Pakistani film Josh’s Seattle screening.–Photo courtesy https://www.facebook.com/thefilmjosh

On March 5 in my home city of Seattle, I had the pleasure of being part of the first North American audience to view the fine debut feature by a talented and enterprising Pakistani filmmaker, Iram Parveen Bilal. Josh (English title: Against the Grain) is the story of Fatima, an elegant and well-bred elite Karachiite who involves herself in village society and politics – thereby endangering herself and others – when she insists on finding out why her beloved maid has gone missing. It’s a cross-cultural story but emphatically a domestic Pakistani one, with minimal reference to the world outside Pakistan. This is as it should be, though it renders Josh, like other serious Pakistani films, less accessible to Western viewers.

Americans are accustomed to seeing other countries, especially Pakistan, as refractions of our own national worries and self-regarding obsessions. That is our problem, not Pakistan’s, and Josh serves us well by declining to pander or spoon-feed. It is a very good film, well conceived and executed on a small budget, and the question in my mind as I left the cinema was whether and how it might be possible to shoehorn such a serious piece of Pakistani storytelling into the awareness of some measurable fraction of the millions who know Pakistan only through TV news and Hollywood movies such as Zero Dark Thirty. I was very nearly the only gora at the Seattle screening.

Fatima is a tender-hearted and perhaps naïve member of Karachi’s cosmopolitan elite. She wears sleeveless dresses; she socializes with fashionable young friends in trendy restaurants; her feckless artist boyfriend (not husband) wants to emigrate to America. She could have left well enough alone, but to do so would have been to abandon her servant to a cruel and undeserved fate. By going to the village and raising awkward questions, she not only leaves her own comfort zone but compels others to leave theirs as well. It’s dangerous, even potentially explosive stuff, as all good art is. It holds a mirror up to a flawed society and asks its own characters, and by extension its viewers, to try to become better versions of themselves.

This applies, certainly, to the habitually timid villagers in the film and their thuggish local landowner and his gundas. But by definition the Pakistani-American audience members in Seattle and other cities are counterparts of Fatima and her privileged urban friends, and the film addresses them primarily. How can we, who enjoy affluence and freedom of action, intervene in a rustic world of rough injustices that are usually inflicted offscreen? Should we intervene? If we do, how can we avoid inadvertently doing more harm than good? How might we be involved regardless, perhaps without realizing it? Because, make no mistake, we elite city dwellers are involved in the lives and deaths of the poor and vulnerable, whether we like it or not. If Fatima had chosen her own safety by averting her eyes, her involvement in her maid’s terrible fate would have been no less. Thus the choice she does make, to enlist her privilege and other resources in the service of justice, is the more courageous and better one, whatever the outcome.

The things Iram Parveen Bilal said during a post-screening discussion with the warmly appreciative Seattle audience suggest her awareness of the importance, as well as the further potential, of what she has achieved with Josh. Although she has an undergraduate degree in engineering, she said, “I felt that there are a lot of doctors and engineers in Pakistan, and there are not many storytellers. Everybody makes documentaries about Pakistan. I wanted my first feature-length film to be from Pakistan. We worked with a completely Pakistani cast and crew.” She singled out for praise another young Pakistani woman, Nausheen Dadabhoy, who did the film’s beautiful cinematography: “She was pretty awesome.”

About Fatima, Iram said: “She is ignorant. Everybody’s telling her, ‘Don’t go, don’t go.’ But in that ignorance is her strength. “No matter how dangerous things are, people who want to do things do them. Most of my positive role models have been very strong women; Pakistani women are very strong. It’s about whether you have a conscience or not. Rich or poor. Do you really care about what’s going on around you? I think Fatima is blessed to have that.”

JOSH is on its North American distribution tour currently prior to an announcement soon for its release in Pakistan. The film is set to hit screens in NYC, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Chicago, Calgary, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix and Atlanta. For latest updates, please join www.facebook.com/thefilmjosh.

ETHAN CASEY (www.ethancasey.com) is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004, to be reprinted next year in an updated 10th-anniversary edition).

