to launch you on a lifetime quest for wisdom and understanding.  You want professors who can help you fall in love with new subjects, new ideas, new ways of investigating the world.  The courses that end up mattering the most to you will be the ones that start you on a lifetime of reading and reflection.

6.  Character counts; so do good habits.

One of the weaknesses in contemporary college education is that many teachers and administrators don’t think enough about the need that students have for moral education: reflection on right and wrong, the development of good habits that make good decisions easier to make and easier to stick with, a healthy spiritual grounding that can see you through the storms of life, and the kind of self knowledge that can only come from a life of serious moral engagement and thoughtful reflection.

Character and spiritual grounding are going to count much more in the tumultuous, uncertain environment that is approaching than in the more stable and bureaucratic world of the past.  It is very hard for a tenured professor or a career civil servant to screw up so badly that he or she loses a job.  But in a world in which employment is less secure, competition tougher, and your reputation for integrity and productivity are the most important assets you have, character is going to count.  More, the ups and downs of life and the risks you will have to run to build your career mean that you will need to be grounded spiritually to stay on an even keel.  Life is going to be scary; sometimes it will be hard.  Where will you find the strength to keep going when the path ahead looks dark?  How will you be able to renew the optimism, the ability to take risks, and maintain your self confidence and stay creative in a world of rapid and sometimes unfair change?

There may be chaplains at your school who can help you with this side of life.  There may be courses on personal ethics; there may be faculty who you feel have something to teach as mentors and role models.  There are other students who have qualities that you wish you had — and there are student groups who read, pray, meditate and act together to help their members grow.  Seek out the people, the communities, the experiences that can help you grow.  College should be a time of spiritual as well as intellectual and career development and growth.

7.  Relax.

If you take this advice, you may still come out of school with too much debt — and the fields that interest you may be hard to break into, and the financial rewards less than you may have expected.  But you will be able to cope: you will have the education, the habits and the character traits that will enable to you find new opportunities and new careers even as old ones fade away.  And whatever happens to your bank account, your journey through life will be a rich and rewarding one if you come out of college with a good liberal education and a lifelong love of learning.

Watching the colossal and implosive decline of the once mighty green movement to stop global warming has been an educational experience.  It’s rare to see so many smart, idealistic and dedicated people look so clueless and fail so completely.  From the anti-climax of the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held, the movement has gone from one catastrophic failure to the next.

A year ago giddy environmentalists were on top of the world.  The greenest president in American history had the largest congressional majority of any president since Lyndon Johnson; the most powerful leaders in the world were elbowing each other for places on the agenda at the Copenhagen conference on climate.

It all came to naught.  The continued stalemates and failures of the UN treaty process have fallen off the front pages; as the Kyoto Protocol sinks ineffectually into oblivion, no new global treaty will take its place.  The most Democratic Congress in a generation will not pass significant climate legislation before the midterms pull Congress to the right, and there will be no US law on carbon caps or anything close in President Obama’s first term, and there is less public faith in or concern about climate change today than at any time in the last fifteen years.

Has any public pressure group ever spent so much direct mail and foundation money for such pathetic results?

The standard rap on the greens is that they failed because they were too environmentalist.  Their pure and naive ideals were no match for the evil, ugly forces of real world politics.  Beautiful losers, they dared to dream a dream too gossamer winged, too delicate for the harsh light of day.  Bambi, meet Godzilla; the butterfly was broken on the wheel.

Even in defeat, the greens can’t get it right.  The greens didn’t fail because they were too loyal to their ideals; they failed because lost touch with the core impetus and values of the environmental movement.  Bambi wasn’t crushed by Godzilla; Bambi turned into Godzilla, and the same kind of public skepticism and populism that once fueled environmentalism have turned against it.

The greens have forgotten where they come from.  Modern environmentalism was born in the reaction against Big Science, Big Government and Experts.  The Army Corps of Engineers built dams that devastated wetlands and ruined ecosystems; environmentalists used to be people who fought the Corps because they understood the limits of science, engineering, and simple big interventions in complex ecosystems.

The case environmentalists used to make was that modern science was too crude and too incomplete to take into account the myriad features that could turn a giant hydroelectric dam from a blessing into a curse.  Yes, the dam would generate power — for a while.  But green critics would note that the dam had side effects: silt would back up in the reservoir, soil downstream would be impoverished, parasites and malaria bearing mosquitoes would flourish in the still waters and so on and so forth.  Meanwhile the destruction of wetlands and river bottoms imposed enormous costs to wildlife diversity and the productivity of river systems.  Salmon runs would disappear.  Often, the development associated with hydroelectric dams led to deforestation, offsetting gains in flood control.

Environmentalists were skeptics of the One Big Fix.  Science could never capture all the side effects and the unintended consequences.  DDT looked like a magic bullet against malaria, but it threatened to wipe out important bird species.  Books like Silent Spring, the environmental classic, attacked the engineers of big interventions as hopelessly out of touch crude thinkers, who tried to reduce complex social and biological issues and processes to simple science.  Intellectually and culturally, environmentalists came out of the same movement as critics of crude urban development like Jane Jacob (The Death and Life of Great American Cities).  They celebrated the diverse local, small-scale adaptations that reflected the knowledge of communities as opposed to the grandiose plans of the social engineers.

Essentially, the core environmentalist argument against big projects and big development is the same argument that libertarians use against economic regulations and state planning.  The ‘economic ecology’ of a healthy free market system is so complex, libertarians argue, that bureaucratic interventions, however well intentioned and however thoroughly supported by peer reviewed science of various kinds, will produce unintended consequences — and in any case the interventions and regulations are too crude and too simple to provide an adequate substitute for the marvelously complex economic order that develops from free competition.  Environmentalists turned this logic against Big Science projects like dams and more generally built a case that humanity should work to have a light footprint in the world.  Natural systems are so complicated, so interlinked in non-obvious ways, that any human intervention in nature has unanticipated costs.  The less we intervene, the better.

Those arguments developed legs in the 1960s and 1970s.  The previous generations had been in love with big projects: Woodie Guthrie even wrote a famous folksong about the Grand Coulee Dam, hailing the power of grand engineering projects to tame the ‘wild and wasted’ Columbia River, and celebrating the mines and the factories that the dam’s power made possible.  Mid-twentieth-century America was intoxicated with social and environmental engineering of all kinds.  As the costs of those projects became more clear, and as a generation that had never known, say, what life had been like in rural Alabama before the Tennessee Valley Authority, focused on the drawbacks rather than the advantages of big engineering projects, the public fell out of love with Big Science and Big Engineering.  The technocratic imagination that people like McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses and Walt Rostow brought to American life in a range of disciplines and endeavors lost its hold on the public mind.

Experts lost their mystique.  The guys in the white coats were no longer deemed all-knowing and all-wise.  A better educated and more skeptical public opinion was no longer prepared to defer to technocrats, experts and government bureaucrats who said they knew best.  The experts said nuclear power was safe; environmentalists doubted it.  The experts said genetically modified food was safe; environmentalists thought that was hooey.  The experts said bovine growth hormone and pesticides posed no dangers; environmentalists thought that was stark raving bonkers and built the organic food industry in opposition.

An increasingly skeptical public started to notice that ‘experts’ weren’t angels descending immaculately from heaven bearing infallible revelations from God.  They were fallible human beings with mortgages to pay and funds to raise.  They disagreed with one another and they colluded with their friends and supporters like everyone else. They often produced research that agreed with the views of those who funded their work (tobacco companies, builders of nuclear power plants, NGOs and foundations).

More, on issues the public follows closely, the scientific consensus keeps changing.  Margarine was introduced as the healthy alternative to butter; now experts tell us that the transfats in many types of margarine are the worst things you can eat.  Should you eat no fat or the right fat?  All carbs, no carbs or good carbs? How much vitamin E should you take?  How much sun should you get?  How much fish oil should you swallow?  How should you divide your time between aerobic and non-aerobic exercise?  On these and many other subjects, expert opinion keeps changing.  Perhaps the current consensus will last; quite possibly, it won’t — but the experts can’t tell you what will happen.

The rise of the environmental movement reflected the increasing independence of thought and judgment of a public that was becoming less and less impressed with credentials and degrees.  The public wanted to take power back from experts and appointed government agencies and put up new obstacles in the way of technocratic engineers with big projects in mind.

But when it comes to global warming, the shoe is on the other foot.  Now it is suddenly the environmentalists — who’ve often spent lifetimes raging against experts and scientists who debunk organic food and insist that GMOs and nuclear power plants are safe — who are the pious advocates of science and experts.  Suddenly, it’s a sin to question the wisdom of the Scientific Consensus.  Scientists are, after all, experts; their work is peer-reviewed and we uneducated rubes must sit back and shut up when the experts tell us what’s right.

More, environmentalists have found a big and simple fix for all that ails us: a global carbon cap.  One big problem, one big fix.  It is not just wrong to doubt that a fix is needed, it is wrong to doubt that the Chosen Fix will work.  Never mind that the leading green political strategy (to stop global warming by a treaty that gains unanimous consent among 190 plus countries and is then ratified by 67 votes in a Senate that rejected Kyoto 95-0) is and always has been so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane.  The experts decree; we rubes are not to think but to honor and obey.

The environmental movement has turned into the Army Corps of Engineers, even as public skepticism of experts has reached new heights.  The financial experts and economists told us the new financial markets were perfectly safe.  Then the Obama administration’s expert economists told us the stimulus would work and that unemployment wouldn’t get above 8%.  They told him and he told us the recovery was underway.  “Recovery summer,” anyone?

Expert, prizewinning Democratic economists now tell us that without more Keynesian stimulus the economy is doomed.  Expert, prizewinning Republican economists tell us that more Keynesian stimulus will ruin us all.

The mining experts said that deep water drilling was OK.  Then the environmental experts said that the oil in the Gulf was an immeasurable disaster that would drag on for years.  The clean up experts then used dispersant that, other experts now tell us, may have worse consequences than the original oil.  Then experts warned us that huge plumes of underwater oil were drifting murderously through the Gulf.  The last I looked the experts were now saying that a previously undiscovered microbe had been eating the oil.  The only thing that the public is sure about at this point is that the experts are likely to be surprised and confounded several more times before this whole ghastly fiasco plays out.

The score so far:  Complexity and unexpected consequences 1000, experts zip.  Public skepticism in ‘experts’ is off the charts.

When it comes to climate change, the environmental movement has gotten itself on the wrong side of doubt. It has become the voice of the establishment, of the tenured, of the technocrats.  It proposes big economic and social interventions and denies that unintended consequences and new information could vitiate the power of its recommendations.  It knows what is good for us, and its knowledge is backed up by the awesome power and majesty of the peer-review process. The political, cultural, business and scientific establishments stand firmly behind global warming today — just as they once stood firmly behind Robert Moses, urban renewal, and big dams.

They tell us it’s a sin to question the consensus, the sign of bad moral character to doubt.

Bambi, look in the mirror.  You will see Godzilla looking back.

The news from Pakistan remains dire.  The flood waters now sweeping toward the Arabian Gulf have been far more devastating and the destruction more widespread than anyone predicted.  They have cruelly exposed many of Pakistan’s glaring weaknesses: its corrupt feudal elite, its corrupt and ineffective bureaucracy, its lack of infrastructure, its weak civil society, and the presence (unsurprising given the decades long failures of the country’s public and private institutions to do their job) of radical religious extremism and terrorism emerging from the rage and despair of a people betrayed by its leaders.

The long term outlook is not good.  Pakistan has failed yet again to educate a rising generation of children and the population is rising faster than the country can find jobs.  While the IPCC may have overstated the problem of glacier melt, long term trends point to a decline in the flow of the rivers on which Pakistan depends.  The growing power gap between Pakistan and India (the world’s two most hostile nuclear powers) is likely to destabilize the geopolitical environment for some time to come.  The slow but inexorable decay of the Pakistani state, the rise of separatism in some parts of the country, and a depressingly long list of other problems greatly complicate the task of those in Pakistan and abroad who would like to help.

Flooding in Punjab Province, Pakistan (UN).