I just finished taking a rather grueling but excellent university course in the history of the Mughal Empire. Fascinating questions haunt the late Mughal story after the death of the Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707: Did the empire decline, or did it rather decentralise? Does it matter which of those verbs we choose to use to describe what happened? And might modern South Asia have developed more or less peaceably – or at least with its indigenous integrity intact – into a cluster of regional kingdoms, if not for the impact of the British East India Company especially after 1757?

These rhetorical questions are not really so far afield from 21st-century America, believe it or not. The analogy is in the way both the ideology of an imperial state long in the habit of claiming hegemonic prerogatives, and the self-confidence of the empire’s domestic society, have become hollowed out, emptied of meaning and momentum, but not yet replaced by a new set of plausible stories. The best people living through such a situation can do is to make things up as they go along. That’s what happened in proto-post-Mughal South Asia in the 18th century, and something like that is happening in America today.

I’m not saying that America is about to break apart. What I am saying is that Americans are no longer paying respect to the institutions and collective habits that for many decades effectively (if not always honestly or benevolently) governed our national life. Nor are we listening to each other anymore. And if, amid the sound and fury of our domestic life, Americans are not listening to each other, you can be sure we’re not listening much to the outside world either. All too obviously this is a serious problem, especially when American soldiers urinate on dead Afghans or massacre women and children in their sleep.

Sunday, March 11 was one of those mornings when I woke up with the intention of minding my own business while enjoying my first cup of coffee, only to be walloped by the latest horrific news from Afghanistan. So I wrote an article very explicitly comparing the futile American war effort in Afghanistan with the war we spent a decade losing in Vietnam. I published the article on my own website, and it was excerpted on Dawn.com, but the version I want to draw your attention to is on the Huffington Post, the widely read liberal Web publication. My article was featured on the Huffington Post’s front page – one reader pointed out that, tellingly, it was the only article on the topic so featured – and it got an unusual number of reader comments. If you want to get a sense of what Americans are thinking and saying about Afghanistan and Pakistan in the wake of the massacre last Sunday outside Kandahar, I suggest reading those comments as fairly representative.

In the wake of the recent string of shocking American-instigated incidents in Afghanistan, the most disturbing thing to me here in America is not that some Americans approve of or excuse them, but that most Americans seem hardly to have noticed them. We make rueful jokes about how the American attention span is like a dog in a park full of squirrels, but that’s not really very funny. Our fickleness and ignorance have real-world consequences. I don’t have a complete solution to that, or the power to fix it fully, but I do know what needs to be done. Educating and engaging the American public about the world and our involvement in it is a long, hard slog, but it’s necessary work.

My Huffington Post article resulted in a television interview with Keith Olbermann, a national political talk show host. In the American park full of squirrels, when you get a few minutes of people’s attention you try to get the most important points across. So, when Keith Olbermann asked me if anything could be done to repair the damage in the wake of the Kandahar massacre, I referred to the quote in my article from my friend Todd Shea. Todd, who has done lifesaving work in Pakistan ever since the 2005 earthquake, argues that “if US leaders had treated [Pakistanis and Afghans] as important in a human way [after the 1980s Afghan war], then society in Pakistan and Afghanistan would be far further along today, because we would have helped them avoid all the things that are happening now.”

I quoted Todd, then I asked Keith Olbermann: “Do we acknowledge our shared humanity with Pakistanis, with Afghans, with Muslims – with the Taliban for that matter? That’s really where it has to begin. … People all over the world need to believe, genuinely, that Americans know them to be human beings. And I really don’t think a lot of people in the world are confident of that at this point.”

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

“The shooting early Sunday took place in Panjwayi district outside Kandahar city, in a village called Alkozai. US military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was believed that the assailant had suffered a mental breakdown.”

There are so many questions raised but not answered here. We can and will learn more details over the coming days, but the thing is, I’m not confident the real questions will be answered satisfactorily. Why did he suffer a mental breakdown? Will he, and he alone, be held responsible? Another way of asking that is: Will he be made a scapegoat, like the enlisted personnel at Abu Ghraib? Might one of these incidents prompt some real soul-searching higher up the American chain of command – maybe even a high-profile principled resignation by, say, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Defense?

I do know there are many good people in the US military – I’ve met them – and that they take moral and ethical issues seriously. Less than three weeks ago I had the honor of being heard out respectfully when I gave a challenging speech (titled “Some Things Are Just Plain Wrong”) at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. What I do know is that this incident requires a real, soul-searching moral response by the American military hierarchy.