Beset by so many problems from so many different sources, Pakistanis struggle to make sense of their country and the world.  Conspiracy theories are rife; the raucous and rambunctious media (especially the Urdu media) is better at expressing anger than analysis.  A strong civil society is struggling to emerge, but the enormous internal disparities in wealth and education make it hard for strong and effective groups to emerge.  Like idealistic 19th century Russian aristocrats and students, the educated idealists who direct many Pakistani social movements are so distant from the world of the poor that their efforts, commendable and well intentioned as they may be, are often irrelevant to the problems of the masses.

A recent example shows how this works.  While I was in Pakistan, there was massive press coverage of “Diplomagate.” Pakistani law requires that members of parliament must have college degrees.  It turns out that dozens of legislators had fake degrees, and the Good Government crowd raised holy hands in horror.  It wasn’t just that the fake graduates were what in the American South we used to call ‘pig-ignorant,’ though some of them were.  It was that they had perjured themselves to take their seats.  There was a mass hue and cry to detect the fakers, expel them from parliament, and even to recover the salaries and expenses they were paid under false pretenses.

OK and fair enough, but a law that requires MPs to have university degrees doesn’t make much sense in a country where half the population can’t read at all and most adults have less than four years of school.  And Americans can’t help but reflect that neither George Washington, Benjamin Franklin nor Abraham Lincoln could have taken a seat in the Pakistani legislature.  More, a political class that prioritizes this law while tolerating the state’s decades long failure to build a strong national primary school system and the persistence of much graver illegalities like the existence of up to a million bonded workers (slaves, many children, many brutalized and abused) clearly has its head screwed on wrong.  The efforts of the educated, professional minority to limit the access of the great unwashed to positions of power and prestige is fought at every level of the Pakistani economy.  Licenses, credentials, certificates, degrees: useful and necessary as all these can be, in the context of Pakistan’s gross and immoral educational inequality they are instruments of discrimination and privilege.  The educated elites mobilize rapidly and effectively against abuses that threaten their privilege; it is harder to get traction for causes that would benefit the masses.

Worse, the leading Pakistani political parties are sinkholes of political corruption, dominated by wealthy (or soon to be wealthy) leaders and cliques.  Modern Pakistani history is in part the story of incompetent and corrupt civilian governments (like the current one) driving the country so crazy through failure and corruption that the nation is practically begging the military to step in and clean up the mess.  Then, inevitably, when the military doesn’t govern well and the corruption and repression of military rule grow unbearable, the nation demands the return of the rotten politicians.  Hailed as heroes, the politicians return — and immediate initiate another cycle of failure and rejection.

Pakistanis are very good at explaining how all this is America’s fault; unfortunately they aren’t very good at breaking the cycle of state failure.

None of this means that Pakistan is doomed — and there are a lot of good things happening there.  But given the immense scope of the country’s problems and the limits on the ability of Pakistani civil society to address the country’s deep fault lines, it is useless to expect a rapid turnaround.  For some time to come, Pakistan seems likely to continue to experience difficult times, religious and political violence, and economic under-performance.  The unhappiness of various groups in Pakistan with this situation will express itself in turmoil of various kinds.  The country is unlikely to succumb to the kind of religious hysteria that installed Khomeini in Iran, but it will experience continuing violence at the hands of radical groups.  Various forms of political ideology based on the idea that a ‘pure’ Islamic revival could rebuild society — some quite benign and even positive, some fanatical and violent — will, in the absence of other ideological possibilities, continue to spread even among the countries scientists and military officers.

The question many Americans have is a natural one at this point.  Pakistan is going to hell in a hand basket.  Should America care — and if we do care, is there anything useful that we can actually do?

The first question is the easiest to answer.  Given Pakistan’s geographical position on the borders of Afghanistan and Iran, the country’s nuclear program, the long and deep connection between elements of the state and terror groups, the United States has no choice. What happens in this country matters to us.  The costs of helping Pakistan get on its feet are significantly less than the costs of living with its continued and ultimately catastrophic decline.  There are moral and humanitarian reasons why we should care as well: more than 170  million people created by God live in this country, half of them illiterate, some of them living in actual slavery and most of them poor.  Unless we want to align ourselves with Cain (“Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asked God after murdering his brother Abel), we need to take heed.

Skeptics argue that while the moral problem will remain, there are changes in American policy that could diminish the strategic relevance of Pakistan to American foreign policy.  Disengaging from Afghanistan and finding a modus vivendi with Iran would reduce America’s exposure to Pakistan’s problems.  Maybe the US should worry more about that, and less about propping up Pakistan.

Unfortunately, it is easier to imagine these policies than to put them in place.  Wanting to exit from Afghanistan and wanting to end the confrontation with Iran doesn’t get you very far.  Unless the Taliban and the mullahs are willing to help (and so far, they aren’t) we are going to have to keep toughing it out for a while.  Additionally, the India-Pakistan conflict cannot be ignored given its impact on wider US interests in the Middle East and Asia — and the Pakistani establishment is very good at brinkmanship, manufacturing crisis as a way of forcing US attention and aid.

I have heard some American thinkers express, quietly and privately, the view that maybe we should do what many Pakistanis already fear we are doing: fully and frankly turn to India as a substitute for Pakistan as our regional partner in central Asia including Afghanistan.  India, say these thinkers, is more sincerely attached to the chief US goal of preventing this part of the world serving as a terrorist base and Pakistan is in any case a hopeless basket case.  Many Afghans hate and distrust the Pakistanis — widely blamed for supporting the Taliban and generally suspected of interfering and seeking to dominate.  Working around Pakistan by engaging with India, China and Russia (and, hopefully, ultimately Iran) in the region is a better long term strategic choice.

I don’t think we are ready to work around and even work against Pakistan, partly again because it is easier to imagine a diplomatic shift like this than to develop a set of workable policies that could bring it about in a reasonably effective and beneficial way, and partly because the danger of an isolated Pakistan going rogue should not be ignored.  Pakistan may not have a lot of ability to make our world a better place, but it has a significant party pooping power that we need to respect.  Nuclear program, terror links, geopolitically sensitive location: it’s a bad mix, but it’s real.

For all these reasons we need to care about Pakistan’s success — but we should not let the Pakistanis think they have a blank check.  Whatever the consequences, we cannot underwrite Pakistan’s failure forever.  Continuing Pakistani weakness and progressive state failure could change the American calculation — and Pakistanis need to know that.  Indeed, part of any serious plan for helping Pakistan involves getting the Pakistani establishment, civil and military, to understand just how much trouble they are in and how urgently the country needs change.  Americans shouldn’t threaten and browbeat Pakistan, but Pakistanis do need to understand that failure has to stop sometime, and that if Pakistan won’t or can’t move decisively to improve its situation, even its best friends can’t help it.

Realistically, Americans cannot care more about Pakistan than Pakistanis do.  If Pakistanis are hellbent on seeing the country go downhill, we can’t stop the slide.  If the military elite is committed to a doomed strategy against India that progressively impoverishes the country and distorts its development, we can argue the case with them, but we cannot force them to change their minds — and we cannot spare them the consequences of the inevitable failure.  If the country’s educated classes are more interested in looting the state, exploiting the poor and maintaining the stranglehold of rural elites than in developing the country and building its future, we cannot change their minds — and we cannot protect them from the domestic and international consequences of their suicidal choice.

Emotionally, many Pakistanis will be enraged by this line of thinking, pointing out (with some justice) that past and current US policy in the region has greatly complicated Pakistan’s life.  The social upheaval and economic consequences of the Afghan wars present and past, the invasion of Iraq and many other US policies large and small have significantly worsened the economic and political situation in Pakistan.  This may be true, but the responsibility for Pakistan’s future still lies in Pakistan’s court.  If Pakistan comes up with a serious and realistic strategy for national recovery and development, the United States can and should help.  If it doesn’t, nothing the United States can do will stop the rot — and Pakistan’s diplomatic position and geopolitical interests cannot be indefinitely insulated from the consequences of domestic decline.

Most US thinkers continue to believe, correctly in my view, that America’s vital interests are best served by the emergence of a stable, prosperous and secure Pakistan and that even as we pursue shorter term goals in Afghanistan and in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the best way to stabilize the region and secure our interests involves a long term focus on the health and stability of the Pakistani state.  But the United States must avoid getting trapped in a dysfunctional and enabling relationship with Pakistan’s elites.  If a strategically myopic military and a rent-addicted economic elite are truly determined to lock the country into its current destructive and unsustainable course, the US will have to consider alternative ways to safeguard its regional interests.

For the present emergency, the United States should unleash the full power of humanitarian aid without regard to the long term issues.  It is the right thing to do, and it is the best way to create favorable conditions for the kind of serious, no holds barred strategic discussions that the US and Pakistan need.

Going forward, the United States will have to find ways to make clear that Pakistanis will determine the future course of our relations.  We should work seriously and contribute generously towards a far-reaching program of national renewal and change; we should not lift a finger for a failing status quo.

In a couple of future posts I’ll offer some suggestions about how the US can most usefully work to help Pakistan toward a workable national strategy and what kind of diplomacy and aid might make sense.  Pakistan presents the United States with some of the most urgent and most intractable policy problems we face anywhere in the world.  Helping Pakistan find its feet and move toward sustainable economic and social development would help stabilize a vital region, strike a massive blow against violent religious extremism, reduce the global danger of nuclear war and improve tens of millions of lives.

These goals are worth working for.  But success won’t be easy and at the end of the day we can’t control the outcome.  On my last visit to Pakistan I found myself often thinking about the old joke: how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one, but the light bulb must want to change.

Rajendra Pachauri, the formerly outspoken head of the IPCC, was yanked firmly off the global stage last January after his blustering and insulting attacks on well-founded criticisms of exaggerations and false predictions in the UN’s high profile climate report turned him into an embarrassing liability to the global environmental movement.  “Voodoo science,” he said dismissively of Indian critics of the IPCC’s ludicrously overstated and ultimately discredited claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 35 years.  After months of non-stop grandstanding and counter-productive public appearances, someone seems to have hooked him offstage; for now, Dr. Pachauri has vanished down a rabbit hole, though he may pop up again on August 30, when the UN assessment of the IPCC report will be released.

But if we do not have him, we still have his work to comfort us during the long and lonely hours.  True, his remarkable novel Return to Almora has unaccountably failed so far to find a US printer, but thanks to Amazon a trickle of copies is available for those who simply can’t do without him.  Count me among that number; I’ve read every word of this fascinating book, trying to learn about the man that the global environment movement placed at the forefront of the science of climate change.

Rajendra Pachauri, receiving another award (Internews).

Return to Almora is something of an extended Bildungsroman: a fictionalized autobiography in which the main character goes from extreme youth to full maturity — in this case, until his early sixties.  We see our hero Sanjay Nath as an infant in his parents’ arms, at school and at play, suffering as the British imperialists punish his father for his courageous patriotic defiance, enduring the pangs of first love, recalling memories of his previous incarnation in Almora, winning honors and prestigious job offers, overcoming boyish sexual misadventures to become a smoother adult operator, opening a successful chain of meditation centers across the United States, accepting the salutes of holy men and saints who spontaneously and miraculously step forward to acknowledge his spiritual grandeur, and doing his best not to hurt the feelings of the many talented and beautiful women who keep throwing themselves at his feet.  In the end, Sanjay finds happiness and fulfillment.  As gurus and holy men prostrate themselves before him and acknowledge his awesome spiritual achievements in the Himalayan caves, Sanjay reaches a new level of insight.  It is not enough to teach the world to meditate: he has a new truth to reveal — that it is also important to help the unfortunate.  He determines to do this; he will help the simple people of the hills.  The closing pages of the novel see him contemplating new tours of the international lecture circuit where he can share this insight and his experiences of helping the poor (when he gets around to having them) with the many, many people who need the wisdom that only he can bring.

It is hard to evaluate this novel.  Pachauri, who claims to have dashed the book off while flying from one international meeting to the next, is not without talent; this reader at least found himself compulsively turning the pages.  The dialog is often clunky and obtuse; the plot frequently loses all sense of direction, wandering pointlessly across unvarying terrain; descriptions are casual and brusque.  Yet the story moves.  Readers wonder which of the many women candidates will land the hypnotically attractive but elusive Sanjay — and how long they will keep him before his spiritual quest sends him off again, the Lone Ranger of Love.