But the military does the bidding of civilian society, and that’s where the real soul-searching needs to take place. I know Americans have a lot on our plate these days, what with the mortgage crisis, the election, etc. But Afghanistan is not far away; it’s right here, bleeding all over American society. Afghanistan is one of the things on our plate, whether we like it or not.

Americans have become great excuse-makers. When Jared Loughner killed several people and almost killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords outside a Safeway in Tucson last year, people like me who saw the incident as inherently political were shouted down by the many who glibly claimed he was a “lone nut.” (One of the articles I wrote at the time is online here.) That excuse didn’t cut it for Loughner, and it won’t cut it in this case either.

I can’t say all that needs to be said in one hastily written article. Nor should I: there needs to be a real, honest conversation about Afghanistan among Americans. Finger-wagging by one writer, or even by a few writers, won’t suffice.

For now, I’ll try to draw our attention back to a question that’s behind so much recent history – so far behind that it usually goes unasked: Do we Americans want to have a relationship with the rest of the world, or do we just want to use other societies and nations for our own purposes?

I recently completed a small research project about coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan after and before 9/11 in Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the US foreign policy establishment. As far as I can tell, the last article fully devoted to Pakistan in Foreign Affairs before 2002 was “The New Phase in US-Pakistani Relations,” by Professor Thomas P. Thornton of Johns Hopkins University, published in – get this – 1989. It’s a memorandum from an era now long past, and any number of passages from it could be quoted for ironic or darkly comic effect:

“The United States must consider how to react to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan: Should we use this favorable situation to enhance our role in the region along the Soviets’ southern flank? Or should the United States reduce its heavy commitment in such a distant region and postpone thinking about South Asia until more pressing problems elsewhere have been taken in hand? … The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan reduces the need for an intimate relationship with Islamabad.”

Todd Shea, a high-school dropout who has lived and worked in Pakistan providing disaster relief and health care since the earthquake that killed 80,000 people there on October 8, 2005, and who has never been invited to contribute to Foreign Affairs, has an answer to Thornton that resounds with tragic echoes of what might have been. Here’s what Todd said to me in July 2009 (I quote this passage in my new book Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti):

“I believe that it was a direct recognition that in the eyes of the US leaders at the time, they were barbarians, subhuman, not worth it. And I would submit that they are human beings, that if US leaders had treated them as important in a human way, then society in Pakistan and Afghanistan would be far further along today, because we would have helped them avoid all the things that are happening now. If you remember, at the time, we were loved. Both countries were in such a state of need, and then we just left. “We got rid of our big enemy, let’s get outta here,” and boy, wasn’t that a strategic error. When the [Berlin] Wall came down and we were waving flags and saying “America, America,” why weren’t we waving Pakistani flags? I remember seeing the Wall come down and all that, and I don’t remember hearing anything about Pakistan.”

And yes, it has everything to do with Vietnam, with which American society never did come to terms. As an older friend once told me, what the 60s were about was how “the blood of the war got on everyone’s hands, and we couldn’t wash it off. It’s still all over the place.”

But it’s possible to see clearly, even through the fog of war – if we want to, which means shouldering responsibility for things from which we’d rather avert our eyes.

Read full article here.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

Last week I had an opportunity to speak to young people who soon will be on the front lines of the American military and geopolitical presence worldwide. The United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs held its 19th Annual National Character and Leadership Symposium on February 23 and 24, and I was one of the invited speakers. Incidentally, NCLS speakers are nominated by the cadets themselves, and the cadet who nominated me was Mahhad Nayyer, who is the first Pakistani exchange cadet to study at the USAFA since 2004. I had the pleasure of spending two full days with Mahhad, and he is a fine young man who is representing Pakistan honorably and well in a challenging context.

The symposium’s overall theme was “Walk the Walk: Leaders in Ethical Action.” I want to forestall any easy or bitter jokes about ethics and the US military by pointing out two things: that, while it’s true that the US military is responsible for many bad things, so is the Pakistani military; and that it’s to the US military’s credit that it holds such a symposium annually. It would have been easy for the Air Force Academy to offer its cadets only flattery and nationalistic self-congratulation, and there was some of that at the symposium. But there also were some hard truths offered by speakers such as Sherron Watkins, a true American heroine who gained notoriety 10 years ago by exposing massive corruption at Enron Corporation. In my own speech, I felt compelled to address several recent incidents in which US soldiers have made things worse in Afghanistan, first and foremost for Afghans but secondarily and importantly also for themselves and their own country.

“It’s helpful to remember that some moral dilemmas aren’t actually dilemmas at all,” I said. (The full text of my speech is online here.) “We all know darn well, as my late grandmother would put it, that some things are just plain wrong. For example, you don’t have to be a theologian or moral philosopher to know that it’s wrong to urinate on other people, no matter who those people are or what bad things they might have done. You can be an uneducated farmer’s daughter like my grandmother and know that. When a video surfaced in January of four US Marines urinating on the corpses of Afghans presumed – but not known – to have been Taliban, I wrote about it, and I took flak from many Americans, including readers who identified themselves as soldiers currently serving in Afghanistan, who were prepared to make excuses for them or to lecture me about how I should show more gratitude toward our proverbial men and women in uniform. But I know darn well that urinating on other people is just plain wrong. And, as a citizen of the United States of America, I don’t want American soldiers urinating on other people in my name.”

I wrote a full draft of the speech several days ahead of time. My father and a friend who read it both thought I might be hitting too hard on the urination incident. They didn’t excuse it, but they feared I might alienate my audience. I had the same fear, and I did consider removing or revising references that might give offense. But wasn’t the point of the references, and of the speech as a whole, the importance of taking care to avoid giving offense, especially in wartime and on another nation’s soil? If I avoided confronting – and asking my audience to confront – the urination incident head-on, why was I there?

In any case, the question was rendered moot when I woke up last Tuesday morning to the deeply exasperating news that copies of the Quran had been burned as refuse at Bagram Air Field. I accept that the Qurans was not burned with any intent to offend, and it’s (slightly) helpful that both General John Allen and President Obama have apologised for the incident. But, as I told the cadets, such incidents need to not happen in the first place. Ten years into a vastly destructive yet inconclusive war on the soil of a Muslim country, America needs to do better than that.

Which brings us back to my original question: Why are we in Afghanistan? I really don’t know anymore. We were in Vietnam because we thought that if the Communists took over South Vietnam, they wouldn’t stop until they got to America. I guess we’re in Afghanistan because, analogously, we fear – with some real cause – that “Islamists” hate America and want to bring us down or forcibly convert us. But does that fear justify committing atrocities ourselves?

My personal answer, the answer I shared with the US Air Force Academy cadets, is: no, it doesn’t. That’s a hard answer to live with, because it means you can’t make excuses. It also means that a nation accustomed to pursuing an assertive “forward policy” in the world might have to get used to being vulnerable like everybody else.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

I’ve quoted that line many times before, including in this space in reference to the martyred Kashmiri human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi. Berry’s words are on my mind perpetually these days. Many things I cherished have been irretrievably lost over the 46 years I’ve been on the planet, and I’ve come to feel that coming to terms with the inevitability of loss – whether of tangible things or political battles – is a necessary survival skill. The trick is to develop that skill without becoming either defeatist or bitter. It’s not easy.

The people – and I mean here Pakistanis, Americans, and plenty of others – who would insist that the world must be run according to the rules of brute power, paranoia, and enmity, might well prevail over the short term. A lot is being lost in the process, including both the Pakistan and the America that I love, and there seems to be little that you or I can do about the direction or velocity of events. One thing I’ve decided I can do is simply to bear witness, which is why I plan to spend this autumn driving around America, researching a book about my own country similar in spirit to the two books of narrative travel that I’ve written about Pakistan. In both cases, my explicit personal purpose is to listen to and retell human stories, and my largely unstated political purpose is to undermine official and conventional – which is to say fake – versions of reality.