One doesn’t quite get what women see in him.  Sanjay is a narcissistic ninny and fop who is the most embarrassing when he is the most sincere.  No new age cliche can be too silly for him, no piece of parapsychological quackery too ludicrous for him to embrace.  (At one point, a mysterious holy man with a great deal of funding has graduate students wear special tin hats through which they are put into contact with the ‘divine’.  This is all very scientific, the narrator reassures us; the subjects report on a scale of one to ten how close to the deity they feel and the resulting data is averaged and calculated using the best available statistical methods.  This data allows the holy man to determine that, just as the ancient Hindu sages taught, the earth has specially holy places where the electro-magnetic waves emanating from the divine are felt more strongly than at others.  The mountains of Peru, the Arctic and of course the sacred mountains of India are places where the Force is particularly strong.)  In a brief walk on role in the novel, Shirley Maclaine explains about the mountains of Peru and immediately recognizes Sanjay as a kindred spirit and fellow Great Soul.

The intellectual vapidity and narcissistic self satisfaction of the book is unsurpassable.  Politics, science, religion: characters spout the most shopworn cliches in the apparent belief that they are uttering profound truths. After Sanjay writes an angry letter to the editor denouncing Ronald Reagan for reasons that will sound silly to the reader but are evidently convincing to the narrator, Senator Chuck Sommers, the junior senator from Pennsylvania begs Sanjay to be accepted as a student of meditation — and speaks to him about the importance of enlightened political action. To quote Pachauri’s own scintillating prose and sparkling dialog:

“Sandy, you must work for larger causes in which you believe,” Chuck Sommers said, putting his arm around Sanjay’s shoulder.  “I greatly admire what you are doing to bring peace to so many human souls.  But we must also bring peace on earth.  There is too much strife around us, and too little compassion.  Political leaders use people and events for their own narrow purposes, putting a spin of superficial nobility and righteousness on everything.  We have to raise our voices against this evil.”

Sharp, focused, useful: that is our Sanjay’s political approach.  As for the politics of Shirley MacLaine, here is how Pachauri describes them:

“Shirley talked about the rally in which she had come to take part.  She had decided, along with a few other committed people to protest US foreign policy and to demonstrate in favor of pro-choice legislation.  She would handle General Zia and Pakistan, a bit later on, after she had mobilised support from other quarters.”

That is pretty much the level of ‘intellectual’ conversation in the book.  No one really struggles with ideas; no one grapples with logic or evidence.  No piece of platitudinous claptrap is ever contested, and no religious doctrine or precept ever seriously interferes with anyone’s desire to do as they please.  In Return to Almora, at least, the truth is what ‘we’ think, and we recognize it not because we sift evidence and chop logic.  We perceive the truth because of who we are; some people just happen to know what is right and, fortunately, we just happen to be that kind of people.  Whether it is the impending doom of the glaciers (whose disappearance is a recurring minor theme), the errors of American Republicans (another theme), or the superiority of Hinduism to all other religious traditions (the dominant underlying message, expressed with extraordinary naivete that is almost but not quite endearing), we are guided by the inner light rather than anything so vulgar as logical disputation.

A family friendly website like this one is not the proper place to describe Pachauri’s portrait of Sanjay’s sex life.  It is not a pretty picture; parts of the book read like the Memoirs of a Disgusting Old Goat — by the kind of Old Goat that doesn’t understand the concept of too much information.

The difficulty in reading Return to Almora isn’t rendering judgment on a vacuous ninny like Sanjay.  The libraries of world literature are rich, but there are few main characters as vain, as blind, as ludicrous and as lacking in self-awareness as Pachauri’s protagonist.  The question is whether Pachauri understands what a fool he’s created: is Pachauri in on the joke or is he part of the joke?  Is he mercilessly and cleverly exposing the absurdities and obsessions of a certain type of unreflective smoothie, or is he naively celebrating that success because he himself is so vain, so blind and so caught up in fame that he is as clueless as Sanjay?

The narrative voice gives us no clue.  The narrator uncritically reports Sanjay’s self assessments and observations as fact; the authorial voice neither challenges nor reflects on Sanjay’s swollen ego and narcissistic obsession.  If Pachauri is in on the joke, this is a truly masterful satire — viciously mocking the spiritual pretentiousness of shallow Hindu practice, the intellectual weakness of India’s aspiring upper middle class and the callous disregard for family and friends of the opportunistic male striver.  Perhaps Rajendra Pachauri is an unacknowledged literary genius: the Jonathan Swift of modern India.

Or maybe as the Times of India theorized in its review, Pachauri has just written a cynical potboiler.  Perhaps Pachauri recognizes the folly and stupidity of the world’s Sanjays, but he believes that a lot of Indian readers share some of these ideas.  He wants to sell books, not challenge world views, and so he’s decided to pander rather than to teach.  He wouldn’t be the first intellectual who decided there’s more money in backing popular illusions than fighting them.

The most troubling possibility, however, is that Pachauri doesn’t criticize or undercut Sanjay in the novel because he doesn’t recognize Sanjay for what he is.  Some reviewers have spoken of Sanjay as an idealized version of Pachauri: this is Rajendra Pachauri as he would like to be and Rajendra Pachauri’s Sanjay is his portrait of a hero.

This is a truly chilling thought — that the global environmental movement might have accepted someone whose ideas and culture are this vapid and banal into its leadership.  Putting on a tin hat and telling a guru on a one-to-ten scale how close to the divine you feel is, literally, voodoo science and neither Sanjay nor the narrator seem to grasp the difference between tinfoil hats and the real thing.  Greens should be deeply, deeply grateful that Pachauri’s novel has stayed off the shelves in the US.

The complete silence surrounding this important publishing event (how many celebrity Nobel prize winners publish racy sex novels?) in the US is all the more surprising because the novel was a big deal in India.  The sudden disappearance of Dr. Pachauri from global media and the iron curtain of silence that fell in the west over this truly appalling book may be welcome signs that the global environmental leadership is belatedly beginning to acquire some elementary caution and good sense.

The lack of any intellectual rigor or evidence of rational thought in this book is remarkable.  Sanjay doesn’t think, really; he swims.  When persons of good credentials and backgrounds appear, he accepts their ideas into his worldview.  Criticism and rigorous thinking are just not in his repertoire.  When famous gurus fall at his feet, when glamorous women kneel by the door of his bedroom, Sanjay doesn’t ask many questions — other than, in the case of the women, asking whether this particular one needs him so badly that it is worth suspending his normal vow of chastity.  Sanjay’s views on Himalayan glacier melt are very much like his views on reincarnation and tinfoil hats: intuition tells him that it must be so.

Fundamentally, Sanjay is a person who intuits rather than thinks.  Whatever ideas are accepted and popular around him are the raw materials with which he builds his own worldview and, more importantly, his career.  He is a fixer, a negotiator, adept at finding his path through the accepted ideas and powerful institutions of his time.  Intellectually, spiritually and romantically, Sanjay is a playboy: he’s a lover not a fighter whose goal is to find a comfortable place for himself in the world rather than stage some kind of lonely, adversarial struggle for truth.  Not that he won’t sometimes pose as a lonely individualist — it’s a good way to get dates.

Although it remains unclear whether Pachauri is the Sinclair Lewis or the Babbit of this story, the satirist or the unintentional and unknowing butt, Return to Almora is a vicious and deflating portrait of international civil society and the Great and the Good.  Vapid and unthinkingly fashionable intellectuals and activists drift in and out of international conferences and fancy hotels, propelled on gassy clouds of consensus, chattering like the characters in Cole Porter’s “Well, Did You Evah.”  Professors, business people and officials swirl pointlessly around one another, feeling good about themselves while getting little or nothing done.  There is a great deal of compassion for the poor, but nobody breaks a nail.

Lucky for him, Sanjay never encounters any serious criticism in this book.  No one accuses him of scientific fraud, no one seriously disagrees with his ‘research’, no one takes him to task over the fee structures of his Meditation Huts (or whatever he calls his 400 plus franchised enlightenment outlets).  It seems likely that if controversy ever came Sanjay’s way he would respond badly.  First he’d try lofty, above it all condescension; when that failed to stifle opponents he’d result to angry and unthinking vituperation.  In neither case would he show much talent for detailed, evidence-based argument.  At the end, he would vanish from the scene, looking and sounding hurt, and go off to seek inner peace among the forgiving silence of the Himalayan hills. There, where the Force is strong, he would heal.  The gurus and saddhus would throw themselves at his feet; women would batter down his door; memories of his past incarnations would distract him from unpleasant events; from time to time he would consider ways to help the poor and spread the light.

Let us hope that Rajendra Pachauri’s new and quieter life suits him well.  It is unlikely that the world’s environmentalists will ever again ask him to play a conspicuous part in their affairs.

As for the novel-writing, I’d suggest that he not quit his day job–the Peace Prize he shares with Al Gore is probably all the Norwegian love that Pachauri can expect.

I’m glad I read Return to Almora, but unless the book is the diabolically clever product of a satirical mastermind it will, I very much hope, be the last piece of Pachauri’s fiction that I’ll ever see.  Reading one novel like this could happen to anybody; reading two of them begins to look careless.

On my recent lecture tour in Pakistan, I was lucky enough to spend some time in Karachi with Dr. Elizabeth Colton, a 65-year-old ex-journalist who has made her second career in the State Department working on public diplomacy for the United States.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve encountered Dr. Colton.  Over the last eight years I’ve run into her in some of the world’s most dangerous hotspots.  In Algeria during a particularly violent time, in Sudan, twice in Pakistan, and in Baghdad back when life there was even more dangerous than it is now, Dr. Colton has been working to win friends and make America’s case out in places where that is a difficult and dangerous thing to do.  I’d never met Liz before I made a State Department sponsored lecture tour in Algeria where she managed things brilliantly.  Since then I’ve come to see her as one of America’s most effective and brilliant (if often unconventional) diplomats and developed tremendous respect for who she is and what she does.

Elizabeth Colton, dedicated foreign service officer.

She does an incredible job, using contacts and connections she built during a lifetime in journalism to bring people into contact with the US who normally wouldn’t have anything to do with us.  I’ve seen her work doggedly through the resistance of stiff anti-American bureaucrats to get American diplomats and speakers onto university campuses for free-wheeling debates in places where free speech isn’t normally allowed.  I’ve seen her build circles of loyal friends in countries where too many American diplomats never get outside the security bubble.  She’s responsible for reaching out to hundreds of journalists and students and persuading them to apply for programs that bring them to the US to see us for themselves — and to take those perceptions back home.

Colton is not your typical foreign service officer.  In fact she’s a lousy bureaucrat who sometimes has a hard time working within the State Department system.  Entering the foreign service as late as she did, she’s had less seniority than colleagues half her age — but it hasn’t fazed her.  She’s taken some of the most dangerous and challenging assignments the government has: in Riyadh, Khartoum, Islamabad, Baghdad and Karachi.  She had a long career in journalism before joining the State Department’s public diplomacy program late in life.  Her doctorate comes from the London School of Economics; she was an Emmy Award winning producer at ABC News, she’s been Newsweek’s Cairo bureau chief, the Washington diplomatic correspondent for NPR, and covered Desert Storm for NBC radio.  She’s edited a group of ten local newspapers in Virginia and covered the Middle East for ABC radio.  Her Karachi connections run particularly deep; she’s known the Bhutto family from her time in London when she helped the newly exiled Bhuttos following the military coup that deposed, arrested and ultimately hanged Benazir Bhutto’s father.  Given that the Bhutto’s party is now running the country (to the extent that anyone is), her connections, her journalistic skills and her deep knowledge of some of the key figures in Pakistani politics make her an invaluable public servant in a critical time in one of the world’s most important and troubled countries.

There’s more.  Given the dangers and hardships of many diplomatic posts these days, some of the most crucial hotspots in the world are staffed by State Department officers on one-year tours.  This makes sense from a human resources point of view: diplomats in countries like Pakistan, Iraq and many other places are threatened by the bad guys and their families cannot come with them.  To ask foreign service officers to leave spouses and children for two and three years at a time is too much.

But for US diplomacy, it’s bad news.  It means that our diplomatic presence in the most volatile and dangerous countries is much weaker than it should be.  The embassy staff is always in transition as one-year veterans ship out and newbies step in.  Add vacation schedules to that, and you have a recipe for steady chaos — in just those places where the United States most urgently needs people with intimate knowledge of local conditions and plenty of hands on experience.  While it’s easy to understand why the State Department runs things this way, there’s no getting around the fact that our diplomatic presence is often the least effective where it’s most needed.