The creeping coup that’s been in progress in America at least since a compromised Supreme Court selected George W. Bush as president after the disputed 2000 election might well reach fruition with the election later this year. If so, they stand to do a lot more damage, both domestically and internationally. What they can’t do is make me believe anything I know to be untrue or get with a program of which I disapprove. And what I can do in opposition is to maintain and communicate a personal understanding of the times we’re living through that’s based on integrity, hard work, and ground-level experience. This is what I consider the real task of any real writer, and it’s what I try to do in this column, as well as in my books.

These musings have wandered a bit far afield from what prompted them, which is the article Talking Tough to Pakistan: How to End Islamabad’s Defiance by Stephen D. Krasner, in the January/February 2012 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Krasner’s bio mentions that he is a Senior Fellow (whatever that is) at the right-wing Hoover Institution, and that he was Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department in 2005-7, which is to say during the Bush regime. Foreign Affairs is the house organ of the American foreign policy establishment. What and whom it publishes reflects and helps guide the direction of US foreign policy or, more precisely, the debates of the official and quasi-official US establishment over the direction of US policy. Its purpose is to give intellectual credibility, often tantamount to intellectual cover, to American intentions, and to define and enforce the boundaries of allowable debate on any country, region, or subject of interest to the American imperial state.

What Krasner considers the “obvious conclusion” is that “Pakistan should be treated as a hostile power.” He allows that the ostensible alliance between America and Pakistan “has produced a few modest successes” such as “drone strikes from bases in Baluchistan” (!), but expresses exasperation that “despite the billions of dollars the United States has given Pakistan, public opinion there remains adamantly anti-American.” Imagine that. He patronisingly refers to Pakistan’s “behavior” and offers punitive, paternalistic solutions: “The only way the United States can actually get what it wants out of Pakistan is to make credible threats to retaliate if Pakistan does not comply with US demands and offer rewards only in return for cooperative actions taken. … Even as the United States threatens disengagement, it should emphasise that it would still prefer a productive relationship. But it should also make clear that the choice is Pakistan’s.” In other words, come on, be a team player – on my team.

There are risks in engaging at all with such twaddle, but it’s a dangerous twaddle, because it’s published in Foreign Affairs. Ignoring it carries greater risks. I have the impression that its publication at the start of a calendar year that might well end with another Republican presidential victory signals something ominous about the direction in which US policy toward Pakistan is moving.

There’s not much I can do about that, with my small voice and limited audience. What I can do is to protest, in order to preserve qualities in my own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence. By doing that, I do my small part to preserve humanity in an inhuman time. I live and write in the hope that others in both America and Pakistan are doing the same. We will need that resource in order to rebuild after the dust clears.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

I’ll start by highlighting points made recently by two Pakistani writers. In a long and excellent profile in the magazine The Caravan, Madiha Tahir writes: “The political worldview of the middle and upper classes — whether it’s the politics of personal expression and individual rights, moral outrage against corruption, or the outspoken embrace of tradition and piety — has almost no point of overlap with the needs and desires of millions of Pakistanis who are too poor to exercise meaningful choice in such matters.”

This cuts close to something Westerners and some Pakistani liberals willfully fail to understand about Pakistan: that it’s not really feasible to promote both Western-style or Western-leaning secular liberalism and the interests and aspirations of the much larger numbers of the Pakistani rural and urban poor. Which gets in turn to a very interesting contradiction in Imran’s own character and position: he is an elitist populist. He is “at his strongest,” writes Madiha Tahir, “delivering a trenchant critique of the often self-satisfied assumptions that underpin secular liberalism.”

On AlJazeera.com, Akbar Ahmed, professor at American University in Washington, DC and former Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK, begins with an obvious but crucial point: “There is a direct correlation between the depths of the gloom in Pakistan and the high expectations of salvation from Imran Khan. It is clear that the greater the despair in the country, the more fervent the hopes in one man as saviour.”

And he cautions: “There are already danger-signs as some old faces who have done the rounds with different parties have now jumped onto Imran’s bandwagon. The balance between making deals in order to chip away at the power base of the ruling Zardari-Bhutto dynasty and the Sharif one, and maintaining his integrity will be crucial.”

So, what do I think about Imran Khan? I don’t know the man and, again, I’m not Pakistani, but I’ve come to admire both his tenacity and his evidently genuine integrity and patriotism. And he seems to be channeling something both authentically and appropriately Islamic. But all this is not necessarily to say that I think he should lead Pakistan, or that he should want to. I certainly wouldn’t want to!

Imran has been hanging in there on the fringes of Pakistani politics for so long now that it’s easy to dismiss him or take him for granted. That’s understandable. But political credibility can consist in things other than National Assembly seats, and the enormous crowds who attended Imran’s recent rallies in Lahore and Karachi suggest that Pakistan might have crossed a Rubicon, or be approaching one. Whether the change that’s coming will be for the better, we can’t yet know. I do know from 17 years’ acquaintance that, for all its appalling inequities and glaring faults and notwithstanding the obstacles thrown in its path by not-so-friendly (not only imagined but also real) “foreign hands,” the Pakistani society does have the capacity to absorb such a change, and to become a better version of itself. Pakistanis are among the most resourceful and enterprising people I know. They’ve had to be, ever since 1947.

Imran is tapping into the natural urge all humans share — it’s part of what makes us human, by definition — to live above the level of material, moral, and social squalor, to be something better than cynical. And he’s absolutely justified and right to appeal to Pakistanis’ self-respect by telling them, essentially, that they don’t need, and shouldn’t want, to rely on aid or instruction from the United States. The challenge, as Prof. Ahmed alludes above, is what portion of the potential can be realised in the real world, where the rubber meets the political road. Relying on a single charismatic leader to change everything for the better is a setup for embittered disappointment and disillusion. Pakistanis and Americans are very similar, not least in being idealistic; and I’m sorry to have to remind you and myself of how much hope we Americans put in a charismatic figure who promised definitive change here, four long years ago.

So I’ll end these musings on a cautionary note, by telling the story of the press conference I attended at Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s famous house in Rangoon in November 1995. Suu Kyi had been released from house arrest a few months earlier, and her National League for Democracy had called the press conference to announce that they were suspending their participation in the military junta’s phony constitutional convention. It was both a stand on principle and an admirable attempt to take initiative and claim political space.

But I wasn’t convinced. The article I wrote for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, began: “Aung San Suu Kyi’s claim to the moral high ground in Burma may be indisputable. But her party seems headed down a slippery slope toward political irrelevance.” Those two sentences led to the severing of my relationship with The Globe and Mail, because I didn’t toe its wishful line, which held essentially that because Aung San Suu Kyi should prevail, therefore she would. It isn’t that easy.

Then again, making a difference usually requires staying power and years in the wilderness. Things are finally looking a little more hopeful in Burma. Could they be in Pakistan as well? If so, then I feel sure Imran Khan has a role to play.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

Nearly as striking to me was how many commentrs scolded me for having compared Imran to Obama. I hadn’t even mentioned Obama by name. What I had written was:

“Relying on a single charismatic leader to change everything for the better is a setup for embittered disappointment and disillusion. Pakistanis and Americans are very similar, not least in being idealistic; and I’m sorry to have to remind you and myself of how much hope we Americans put in a charismatic figure who promised definitive change here, four long years ago.”

As far as I can tell, the readers who scolded me had no real reasons to offer for why Imran and Obama have nothing in common, only wishful assertions. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

There might well be real differences in the personal character and mettle of the two men.

I think there are, in fact, and those favor Imran. He has been toughing it out in the political wilderness for more than 15 years, through many changes of circumstance and regime, when he really didn’t have to. He has earned his credibility the hard way, above all through his tireless and successful work building and funding the justly famous Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital in Lahore. Obama had accomplished nothing comparable to that before becoming President of the United States, and he still hasn’t.

But what the commenters failed – willfully, I would venture, if understandably – to appreciate is that I wasn’t comparing the men, but the phenomena. The questions both raise are: Why do desperate societies feel a need to invest their hopes in a single charismatic would-be leader? What is the best result we can hope for, when that happens? What are the dangers? If (more likely when) the leader disappoints us, is that his or her failure, or our own? Above all, what are we entitled to hope for?

I write these days under two rubrics: twice monthly on Fridays in Dawn on topics directly to do with Pakistan, and every Monday on my own website (excerpted in Dawn) in a series called Home Free, which will also be the title of the book I’m working toward, reporting from the grassroots and commenting on the current and coming crisis here in the USA. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see the line where one ends and the other begins, and indeed one of my standing aspirations is that anything I write should, ideally, speak in some way to anyone who reads English, anywhere in the world. This installment is a case in point.