Dr. Colton is an exception to this rule.  She not only volunteers for the most dangerous assignments in the hardest cases; she’s willing to extend her tours and serve double and triple terms in places where diplomats face constant, unremitting danger from well organized and well funded terror groups.

And so, naturally, the State Department bureaucracy wants to put her out to pasture — and to do it in the most inefficient and expensive way possible.

There’s a mandatory retirement age for State Department foreign service officers of 65.  It’s a hangover from the time when arbitrary retirement ages were common in the American economy; it may well be unconstitutional age discrimination.  The policy only applies to career officials; political appointees (who usually hold the most powerful and best paid State Department jobs) are exempt.  Exceptions to this shortsighted and inane policy can be made on a case by case basis, but the State Department, possibly because Dr. Colton has challenged the law in court, is refusing to extend her time in Karachi.  (You can read about the story in this NPR account.  There are more details and some additional references in this blogpost from Diplopundit.)  The Near Eastern bureau has asked for Colton to be assigned to the Cairo embassy for a three year tour, but for obscure bureaucratic reasons the State Department is limiting the extension to one year.

Yes, friends.  We have an experienced, savvy and dedicated diplomat in Karachi, Pakistan, the intellectual and media capital of the country on the front line of whatever this global conflict that we’re fighting is called who was willing to stay a second year in a post that most diplomats leave after one.  And what does the State Department want to do?  Take her out of Karachi where she’s built an extraordinary network and send her nonsensically on an artificially shortened one year assignment to Cairo (Diplopundit suspects the goal is to avoid trouble for the State Department from the judge hearing the age discrimination case).  Dr. Colton will go to Cairo, I’m sure, and do a good job for the year that she’s there — but it’s a waste of human potential that the State Department can ill afford.  If the State Department really hungers and thirsts to take this uniquely qualified diplomat out of Karachi at a critical time, it should at least send her to Egypt on a three year tour that would let her get something done.

Nobody has more respect for America’s diplomats and our State Department than I do.  Over the last fifteen years I’ve visited US embassies all over the world and spent time with the remarkable people who represent this country in good times and bad, often at the daily risk of their lives.

But treating Dr. Colton in this thoughtless and cavalier way is insane.  We do not have a surplus of well-connected, seasoned public diplomats who are as Colton was, ready, willing and able to spend years building relationships in the world’s most dangerous places.  When we find people like this, we should honor and treasure them, not dump them when they pass an arbitrary age limit.

I can see some sense in an age limit.  Older diplomats acquire a lot of seniority giving them advantages in bidding for posts, and human nature being what it is, I suspect that a good many boomer diplomats would like to go on pushing cookies and swanning around stately capital cities as long as they physically can.  But that’s not what Colton wants: she wants to stay in a grim hardship post where her life is at risk every day.  When officers are willing to remain in hardship posts for a second and third year, and when they are clearly willing and able to do the job, the State Department should routinely let them stay on.  The advantage of having greater continuity and experience in difficult places is immense.

The Colton case points to some broader problems with State Department personnel policies.  The State Department is a fiendishly difficult place to manage well.  The Washington bureaucracy is large and is organized like other bureaucratic agencies.  But the embassies overseas are much smaller, and the environments in which they operate are very different.  Developing ways to manage hundreds of posts (embassies, consulates and representative offices working with international organizations) is hard — especially when many of the key officials in the system are political appointees who come and go without ever really understanding the institution in which they’ve been placed.

To make matters worse, the State Department’s personnel policies by and large reflect the realities of an earlier era: the rigid State Department system struggles with two career families and with people like Liz Colton who change careers.  The shift in America’s diplomatic focus away from Europe towards sometimes more challenging Asian, African and Middle Eastern environments — not to mention the wars, security threats and strains associated with the War That Must Not Be Named — will ultimately have to transform the way the United States recruits, trains and manages its diplomats.  The bureaucracy is going to have to get better at attracting talent from outside the system and develop much more flexible management methods.  That would be tough in any case; since Congress takes a direct hand in State Department oversight, and writes many of its personnel policies into law, this is going to be hard and its going to take time.

But in the meantime, if Dr. Colton wanted a second or even a third year in Karachi — they should have let her stay there.  We need more patriots like her making long-term commitments to hardship posts.  That the Near Eastern bureau wants her in Cairo is a tribute to their judgment; she is looking forward to the assignment, and I’ve spent enough time in Egypt to know we can use her there.  But that we have procedures that automatically rotate people out of critical assignments for which they are ideally suited is not a good thing.  The system is broken and it needs to be fixed.

The Obama administration promised to give us ‘smart diplomacy’.  Smart diplomats would keep Dr. Colton on a job she does brilliantly, especially when times are as critical as they are.

Readers who agree can do three things.

First, you can send an email to Dr. Colton thanking her for her service and telling her that the folks back home appreciate and honor Americans willing to put their lives on the line to represent our country abroad.  You can reach her at lizcolton@yahoo.com.  Wish her a happy birthday and let her know she’s not alone.

Second, you tell the State Department what you think.  You can send an email to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking her to make sure Dr. Colton gets a three year tour in Cairo and that procedures are changed to make it easier for people like her to extend on hardship posts past 65; make yourself heard on the State Department’s Twitter and Facebook page.  Let them know that American diplomats willing to stay on past retirement age in hardship posts deserve the country’s thanks and support — and if you think the retirement age should be the same for career officers as for political appointees, tell them that also.

Third, you can contact your elected senators and congresspeople to ask them to take an interest in this case.  The State Department cares what Congress thinks.  Senators and representatives care what you think — especially in the run up to elections.

It now seems inevitable that Dr. Colton will be ending her tour in Karachi on August 31, the end of the month in which she celebrated her 65th birthday.  That will be a slap in the face to a real American hero, and a totally unnecessary blow to America’s front line diplomatic presence.  But she’s going to do a great job in Cairo and, hopefully, the State Department will relent and allow her to stay long enough to learn the job and do it with her customary enthusiasm and skill.

I’ll keep you posted.

The unremitting spate of bad news from Pakistan continues; rains are still drenching the highlands and the devastation continues to spread down the river valleys.  This year’s harvest has been ruined; increasingly, it seems unlikely that farmers will be able to plant fall crops.  While visiting Pakistan earlier this month, I posted on the roots of Pakistan’s rage, doing my best to explain why so many Pakistanis are so angry with the United States.  That is one side of the story; but equally mysterious to many people and especially in Pakistan is another side of the equation: why so many American policy makers and opinion leaders are fed up with Pakistan.

Listening to Pakistanis, I hear several theories about why the US (and the west more generally) are suspicious or unsupportive of Pakistan.  Many of these have to do with religion: that Americans and their western associates dislike and fear Islam, and therefore dislike and fear Pakistan. Worse, some Pakistanis fear that America’s leaders see themselves engaged in a contest with resurgent Islam, and their policy toward Pakistan represents an attempt to keep the west on top and to suppress Islam as a global force.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates talks with Pakistani President Asif ali Zardari in Islamabad, Pakistan (DOD).

That’s not the way most American policy makers and opinion leaders understand the relationship.  The American foreign policy elite is not particularly religious or interested in religion by and large; it assesses countries on a more pragmatic basis: how well are they doing, and how do their policies and prospects affect American interests.  And the problem is that most of the American foreign policy world thinks that Pakistan is doing a bad job, and that its mistakes, failures and vulnerabilities not only threaten its own interests and well being, but threaten to drag down the whole region as well.

Many of the Pakistanis I’ve met think this is horribly unfair; they argue, for example, that without the US abandonment of Afghanistan after 1989 and its strategically shortsighted policies there since 2001, Pakistan would be much better off.  Perhaps, but even Pakistanis who think the United States is entirely to blame for everything wrong in South Asia would do well to understand the relationship as Americans see it.  It always helps to understand the other side’s point of view.

There is no single, monolithic American view of Pakistan anymore than there is a single Pakistani view of the United States, but in general American observers have a pretty bleak view of the predominant trends among Pakistani elites.  Large numbers of influential Americans believe that Pakistan’s leadership (military as well as civilian) is dragging the country down.  American observers tend to believe that while there are many outstanding military officers and civilian business and intellectual leaders, as a whole the Pakistani elite has failed to understand the country’s situation, failed to respond in a sensible and strategic way to the challenges around it — and that its continuing failures have reached a point where the Pakistani ruling elite is a danger to itself and to everybody in its reach.  For different reasons, both the political and the military leaders of Pakistan seem to American eyes to be hellbent on a ruinous course that is wrecking the country, destabilizing the neighborhood, and stoking the fires of radicalism and terror in ways that endanger Pakistanis most of all but also create serious dangers for people all over the world.

Americans are divided over whether the military or the civilian leadership of Pakistan has done the worst job, but most think that both wings of the establishment have contributed substantially to the country’s distress.  The military has systematically sacrificed the country’s development to a hopeless and losing struggle against India that blocks the country’s economic and social development and leaves Pakistan weaker, less stable and further behind its giant neighbor every year.  Civilian elites are dominated by viciously unprincipled feudal landlords and corrupt dynasties who would rather exploit the population than develop the country.  The two wings of the elite create an interlocking deadlock; civilian politicians won’t take on the military’s suicidally blind strategic fixations and the military won’t push through the kind of modernization (serious land reform, education of the peasants, reform of a rent seeking and corrupt bureaucracy) that could break the dark grip of the landlords and give the country some hope.  Each wing of the elite would rather collaborate in the country’s destruction by indulging the worst tendencies of the other than take the risks (and exercise the self restraint) that could set the country on a better path.

The military’s fixation on India is not just about focusing on conventional war on the Indian frontier at the expense of counterinsurgency operations in the northwest.  It is a much bigger and much more destructive problem.  Ever since the Partition of British India left a smaller, divided Pakistan facing a larger (and, frankly, a sometimes hostile and aggressive) neighbor, the Pakistani military has defined its mission and the nation’s identity by the need to hold up its end of the military contest.  Realizing from the beginning that the smaller Pakistani economy could not support a strong enough military for the task, the Pakistani military turned to outside powers and especially the United States for help.  Pakistan took the American side in the Cold War while ostensibly ‘non-aligned’ India tilted toward the USSR.  Pakistan hoped that US aid would allow it to maintain the unequal contest; this is often the reason Pakistanis today give for Pakistan’s staunch support of the US during the 1950s and 1960s.

The strategy failed then and it is failing now.  US aid has helped build Pakistan’s formidable military and given it top notch equipment, but the costs of Pakistan’s military buildup remained crippling — and over the years India has consistently pulled further ahead.  Today the contest is more unequal than ever.  India is emerging as a global power; Pakistan looks more and more like a basket case. East Pakistan was ‘lost’ a generation ago and is now the independent state of Bangladesh; what was once the western half of Pakistan is simply not in India’s league and the social and political cohesion of what remains weakens every year.  Currently, Pakistan ranks 8th in the world in military expenditure as a percentage of total government spending (23%); India spends a lower percentage of both GDP and government expenditure on the military than Pakistan.

The costs of that failed strategy have been high.  While country after country in Asia embarked on export-oriented development strategies that have brought new affluence and influence to places ranging from South Korea to Malaysia and Vietnam, Pakistan remains mired in old fashioned underdevelopment.  Power flickered on and off across the country even before the recent floods; illiteracy and poverty levels remain at shocking levels.  Even in military terms this has its consequences; Pakistan’s failure to grow and develop fast enough means that the country is less and less able to support the kind of military that the soldiers think it needs.

But there is more.  The iron necessity of competition with India as perceived by the Pakistani military led to three additional fateful choices.  First, the nuclear program: once India proceeded with its bomb (and perhaps even if it didn’t), Pakistani military authorities had to get their own.  To be smaller in population and economy, weaker in conventional power and also to be a non-nuclear state confronting a nuclear power was radically unacceptable.  The military felt the bomb was a necessity, no matter what it cost, no matter what deals with what devils were required.