So these musings are prompted in part by what I see as the dangerous over-investment of hope many Pakistanis are placing in Imran Khan. Expecting too much from him is not fair to him or good for the Pakistani nation and society. At the same time, what’s been on my mind is how the Republican presidential primaries have been dominating mainstream news coverage in the US for far too long now. What that shows is not only the infamously interminable quality of American elections in general, or even Obama’s all too real failure either to be the leader we elected him to be or to assert himself politically.

Beyond proximate contexts and personalities, what I’m sensing is a greater than usual disconnect between the ostensible and the actual, as American society atavistically clings to the vestiges of its formerly functional institutions.

A litany of these reads like a roll call of the institutions that defined the America I grew up in, from once-prestigious book publishers and record companies to General Motors to the nightly news to Hollywood to Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous. The truth we’re disinclined to face in our national politics is that not only have the Republican and Democratic parties become similarly vestigial and pointless, but maybe so has the presidency itself. What’s been lost along with all of the above is something intangible but that, now that it’s gone, we know to have been crucial. Call it community or share purpose, or at least a tacit agreement that we’re all on the same page. Also lost is a sense that we’re all in the same boat, traveling together to a destination that we believe to be worth the journey.

Read full article here.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

Last Friday I woke up at 2 am feeling an itch in my brain, so I got out of bed and wrote “Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?” If you want to know what I think about the incident itself, please read that article. This article is about some of the comments posted on that one, which brought home that some things that seem glaringly obvious to me are quite a bit less so to many of my fellow Americans.

“To call for these four guys’ heads over something so minor is ridiculous,” asserted one reader.

In response to my remark that I’ll remember the urination incident the next time I witness passengers in a US airport breaking out in applause when the gate agent or flight attendant congratulates “our men and women in uniform,” another wrote: “You are free to think that, you are free to write this column … thanks to men and women in uniform. Your statement shows your ignorance of the service and sacrifice of people like myself who give of ourselves and willingly put ourselves in harm’s way to ensure our loved ones and people like yourself can be free. This also shows blatant prejudice of an entire group based on the actions of a few. May you continue to enjoy the freedoms earned by men and women that volunteered to ensure you never lose them.”

My response to such pro-military bullies and blowhards is: No, I’m not free because of the sacrifices of “our men and women in uniform.” I’m free because I’m free. You can’t give me my freedom, nor can you withhold it. It’s mine by right. That’s what America is all about – right?

I’m prepared to insist on that point because, even though freedom is mine by right, I can keep it only by exercising it. So I’m going to continue exercising it, because it’s not possible to be both completely free and completely secure, and I prefer freedom.

Fetishising “our men and women in uniform” leads to justifying, excusing, or explaining away whatever they might do in the heat of battle. But should they even be in battle in the first place? And, despite their bravery and training, “our men and women in uniform” seem somehow to have failed or neglected to protect me from the National Defense Authorisation Act, which since December 31 provides for indefinite detention of US citizens. It’s fair to ask whether the Taliban are truly more dangerous to Americans’ freedom than the United States Congress or Supreme Court.

A commenter on Sebastian Junger’s fine Washington Post article “We’re all guilty of dehumanising the enemy” wrote: “It’s tribal. It’s not a police action. While these acts are deplorable, they are also understandable. In a warrior’s mind, they already dehumanised the enemy.” I can’t disagree with this; as Junger pointed out, “A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s [allegedly] okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.”

We can’t deplore (such a milquetoast word) enlisted Marines urinating on people we’ve defined as our enemy without acknowledging that (another lame phrase) “our political leaders” – which is to say all of us, especially if we still believe in democracy – are guilty well prior to the Marines themselves. What could the Taliban do to us that’s worse than the things we’re already doing to ourselves and each other? And is allowing ourselves to commit atrocities preferable to leaving ourselves vulnerable?

How you see this incident depends on whether you’re willing to acknowledge that the corpses urinated on were those of human beings.