And more: a smaller power in conventional terms looks to forms of asymmetrical warfare to offset its enemy’s advantage.  For Pakistan, this meant that cultivating relationships with groups willing to use violence in Kashmir and against India more generally became a perceived necessity of state.  Pakistan might be smaller, weaker and poorer than India, but it was not without offsetting advantages.  The discontent of so many Kashmiris under India rule and the presence of both religious and political resistance movements gave Pakistan opportunities too good to resist.  The partnership of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment with unconventional, non-state violent movements began to take shape.

Finally, the need to compete with India drove Pakistan into far-reaching policies in Afghanistan.  There are many reasons why Pakistan was interested in influencing events across the Durand Line (the British-drawn line that separates Pakistan and Afghanistan on maps, but which neither the local tribes nor the Afghan government has ever recognized), but the need for ‘strategic depth’ against India and the need to combat Indian influence in Afghanistan have shaped Pakistan’s Afghan policy for decades.  Pakistan made more deals with more devils, collaborating in the obscenity of Taliban rule for the sake of maintaining Pakistani influence.

The net effect of these strategies has been costly.  Pakistan’s combination of illicit nuclear activities, terrorist links and collusion with the Taliban set it directly in opposition to core American interests — even as India’s rising power made Pakistan more dependent than ever on the US.  Since 9/11 Pakistan has been impaled on a dilemma of its own construction: torn between supporting and opposing American policy on proliferation, terrorism and Afghanistan.  Meanwhile, unresolved questions about Pakistan’s nuclear program, combined with US support for India, have led to the worst possible nuclear outcome for Pakistan: India now enjoys full access to advanced nuclear technology and materials while Pakistan’s access remains blocked.  Nuclear weapons were supposed to be Pakistan’s equalizer in the contest with India; increasingly, they look like just another crucial area in which India is gaining the advantage.

Worse, Pakistan’s support of terror groups in India (including Kashmir) has provoked, Pakistanis fear, increased Indian support for the long-festering separatist movement in Balochistan.  Ethnic Punjabis now live in fear there; the Pakistani flag and other national symbols can no longer be displayed in much of the province, and public opposition to rule from Islamabad seems to be growing.  Significant voices in Sindh and Kyhber-Pakhtunkwa (formerly known as the Northwest Frontier Province) are less than enthusiastic about Pakistan, often seen by non-Punjabis as a front for Punjabi ethnic domination.

Many Pakistanis with military links and strong nationalist credentials are looking for alternatives to the US alliance, but the alternatives aren’t attractive.  The three most significant alternative partners for Pakistan (China, Saudi Arabia and Iran) don’t add up.  China does not seem willing to complicate its relations with both India and the United States by building the kind of strategic partnership with Pakistan that could replace the US alliance.  The Saudis (widely believed to have supported the Pakistani nuclear program in order to have a ‘Sunni bomb,’ and to be major sources of funds for Pakistani politicians and the economy) would also prefer that Pakistan not detach itself entirely from the US, and would bitterly oppose a Pakistani alignment with archrival Iran.  Iran is too small a power, too encumbered with its own economic and political problems to be of much help to Pakistan, and it is unlikely that Iran wants to add India to its already long enemies list.

But if the military has been backing Pakistan into a strategic dead end, the country’s civilian leadership has been deeply destructive in its own way.  Almost everyone in Pakistan I met denounced the ‘feudals’, the landlord families who keep much of the country landless, illiterate and poor.  Since independence the feudals have blocked real land reform of the kind that kicked off economic development in places like South Korea and Taiwan.  Pakistan’s systematic educational failure is an overwhelming national disgrace.  A few statistics tell the story:  55% of primary school age girls are not in school; the average Pakistani adult has 3.9 years of schooling; at 1.8% of GDP, Pakistan ranks 127 out of 132 countries worldwide in educational expenditure (spending 4.1% of GDP, India ranks 82nd); there are only 5 years of compulsory education — and many children get less; less than half the total population can meet a minimal literacy test (compared to 59% in India).  Newspaper accounts in the Pakistani press while I was in country reported that only about one third of school-age children in Karachi were in class.  Other Islamic countries like Malaysia, Turkey and Iran do much, much better.

To most informed American observers, this is a country committing national suicide and these statistics show an elite concerned to pillage and loot rather than to teach and to serve.  Americans look at this astonishing situation as a failure of political and social culture so profound, so immense, that it is hard to see how anybody or anything can help unless Pakistan can summon up the will to make some wrenching changes.

But the damage of weak and corrupt civil leadership goes deeper.  It is hard to find a country whose political class is more widely despised at home and abroad.  President Zadari’s farcical European tour during the current floods, the prime minister’s stop at a bogus refugee camp, the infamous corruption associated with virtually every political leader and party in the country: I did not meet a single Pakistani journalist, businessperson, professor or civil society worker who had any respect for the political class.  Officials in other countries with access to classified information often know deeply damning and even humiliating facts about the financial shenanigans of Pakistan’s political class: even Saudis roll their eyes at Pakistani corruption. Many Pakistanis asked me why the US didn’t give more economic aid to the country; when I asked them whether additional aid would get to the people or go into Swiss bank accounts, there was general agreement that the chief beneficiary of more aid would be the Swiss banking system — unless the US insists on the type of strict controls that the Pakistani bureaucracy traditionally fights tooth and nail.

The corruption at the top extends throughout the state and into civil society.  Business often depends on government for licenses or special treatment.  Tax collection is laughably inefficient and compliance with poorly-drafted and poorly-enforced tax laws makes countries like Greece and Italy look sober and puritanical.  Politics and connections affect the ability of NGO groups to raise money and take a toll on the integrity of universities and other institutions.

This is the view of Pakistani politics and government that seems most widespread among Americans who deal with Pakistan on a regular basis.  It is qualified by the strongly positive relationship that many Americans have for particular Pakistanis with whom they deal.  Both the American military and diplomatic establishments have people who admire and trust the particular Pakistanis with whom they interact.  (And I can personally testify on the basis of my limited contacts to the high intellectual and personal qualities of many Pakistani diplomats, current and retired service personnel and civil servants.)  But overall, American political and opinion leaders think that Pakistan’s leaders have made a series of strategic errors that leave the country dangerously vulnerable to continued decline.  Many Americans accept Pakistani criticisms that American policy mistakes have made things worse, but by and large Americans are convinced that Pakistan’s most crippling problems are homemade.

Like many of the Americans who work closely with Pakistan, I see some positive features as well.  The Pakistani media has become much freer and more lively in recent years.  Incompetent and corrupt politicians can be savagely ridiculed in the press (though the military seemed largely exempt from harsh criticism on my last trip).  A recent study by Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency suggests that parts of the national security state are beginning to rethink basic elements of Pakistan’s strategy:  the report states that the biggest threats to Pakistan’s security now come from internal terrorists rather than India.  If the country proceeds with a serious rethink along these lines, much could change.

More to the point, while Pakistan’s political institutions are deeply dysfunctional, the country continues to produce amazing people who are doing their best to set things right.  Over and over again I was impressed by the intelligence and dedication of teachers, journalists and students who want to make Pakistan work.  That dedication has only been deepened by the gradual awakening of the country’s elite to the threat that religious radicalism and terror pose. The longing I witnessed among people of all socio-economic levels for honest and competent government was extraordinary.

Yet as the floods continue to thunder through this unhappy country and troubles at home and abroad continue to mount, it is hard not to worry.  There are Americans who are ready to write Pakistan off, and to work around the country rather than trying to work with it.  But that is still a minority view.  For both humanitarian and political reasons, American foreign policy is unwilling to cast Pakistan adrift.  The patience, though not infinite, has not yet been exhausted.

The next few years are likely to be critical both for Pakistan’s development overall and for its relationship with the United States.  Before ending my spate of Pakistan posts, I’ll conclude with some thoughts on what, given the frayed relations, bad history and urgent political and humanitarian problems before us, we can and should do.

Some thanks are in order.

First and foremost, thanks to Walter for letting me do this. It’s been a treat to get to post here for the past two weeks. If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t get more posts done. These regrets are, of course, senseless. As Christopher Hitchens once put it, there is no “wanting to write.” You either do or you don’t—everything else is besides the point.

And to be honest, it’s not like I haven’t been writing—I have the stubs of two posts on Afghanistan in progress. It’s just that they aren’t ready for airing quite yet. And that’s the thing about Via Meadia. On most any other blog, I would have been tempted to link to an article or a post somewhere out there on the Internet, sketch out a response in one or two paragraphs, and move on. But that’s not what I’m looking for when I come here as a reader, and I suspect it’s not what you all are looking for either. Walter sets an incredibly high standard, and it’s been very challenging and rewarding coming up with stuff which, though far from Mead-like, I wouldn’t cringe at while re-reading.

Thankfully, these scribbles of mine are not stillborn. I’ll be regularly writing at The American Interest‘s editorial blog, Cont’d. from now on, so you’ll be able to read them there when I’ve finished polishing them. Which leads me to the second set of thanks: to you, the readers of Via Meadia. I’ve benefitted very much from your thoughtful comments and helpful links. Usually blogs suffer from a cripplingly low signal-to-noise ratio in the comments, but such is not the case here (thus far). I hope to continue the conversation with you at the new location. Here’s a link to the RSS feed if you feel like subscribing.

I’ll leave you with a pregnant passage from Rory Stewart’s excellent book on walking across Afghanistan, The Places In Between. Its lesson is all too easily forgotten by those who irresponsibly hope to transform that ancient land at the cost of the lives of our young men and women.

“Why did you become a Mujahid?” I asked Seyyed Umar.

“Because the Russian government stopped my women from wearing head scarves and confiscated my donkeys.”

“And why did you fight the Taliban?”

“Because they forced my women to wear burquas, not head scarves, and stole my donkeys.”

For days I have been planning a series of posts on the subject of “BDS,” the anti-Israel boycott/divestment/sanctions “movement.”  BDS’s aims include a cultural and academic boycott against Israel, which makes it relatively unique in the history of these types of movements.  After figuring out what I wanted to say, and sitting down to start writing, I was struck with the fear that by drawing attention to BDS I would increase its notoriety and inadvertently draw additional followers to the cause.  So instead of writing a long take-down of BDS, which I may well do another time, I decided to go meta- and write about writing about BDS, although this approach still increases the notoriety of BDS. Nuts.

BDS has been very slowly gaining traction in the media without gaining actual traction on the ground.  Jacob Weisberg recently wrote an essay on the topic in Newsweek.  The title provides a nice summary of the content, “Don’t Boycott Israel: The Very Idea is Repellent.”  Like many articles opposing BDS he focuses on the uniqueness of the cultural and academic boycotts of Israel, and points out that this approach alienates the very people most sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.  He does not discuss the impossibility of an effective BDS movement, which is a topic I plan to write about in the future (and touch on below).

Contrary to all forms of logic, the BDS crowd contends that Weisberg’s essay is proof that BDS is working (a step beyond “any press is good press” logic, which does not necessarily imply that a movement is effective yet).  If you do a simple Google search of “Weisberg” and “BDS” you will find quite a few links to posts that make this argument.  I am sure that some people will say the same about this post.  (As a side note, if you Google “BDS” the anti-Israel movement is only one of the top ten hits.)

BDS has had so few triumphs that every extremely minor victory is blown up as “proof” that the movement is gaining steam.  I suspect that this phenomenon is the natural psychological coping mechanism of people who have devoted themselves to an ineffective, offensive, and hopeless cause.  This movement is planned on computers that run Intel chips (often designed in Israel, and a large employer in Israel) via e-mails that are sent through Cisco Systems routers (also often designed in Israel, and a large employer in Israel) by individuals using Microsoft Office (partially designed in Microsoft Israel’s Research and Development Center).

The cancellation of an Elvis Costello concert, scheduled after the Gaza War, will not cause Israel to withdraw from Gaza (Oh. Wait. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2006).  The Costello household itself was not even unanimous in its boycott of Israel–  Diana Krall, Costello’s wife, performed in Israel on 4 August.  Naïve musicians and other artists being convinced of the “error of their ways” by naïve college kids, professional activists, ex-hippies, and Pat Buchananites, does not a strong movement make.  The fact that an artist canceling a concert in Israel for political reasons is rare enough to make the headlines is not a sign of growing support for BDS.

There are no major organizations or universities in the United States that have agreed to the B, the D, or the S of Israel.  Some have debated the issue, but anything is debatable if someone debates it—it does not mean that the matter was taken seriously. The BDSers continue to make a fuss about Hampshire College “divesting” from Israel, long after the school itself issued a statement, in the form of a public letter to Alan Dershowitz, saying, “No other college or university should use Hampshire as a precedent for divesting from Israel, since Hampshire has refused to divest from Israel.” Here we see a non-success trumpeted as a great success. The matter has been debated in the English university system for years, but votes on boycotts have repeatedly failed.

So an article or incident that is in favor of BDS is proof that BDS is gaining steam; and an article or incident against BDS proves that it is gaining steam so quickly that the writer or publication is nervous about it.  A victory is a victory and a loss is a victory.  If the writer calls it anti-Semitic then that is an even greater victory as the writer is “resorting to ad hominem attacks.”

If I do write a long post or series of posts I will be handing a victory to the BDS movement.  If, in that post, I write about the anti-Semitism that creeps into the BDS movement then I have handed out a huge victory.  But if I am scared into not writing about BDS for fear I will be helping the BDS crazies, then that is certainly a victory for BDS.  If I write about writing about BDS, I still haven’t avoided handing a victory to my opponents on this issue.  So I must apologize to supporters of Israel for handing yet another victory to this small, inconsequential, but very loud movement.

Postscript #1:  The blog “Divest This!” is an excellent source of information about this topic; and Rob Harris recently posted an interesting three-part article titled “The Music World Goes Anti-Israel” to FrontPage Magazine.

Postscript #2:  My great thanks to Professor Walter Russell Mead for giving me the opportunity to post to his blog.  I also thank the readers of this great blog for putting up with me in his absence; as you all know by now, I am no WRM!!!

After two weeks in Pakistan and a week’s vacation I am hoping to return tomorrow to the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens.  A bit sunburned and blistered from some tough scuba duty here in the Cayman Islands, I expect to resume regular posts on Via Meadia this week.  Many thanks to Professor Cristol and Damir Marusic for keeping the place lively while I’ve been away and if the rumor mill is correct we have at least one more Cristol piece to look forward to.

Another week at the beach wouldn’t have hurt, but it’s time to come home.  The next three weeks are going to be busy ones at the Mead manor.  I’ve got classes to prepare for the fall semester at Bard and Yale, a book manuscript due in December to dust off and think through, capsule reviews are due at Foreign Affairs and there’s a whole slew of activities at The American Interest Online to plan.  It won’t all be work.  There’s a reunion planned for the researchers I worked with over the years at the Council on Foreign Relations, my parents are celebrating their 59th wedding anniversary, and it looks as if I’ll have a couple of weekends in the country with friends.

I’m coming back to Via Meadia refreshed and renewed.  There’s still more to say about Pakistan, the green agenda on climate change continues to unravel, there are some surprising and even hopeful developments in Israel, I’ve read IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri’s dreadful novel cover to cover and am ready to review it, the major American political movement of the twentieth century is on its deathbed, and I have a few thoughts about the relationship between Islam and the west that I’d like to sketch out.

For now, it’s time to go out and meet the dive boat.  The summer break is ending, but there are still a few hours to go and there’s one more chance to catch a spectacular tropical sunset over the gin clear sea.

I am nearing the end of a week’s rest and recuperation at an undisclosed location in the Cayman Islands, but Pakistan’s Summer from Hell is still going strong.

Things were tough enough during my stay.  On my way in from the airport in Karachi, traffic was unusually light.  Roving gangs of armed thugs were roaming through the city, pillaging gas stations.  The police force was laughably overwhelmed; the only gas stations that stayed open had battalions of private security.  Meanwhile, up to 100 people died there in violence between the organized gangs of criminals known in that unhappy city as political parties, schools and businesses are closed in fear, and tens of thousands of families already living at the margins of existence are losing their daily wages until peace returns. One night during my visit a vicious goon threw a hand grenade into a group of worshipers performing their evening prayers in a Karachi mosque; nothing in this city is sacred anymore.

In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known as the Northwest Frontier Province, and currently on the front line of the COFKATGWOT (the currently nameless Conflict Formerly Known As The Global War On Terror) assassins  killed the son of a prominent official and Safwat Ghayyur, the Commandant of the Frontier Constabulary.  Three million people became homeless in the early stages of the flood; since then monsoon rains continue to inundate the highlands, and successive flood crests is move inexorably down river, spreading devastation through the Punjab and overspreading the country’s most valuable and productive agricultural land across both Punjab and Sindh.

The economy is unraveling.  During my stay in Karachi, the country’s commercial center, banks were unable to process payments because their staff, fearful of violence and facing the total collapse of the transit system, could not get to work.  Paychecks aren’t being cut and millions of workers have not gotten their July paychecks.  That is nothing new for the country’s journalists.  Many media companies have, I am told, been caught in a cash squeeze as a result of heavy tax assessments and have fallen weeks or even months behind on their payroll.  The floods disrupted transport across the country; worse, they are wiping out crops in the rich, low lying bottom land next to the rivers.  Fruit and vegetable shortages will be showing up soon, driving up prices and worsening an inflationary spiral that has already forced the central bank to raise rates — and led the government to raise controlled prices on goods like sugar.  Cotton production is likely to fall by up to 20% even as warehoused stocks of cotton and wheat were destroyed by the floods; a lot of Pakistanis will be going hungry in coming months. Not the best time for a budget cut, but with tax revenue falling as the disasters unwind, the government is planning major cuts in development and social spending.

Meanwhile, foreign investors, reading about the succession of horrors, are staying away in droves.  Floods, Taliban, some of the most appalling corruption anywhere in the world, anarchy and chaos in the streets: who needs it?  There are plenty of safer places to put your money.

It is hard to exaggerate the eye-popping incompetence displayed by some government officials and politicians in the face of these disasters.  The country’s president ran off to the UK where a lavish party was planned for his son: first things first, after all.  And as I was preparing to leave the country a newspaper story in the Tribune reported that a Pakistani trade delegation has just returned empty handed from a mission to Moscow.  The designated head of the delegation for some reason wasn’t cleared for the trip; the delegation then dissolved into vain and petty disputes over who should be in charge.  (Dysfunctional and petty posturing over minor points of precedence is a mainstay of Pakistani politics.)  The Russians were insulted; no agreements were reached.  The delegation returned empty handed.  A journalist at a dinner told me that the ‘black box’ from the recent plane crash that killed 152 people near Islamabad failed to leave the country on schedule because a member of the air safety authority insisted on accompanying the black box to Paris — and the official’s visa hadn’t come through yet.

The rot doesn’t just affect the high ranking officials.  A story in the Nation reports that police in a number of stations across Lahore have simply turned off the station telephone lines.  Too many calls from too many citizens asking for help; it was disturbing the well earned rest of the cops.  There are stories of “ghost schools” in rural areas: salaries are paid, but no teachers appear for work.

Pakistanis live with levels of incompetence, chicanery and fraud in government that would have Americans assembling in lynch mobs.  From the presidential palace to the cop on the beat, public servants routinely neglect and abuse their responsibilities in this country in ways that would be sensationally scandalous in any well developed, well functioning state.  The intolerable is the normal here, accepting the unacceptable a way of life.  There are wonderful people in this country: honest journalists, able and patriotic civil servants, idealistic reformers, committed educators, incorruptible officials civilian and military, brilliant novelists, daring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers.  But somehow the dough doesn’t rise.  Something, or several somethings, don’t seem to work.

Sit down with any number of Pakistanis and ask what’s wrong and you will be in for a fascinating, rich and informed discussion and debate about whose fault it is and where the wrong turnings were taken.  The military, the US, the British, Partition, the loss of Kashmir, the loss of Bangladesh, this prime minister, that prime minister, Islam, secularism, India, the Punjab, the Sindh: there are almost as many theories of Pakistan’s crises as there are symptoms.  Some come from the lunatic fringe: the American-Jewish plot to crush Pakistan precisely because it is the key to the global Islamic resurgence, for example.  Others come with thick forests of documentation, argued with passionate conviction by people who have invested lifetimes into developing a comprehensive theory of Pakistan.  Yet the reality seems more complex than any theory, and none of the theories I’ve heard offer much hope for quick change.

Two theories common among westerners don’t make sense to me: that Pakistanis suffer from too much nationalism and religion.  Too much chauvinism and bigotry, perhaps, but at least among the nation’s elites both genuine love of country and sincere religious faith seem in short supply.  A 21st century country that can’t be bothered to educate its own children and permits abuses like bonded labor on a mass scale can hardly be said to be nationalist in any meaningful sense; a culture where so many officials high and low operate with this level of corruption and neglect of the public good cannot be called religious.  In both cases there may be an obsession with the outer symbols of nationalism and religion (flags and beards), but the immense gap between aspiration and reality suggests that there is something hollow about the way too many (though certainly not all) Pakistani elites embrace these two value systems. A nationalist revival that saw elite Pakistanis making genuine sacrifices to educate the poor, assure equality before the law for all the country’s citizens, build up the national infrastructure and drive corrupt and incompetent officials and politicians from public life would be a very good thing.  So would the kind of religious revival that inspired public officials to refrain from taking bribes.

Pakistan is not the world’s only country where the best and the brightest spend long hours debating what when wrong and whose fault it was.  Egyptians, Argentines, Italians, Serbs: there are lots of countries out there where diagnosing the wrong turns in the road is a national hobby.  Different Pakistanis have different theories, and most of them involve the US, though in different ways.  Military types attack the US as an unfaithful ally and blame Pakistan’s steady loss of influence and power vis a vis archrival India as the consequence of American betrayals.  Some democrats in Pakistan blame the US for preferring military government to democratic rule.

It’s not all about us.  Some of the people I met with told me that the idea of Pakistan itself was a dreadful mistake: that it would have been smarter for the Muslims of British India to insist on constitutional guarantees for minority rights in an undivided India.  Outside the Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, many people resented the concept of Pakistan as a vehicle for Punjabi domination of the rest.  Others thought that the concept of Pakistan was fine, but that the idealistic vision of the nation’s founding father Ali Jinnah has been betrayed.

What Pakistan probably needs most is the one thing it won’t get: a vacation from history.  A front line state in the COFKATGWOT, in the Cold War, and in the Ind0-Pak confrontation going back to Partition, Pakistan could use a couple of decades of geopolitical irrelevance and obscurity to settle down comfortably in its own skin, develop its institutions and resolve basic questions about its identity.  This isn’t going to happen; the war in Afghanistan isn’t going to end quickly, India isn’t going away, and the shadow of the US-Iranian confrontation hangs over the region’s prospects.

Meanwhile on top of its geopolitical issues and its unresolved domestic questions, the country is now struggling with the worst floods in its history.  Millions of mostly illiterate people already on the verge of destitution are facing the loss of their homes, their farm animals and their only possessions.  This is a time when the United States needs to stand up and be counted on the side of Pakistan’s people.  Every dime of government and private aid, every helicopter rescue mission, every bundle of food, every piece of medical equipment and every dosage of lifesaving drugs conveys and important message about the kind of people we are and the kind of world we want to build.

George Kennan says in American Diplomacy that “the national state pattern is not, should not be, and cannot be, a fixed and static thing.”  Kennan believed that the general freezing of the map that persisted (excepting two major exogenous shocks) after World War II was not a good thing.  He argued that a body of laws should not set the standards for statehood.  Kennan said that despite their claims to the contrary, states would make their decisions to recognize new states, and almost all other decisions, based on national interest.

It is against the backdrop of an all too static map that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its advisory opinion on Kosovo’s 17 February 2008 declaration of independence.  The importance of this case is not found in the text of the decision, though I will discuss the decision shortly.  The importance is in how both de facto states and recognized states act on this decision.

The Peace Palace, seat of the International Court of Justice, in The Hague (UN).

In my view, this advisory opinion will not affect states’ policies toward Kosovo and will not affect Russo-American relations.  I believe that Russia will ultimately recognize Kosovo as part of an exchange for US recognition of one or both of the Russian-backed breakaway regions in Georgia.  Nevertheless, this decision is one of a very few recent cases on issues related to new statehood and thus, despite its narrow scope, it is of much interest to me and to the handful of other academics who have a specialty in diplomatic recognition.

The reason for its prima facie unimportance is due to the extremely narrow scope of the decision.  The reason why it could end up important anyway, is how it is interpreted by de facto states and existing states.   If it is interpreted as meaning that any declaration of independence is legal and that states should recognize other states that declare independence, it will not matter that the actual opinion says no such thing.  Alternatively, if the opinion is applied carefully, it will merit one or two sentences in the introduction of a relatively obscure academic’s dissertation.

It is inarguable that many states believed that the decision was important.  Thirty-six states provided first-round written statements to the ICJ, fourteen states provided follow up statements, and twenty-eight states argued before the court (excluding the representatives from Kosovo).  Many of these states have no clear stake in this particular region, and some do not even have active separatist movements to worry about. Those states that do have separatist movements fear that the decision will be interpreted as giving the go-ahead for breakaway regions or de facto states to declare independence.

The advisory opinion is quite clear and any broad interpretations would likely be deliberate, or out of ignorance.  The ICJ found that Kosovo’s 17 February 2008 declaration of independence did not violate international law.  That is all.  It does not say that all declarations of independence do not violate international law.  It does not set a precedent.  The ruling explicitly does not have any bearing on the question of recognition and/or statehood. It does not force Russia, Spain, or any other state to recognize Pristina (and not Belgrade, or the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)) as sovereign power in Kosovo.

The court reasoned that there was no applicable law explicitly barring a declaration of independence (as there is regarding Northern Cyprus, for example). It also found that the political process towards negotiating a final status for Kosovo, as is called for in United Nations Security Counsel Resolution 1244, had ended.  Finally, the court determined that the declaration was not made in a UN sponsored circumstance and so did not violate UNMIK’s mandate of neutrality.

The breakdown of the 10-4 decision by nationality of the judges is not surprising for followers of the often-partisan United States Supreme Court and/or world politics.  The four dissenters were judges from Russia, Morocco, Slovakia, and Sierra Leone.  Judge Mohamed Bennouna’s (Morocco) dissent posits four major distinct arguments and a handful of minor arguments.  Most egregiously, he argues that the court should not guarantee that a fait accompli would be validated.  However, historically, fait accomplis are often used as a basis for recognition of new states.  The dissent feels almost desperate, but then Morocco might have the most at stake in this decision.  The Russian judge took a more focused approach and thus mounted a more effective, if ultimately unconvincing, case against the opinion (all of the opinions can be downloaded here).

The court found that the context of a declaration of independence and who makes the declaration are key factors in the declaration’s legality.  The Kosovo case differs from other potential cases in one major and one less major way. Most importantly, Serbia lost its sovereignty over Kosovo as a result of the war crimes committed in that territory. There is a growing body of scholarly work, which the ICJ and International Criminal Court (ICC) are free to consider in opinions (the ICJ does in this case), that argues that states can lose their sovereignty over a territory if they have committed gross human rights violations.  The international community, through the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), prosecuted Serbian war criminals for their crimes.  There have not been any Georgians prosecuted for such crimes in South Ossetia or Abkhazia.  The political contexts are distinct.

The less important way that Kosovo is unique is that the international community, represented by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Kosovo, who had control of UNMIK and almost absolute power over Kosovo, governed the territory. It was not largely supported by one state (the record of Kosovo’s success in achieving recognition from other states vs. the breakaway Georgian territories’ success demonstrates this difference).  This situation makes Kosovo more comparable to East Timor, which fought against the Indonesian military and was granted autonomy and UN administration after Indonesian human rights violations against the East Timorese, than to the aforementioned territories.

Ultimately, however, the fact that the Georgian breakaway regions lack the legal legitimacy to secede does not mean that they will not be widely recognized.  The reality on the ground certainly plays a role, as do traditional great power politics.  That is why the fate of other de facto states and secessionist movements does not depend on this ICJ advisory opinion; it depends on cables, communiqués, cooperation, and negotiaton between the world’s major powers.

My thanks to Dr. Amanda Toronto for her valuable comments on a draft of this post.

Partition is in the air, it seems. Just as the ICJ was contemplating the legality of Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia, along came the detailed proposal for de facto partition of Afghanistan from Ambassador Robert Blackwill. Walter referenced the article in a previous post, and if you didn’t go and read it in its entirety the other day, you ought to click on over now and give it a once-over.

Astute readers will note that we’ve finally reached that point in the Afghanistan war—the point that was reached much earlier in Iraq. It was in 2004 that Ambassador Peter Galbraith fired a similar salvo in the ongoing debate on what to do with our ward state in the Middle East. And much like with the Galbraith plan, there’s a whiff of unreality to what Ambassador Blackwill is proposing.

It’s not that his argument blithely dismisses the human costs of what partition usually entails, as Ahmed Rashid suggested in the second half of an op-ed in this morning’s Financial Times. After all, Blackwill was U.S. Ambassador to India—a fractious land that is no stranger to sectarian strife both along its border and within. And in this capacity he was no doubt made very aware of the kind of repercussions partition produces. Indeed, Blackwill is explicit in excusing the inevitable human toll by appealing to a lack of vital U.S. national interests at stake in Afghanistan. Of course he’s right to do so, as this kind of incredibly costly war cannot be run indefinitely for purely humanitarian ends.

And it’s not that partition is always categorically the worst outcome in any situation, as some reflexively note as soon as the p-word is uttered. Despite the grisly costs in lives lost and ruined, partition was arguably the only way forward for India and Pakistan in the wake of Great Britain’s hasty departure from the subcontinent. Though countless thousands died, it’s easy to imagine many more perishing in an ensuing civil war had orderly partition not occurred, slapdash as it was. And the partition of Yugoslavia along the borders of its constituent ethnic republics, though bloody and painful, has led to an era of relative peace and reconciliation in the region. Even Bosnia’s de facto partition into autonomous ethnic para-states, though it bodes ill for its future integrity, has brought a certain level of stability to that patchwork nation.

No, the unreality kicks in towards the end of the article, where Ambassador Blackwill lists the supposedly surmountable challenges his plan faces. The following three passages stick out like sore thumbs:

Pakistan would likely oppose de facto partition. Managing Islamabad’s reaction would be no easy task — not least because the Pakistan military expects a strategic gain once the U.S. military withdraws from Afghanistan. …

… Fearing a return of Pakistan dominance in Afghanistan, India would likely encourage Washington to continue ground combat in the south for many years to come — and would have to be told that was not in the cards. …

… Putting together a coalition of like-minded nations to implement this strategy would be a daunting diplomatic challenge — not least with Tehran.

So the three nearby major powers with most at stake in Afghanistan do not want Afghanistan partitioned. And going by the first half of Ahmed Rashid’s op-ed, it would appear that there’s absolutely zero constituency among the Afghans themselves for such a solution. The idea is a non-starter, pure and simple. It’s not that American power is in decline. It’s that it’s difficult to imagine any Great Power ever being able to fundamentally reshape a local reality against the wishes of all of the regional players.

But it’s hard to blame Ambassador Blackwill for his mistake. The core assumption at the heart of his proposal—that we can shape the outcome in any meaningful way if only we use our power correctly—is the same core assumption you’ll find in almost all plans for Afghanistan. Rory Stewart’s caustic critique of these assumptions in Der Spiegel, now just over a month old, is more and more devastating with each passing day. Perhaps it’s something indelibly Western in our mindsets that forces us to see the world as a giant puzzle, with all its problems ultimately solvable. The danger is that this fallacy may lead us to reliably pick the wrong courses of action. Over and over and over again.

Sometime in the last 24 hours, Via Meadia passed an important milestone: the blog has had more than one million hits.

When I started to blog last fall, I had no idea whether these essays would find an audience.  I’ve been more than gratified by the response, and thanks to all the visitors, regular and occasional, who helped us get this far.

I’m particularly pleased that the site has had an international audience from the beginning.  About 85% of the hits come from the United States, the rest from all over the world.  Some of the usual suspects are well represented: we have flourishing groups of readers in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.  But there is a significant Via Meadia readership in much of the world — with even a few hardy souls checking in from Greenland.

One of the strongest features of the site that took us all by surprise has been the comments section.  Overall, we seem to be attracting comments from strong minded people of many different points of view who are generally committed to the idea of civil if sometimes sharp discourse.

We aim to keep it that way and will continue to edit comments for civility and, occasionally, rationality.  In particular, I’d like to remind readers that the audience for Via Meadia is international.  Readers in Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Iran and many other countries who may never encounter each other in person can meet here — and are all welcome.

In continuing to curate the comments, the team at The American Interest is going to be especially vigilant about ensuring that the conversation remains civil, understanding that the standards of civil discourse vary from region to region around the world.  On the topic of religion, it is especially important to remember that communicating across regional and cultural boundaries can be difficult.  I hope that the comments can continue to feature vibrant debate and serious discussion about the place of religion in the world and about the relations between the world’s religions.  But that kind of discussion is not as easy as it seems, and comments that seem appropriate in one setting create misunderstanding in another.

In any case, thanks to all those whose support has brought the site this far.  I hope we stay together for another million.

It’s been one disaster after another this week in Pakistan.  The WikiLeaks documents opened raw wounds in Pakistan’s agonizing relationship with the United States.  A plane crash on the outskirts of the capital of Islamabad killed 152 people.  UK Prime Minister David Cameron ostentatiously attacked Pakistan for exporting terror and ‘looking both ways’ in the fight against religious extremism as he visited New Delhi to promote British trade with India. And now the worst monsoon floods in a century are ripping through the country, with more than 1,100 known dead already, and possible casualties in isolated and cut off communities several times as high.  More rains are on the way as I write; rainclouds are sweeping in toward Islamabad across the Margalla Hills as the people downstream in Sind brace for swollen rivers to burst their banks.

Unusually, the United States has been a bit player in this latest deluge of disaster.  While some Pakistanis suspect official involvement in the WikiLeaks, nobody much blames the US for the plane crash, or for David Cameron, or for the monsoon.  But the longer I stay here, and the more people I meet, the more I understand that the gulf between Pakistani and American perceptions and priorities is deep.  For both sides, the alliance is vital, but for both sides the alliance right now isn’t working particularly well.  While American pundits and politicians express doubts over Pakistan’s loyalty and its longtime links to radical extremists, Pakistan is on the boil with conspiracy theories about sinister American plots and feelings about the US run the gamut from bewildered disappointment to burning rage.

I came to Pakistan already well versed in some of the standard American complaints about the alliance; being here has been one long crash course in Pakistan’s complaints about the US.  They aren’t, in my opinion, all well founded, but they are important and they deserve to be heard.  Over my next few posts, I’ll first lay out some of Pakistan’s concerns as I’ve come to understand them, then lay out American concerns about Pakistan — and then make some suggestions about what, given the tension between these two dissatisfied allies, we can do.

Pakistani Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani talks with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen during an aerial tour of Northern Pakistan in July 24, 2010.

For better or for worse, this is a basic part of my method in trying to understand what is going on in the world.  In countries like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Cuba in the 1990s, across the Arab and Islamic worlds in the last ten years and here in Pakistan now, I do my best to try to understand what it is that people object to in American foreign policy and, at times, American culture and life.  Before I arrive, especially on a first visit, I’ll read up on the history and on contemporary issues and try to get a sense of the economic situation.  On the basis of that reading I’ll come up with some working hypotheses about what is going on, or going wrong, in the relationship.  Once on the ground, I spend as much time as possible absorbing the local news media, interacting with journalists, officials, students, intellectuals and diplomats to test and refine my hypotheses. I keep at this until I find that more and more of the local people I meet with think that I ‘get it’, and it’s at that point that the conversations get really interesting.

In Islamabad, Pakistan’s purpose-built capital picturesquely sited at the foot of heavily wooded hills, I’ve been meeting with students and academics at Pakistan’s premier national university Quaid-i-Azam, journalists, analysts, and senior military officials — some with links to the ISI, the shadowy Pakistani intelligence agency cited in the WikiLeaks documents and other sources as the contact point between the Pakistani government and various extremist and violent groups.   I’ve visited think tanks like the South Asian Strategic Stability Institute (SASSI), had tea with retired cabinet officers, argued with Pakistani journalists and quizzed US diplomats to get their views on the most troubled international partnership in America’s alliance system.

I’ve still got more people to meet and more to learn, but at this point — about halfway through the trip — four big issues stand out among the problems that Pakistanis describe in the relationship.  It would take a whole book, and a lot more experience and knowledge than I have, to give a comprehensive picture of what Pakistanis think about the United States, and people have different ideas about how and why the US has done Pakistan wrong, but these four concerns come up over and over again.

India

First, the Pakistanis by and large do not trust American intentions toward India and this issue looms much, much larger here than in the United States.  Americans often do not realize just what a huge place India occupies in the Pakistani mind.  The two countries have fought five wars since Partition; in 1947, 1965, 1971, 1984 and 1999.  They have been to brink of war more often than that, and even today both countries have their forces on hair-trigger alert.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  The struggle between Hindus and Muslims across India is a thousand years old.  Muslim conquerors stormed down from today’s Iran and Afghanistan to build some of the world’s richest and most powerful empires.  Merchants, mystics and saints spread the faith across the subcontinent and across the sea routes into what are now Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.  A tolerant and complex civilization grew up across the subcontinent; Hindus and Muslims sometimes fought but often they lived together reasonably well and, as Muslims remember it, this was a happy and prosperous time.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan (Wikipedia)

The British conquest of India (at its height, British India included modern India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Burma) destroyed the Islamic empires.  Muslims (roughly 25% of the total population) lost the protection of powerful princes; the British sought to divide and rule the two communities, favoring now one and then then other.  As British power waned, many Muslims came to feel that the subcontinent sheltered two nations: one Hindu, one Muslim and that the differences between the two were so great that the Muslims needed their own state.  Under the leadership of the charismatic and talented Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Muslims insisted on and obtained the partition of British India into Hindu and Muslim states.  Pakistan (which originally included Bangladesh as well as what we now know as Pakistan) was the state for the Muslims.

The British often spoke sanctimoniously about their global responsibilities, but they left India in a hurry as the subcontinent descended into chaos.  Millions of Hindus and Muslims caught on the wrong side of the dividing line fled or were driven from their homes.  Something like 14.5 million refugees were created initially with ultimately about 25 million people moving from one country to the other; somewhere between 200,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed in vicious communal riots whose memory still poisons the region today.

In addition to dividing the country between Hindu and Muslim majority districts, the British also allowed the rulers of the “princely states” to choose whether to join India or Pakistan; Kashmir’s ruler opted for India under controversial circumstances as Pakistani forces sought to bring the Muslim-majority state into Pakistan.  India won the subsequent war, and continues to hold most of the old princely state.  The conflict in Kashmir remains bitter to this day; in recent weeks civil disturbances have broken out, resulting in shootings and curfews.

In subsequent years, life in both countries, but especially in Pakistan, was dominated by the consequences of Partition.  Settling refugees, periodic wars, the running sore of Kashmir: all keep the memories alive.  Almost everything in Pakistan’s history revolves around the unequal struggle with India — a struggle that became even more challenging after what is now Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan, with India’s help, in 1971.  Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program is seen here as a triumph against the odds, and the nuclear arsenal is seen as the country’s last-ditch ace in the hole (in much the same way Israelis see their deterrent).  Most Pakistanis are completely convinced that India is ceaselessly plotting Pakistan’s destruction and everything in Pakistani foreign policy boils down to a simple calculation about who is winning the zero-sum contest between these two states.

Since 1989 one of the biggest changes in American foreign policy has been the slow shift towards a strategic partnership with India.  From an American perspective, the rise of India towards superpower status is one of the best things happening in the world today.  The rise of India means that China’s rise is likely to be peaceful; sharing Asia with India and Japan means that China is that much less likely to try to dominate Asia in the way that Japan once did.  A peaceful China balanced by powerful neighbors is exactly what the United States hopes to see.

The burgeoning US-India relationship frightens and horrifies Pakistan.  Trade is booming; the Indian diaspora in the United States is becoming steadily more visible and influential.  The US takes India’s side in major controversies — blaming Pakistan for terrorism in Kashmir and India while doing nothing about India’s actions in Kashmir.  Worst of all, the US is helping India gain access to nuclear materials and nuclear technologies while continuing to block Pakistan’s attempts in the field.

The struggle with India is central, many Pakistanis feel, to Pakistan’s security and even to its existence.  The United States is systematically and increasingly siding with India.  What kind of an ally is this? Pakistan asks.   The United States is working to help India become a global power; what does this mean for Pakistan?

India is the first major issue driving the US and Pakistan apart; Americans should not underestimate its importance.  India is an all consuming obsession for many people here, and the presence of a larger, rapidly growing and richer neighbor just 18 miles from Lahore is something that many Pakistanis can never forget.  The perception that America is betraying its old and faithful Pakistani ally to benefit from India’s rise echoes and re-echoes through Pakistani culture and politics.  It unites the military and those in the religious community who hate and fear Hinduism even as it alienates many patriotic Pakistanis who have no religious ax to grind.

Afghanistan

The second major issue shaping negative Pakistani feelings about the United States is almost as important.  Pakistanis are on the front lines in the war on terror and Afghanistan is, literally, right on their doorstep.  Pakistanis have no confidence in America’s regional strategy and they are convinced that American blunders have created a multifaceted disaster that has already cost Pakistan dear.  Many Pakistanis believe that the US invasion of Afghanistan was a mistake in the first place; Mullah Omar offered to send Osama Bin Laden to stand trial in a third country, they say, and the US should have accepted that.  More, they argue that American policy from the beginning was a disaster.  We invaded in the wrong place at the wrong time; we refused to work with the people who could have helped us; we lost our focus on Afghanistan to turn toward Iraq (a war deeply hated by many Pakistanis).  Now, inevitably, the disaster in Afghanistan has spread across the border into Pakistan, with religious radicals and tribes in revolt turning their fury against Pakistani targets even as drone strikes in Pakistan infuriate many people.

The US, Pakistanis say, has given only derisory military aid — $1.5 billion versus the estimated $40 billion the war has cost Pakistan.  More, we are blaming the victim.  The spread of radical violence in Pakistan is the direct result, they say, of the American war and American blunders in Afghanistan, but all we do is blame Pakistan for the problem and, endlessly, repeat the cruel and unfeeling refrain: “Pakistan must do more.”  We even want them to dismantle their defenses against India (an enemy strengthened by America’s nuclear bias) to move forces to the Afghan frontier.

US attacks on Pakistan for ties to the Taliban and radical groups are, Pakistanis say, cynically hypocritical.  After all, the US and Pakistan worked together with many of these groups to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.  Is it perfectly OK to work with radical religious groups for American goals but a moral crime to use the same groups to protect Pakistan’s interests?

More, US threats against Iran threaten Pakistan’s economic interests and political stability — just as our failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute outrage Pakistani sensibilities and make our overall position in the region less stable.  Pakistanis darkly suspect that Indian money and Indian agents are responsible for violence in troubled parts of Pakistan and many believe that the US supports what Pakistanis believe are India’s efforts to build up its influence in northern Afghanistan.

Many Pakistanis believe that on top of everything else, the US is now getting ready either to cut and run in Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan with the thankless task of sweeping up, or, worse, handing northern Afghanistan to India, forcing Pakistan into a two front confrontation with its larger and richer rival.  Pakistan has no greater strategic nightmare than to see India entrenched in Afghanistan; many Pakistanis are completely convinced that this is what the end result of America’s Afghan policies will be.

America and Islam

The third problem is that many Pakistanis fear — and some are convinced — that Americans are anti-Muslim.  These fears are even more pointed here than in some countries because Pakistanis have an extra reason for suspicion: America’s reconciliation with Hindu India.  The relative silence in the US about the situation in Kashmir compared to American hyperventilation about other problems strikes many Pakistanis as further proof that Americans don’t care as much about human rights problems that Muslims experience.  More than 60,000 people have been killed in clashes between Indian security forces and Kashmiris in recent years; this is much worse than anything that has happened in Tibet.  Why, Pakistanis darkly wonder, do Hollywood stars fall all over themselves about poor Tibet, but Americans seem to glide right past the problems of Kashmir?  Is this part of a global struggle against Islam?  Many Pakistanis think so, and you will see newspaper cartoons that show Uncle Sam wearing a top hat with the Star of David and the flag of India on it.

Islam stands at the core of Pakistan’s identity.  Without Islam, there is no rationale for partition.  Unlike many Muslim countries that have an ethnic as well as a religious identity (Arab, Turkish, Malay and so on), Pakistan’s ethnic groups have only Islam to hold them together.  Take Islam away and there is no point to Pakistan.  American policies, like the reconciliation with India, that threaten Pakistan’s national interests feel and look anti-Islamic as well.  By the same token, American policies seen as hostile to Islam (support for Israel, the war in Iraq) are frequently felt in Pakistan as attacks on the nation as well.

Nationalism and religion are the two strongest forces in world politics today; in Pakistan they are uniquely woven together and American policies are seen as deeply hostile to both.

Unwelcome Influence

Fourth, Pakistanis think Americans make all the big decisions here and that Pakistan’s institutions, including the military, have to knuckle under to American pressure.  They sometimes talk about the “three As” that run Pakistan: Allah, the Army and America.  Pakistanis believe that America makes and unmakes governments here; if there is a military coup, it is because the Americans willed it.  If an elected government makes an unpopular decision, it is because of American pressure.  Unpopular economic policies reflect our neo-liberal economic agenda; unpopular security policies represent our relentless pressure on Pakistan.  Most Pakistanis seem convinced that the US prefers military to democratic governments in Pakistan, and that America’s alliance with Pakistan’s own corrupt civilian elites and unpopular military rulers is the main reason that these undesirable people have controlled the country for so long.

This is how many Pakistanis see the relationship and how the relationship is often described in the Pakistani press; for Americans, the first step in developing a better relationship with Pakistan is to see this picture whole and clear and realize that, accurate or not, this is the impression our policies create on a great many people in Pakistan.

In my next post, I’ll write about how the relationship looks from the American perspective.

I had not planned on writing another post here at Via Meadia so soon, but Abraham Foxman’s well-meaning but patently incorrect statement about the proposed Islamic Center in downtown Manhattan has me so worked up that I am compelled to share my views.

I have residences both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.  In the United Kingdom I have a German friend, perhaps my only German friend.  One day she asked if I might like to visit her in Germany some day and I hesitated before giving a vague “not really” sort of answer.  It told her that I thought I would be somewhat uncomfortable.  I know that I am not alone among Jews, or even among Allied veterans and their offspring in feeling somewhat uncomfortable around Germans.  I can imagine that seeing an Islamic Center so close to Ground Zero will provoke a similar unease in many American visitors to the site.

While none of these feelings are entirely rational, I know that my friend is not a Nazi and that I’d probably enjoy Berlin, I know I’d be quite uncomfortable there (and it would kill my parents).  The unease that many would feel at seeing an Islamic Center at Ground Zero is perfectly natural, but again– it is not rational.  It is not rational and, more importantly, it is our (those of us who feel this way) problem, not the institution’s or its future patrons.

The calls of so many on the Right (many of whom not only do not live in New York City, but do not consider it part of “real America”) to bar the construction of this building are only further evidence of ignorance and Islamophobia.  Ignorance not only about Islam, but also about New York City and how here, unlike in much of America, Mosques and large (non-Christian) religious cultural centers are not much of a big deal.

Regardless of what any of us feel about the construction of this building, in the United States we do not allow the government to make zoning decisions based on religion. As the New York Times reported, Mayor Bloomberg rightly said, “government has no place dictating where a house of worship is located.”  Not to mention the powerful message it sends to the Muslim world– that we can tolerate a mosque and Islamic Center in the shadow of no towers (to borrow Art Spiegelman’s phrase) because we do not have a problem with Islam.  Any problems we have are with particular interpretations of Islam and with Islamic terrorism.

I should add, however, that if the planners and funders of the Islamic Center are surprised by any of this controversy then they are shockingly naïve.  That they have the right to build there and that it actually suits American foreign policy goals does not mean that the choice of location does not contain a hint of provocation (imagine if Germany built its consulates in sight of Holocaust memorials).

It is totally understandable that some 9/11 families would oppose this building; but they do not have veto power over construction in one of the most heavily trafficked neighborhoods in America.  It is a local issue for the people of downtown Manhattan to address.  I am a great admirer of Dr. Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League, and I can forgive this lapse into the bigotry they fight so boldly against, I just hope it is an aberration and not a trend in the wrong direction.

I thank Anna Pycior for her comments on a draft of this post.