Read full article here.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

His tone and style are not to everyone’s taste; he can be abrasive, profane, and sometimes insulting. But sometimes it’s important for somebody to be impolite, for the sake of saying things that otherwise might not be said, and Kunstler usually handles that role with aplomb and panache. He also affects a gentler and more compassionate vision in his World Made By Hand series of novels set in the aftermath. I’ve been reading his weekly blog faithfully ever since a friend gave me a copy of his book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, about five years ago.

Kunstler’s concern with oil means, of course, that he can’t avoid addressing issues of geopolitics, and more specifically of the West’s relations with Muslim countries. Iran’s threat this week to close the Strait of Hormuz is an example of something he would, and probably will, write about. But his main theme is how American society has lost its way with its obsessive grasping after the suburbanised “American dream” and its related dependence on automobiles. When he is writing about this, Kunstler is at his prophetic best.

But, like any ambitious writer with a universal vision, Kunstler occasionally strides all too confidently beyond his own authority. He also – again, like any of us – is animated partly by personal and visceral sentiments and resentments. Thus this week, in his long look ahead at trends for 2012, he wrote:

“It is hard to think about the bizarre case of India, a nation with one foot in the modern age and the other in a colorful hallucinatory dreamtime. Their climate-change-related problems are doing heavy damage to the food supply. Their groundwater is almost gone. The troubles of the wobbling global economy will take a lot of pep out of their burgeoning tech and manufacturing sectors. It wouldn’t be surprising if these travails prompted distracting hostilities with its failed-state neighbor, Pakistan.

Pakistan, with its inexhaustible supply of Islamic maniacs, could easily start a rumble with some crazy caper like the Mumbai hotel assault of two [sic] years ago, but this time India would answer with a heavy cudgel, perhaps even a nuclear sortie designed to neutralise Pakistan’s dangerous toys at a stroke. And that would be that. Like cleaning out an annoying neighborhood crack house. It’s not a very appetising scenario, but what else can you do about failed states with nuclear bombs?”

I quote this passage, even though I consider it flawed or just plain wrong on several points as well as dangerous, to show Pakistanis what your country is up against, in terms of American perception. For what it’s worth, Kunstler doesn’t think America is in very good shape either. Part of Kunstler’s problem, though, is that while, legitimately given the kind of writer he is, he takes the whole world for his bailiwick, he consistently treats Muslim countries as if they were all about Islam and nothing else (and he doesn’t mean that in a good way), and he gives a pass to any country, such as India, that’s positioned against a Muslim country or countries. This doesn’t invalidate his credibility overall, but it does reveal a large blind spot.

It’s unavoidably true that India is the dominant power on the subcontinent, but part of what’s missing from Kunstler’s drive-by geopolitical analysis is a recognition that several of the problems he identifies as India’s, from climate change to water to “dangerous toys,” are also Pakistan’s. Speaking of which, as every Pakistani knows, it was India’s then-BJP government that raised the stakes in 1998 by testing a nuclear bomb first. It’s maddening, and telling, how Westerners tend to forget that awkward fact, or don’t even know it in the first place.

In any case, if India were to hit Pakistan with a preemptive nuclear sortie that would not be that, to put it mildly. Would Pakistan retaliate? Probably tens of millions of people would die on both sides of the border. We think – and hope – that such a scenario is unthinkable. But if, as this ominous new year begins, we cast our minds back over the past decade, we should all be chastened by an awareness of how many previously unthinkable scenarios have already come to pass.

Kunstler’s provocative prognostications do raise hard questions: Does Pakistan have an “inexhaustible supply of Islamic maniacs”? Is it – or, less provocatively, could it become – a “failed state”? Could, or would, Pakistan “start a rumble” with India? Above all, who’s in charge? Pakistan needs nothing more than it needs mature, responsible, patriotic (as distinct from nationalist) leadership. Then again, that’s also more than anything what my own country needs.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

The comment’s bitter tone is strikingly reminiscent of the many comments on an article I published in the summer of 2010, in which I tried to enlist the human sympathy of Americans for victims of the horrific flooding in Pakistan. Here’s a representative response to that article:

“Every year, the United States sends billions of dollars aiding Pakistan from [sic] their own people who are trying to bring down the Pakistani government and turn their country into a brutal dictatorship run by thugs that claim they speak in the name of God. Our thanks? Nothing but demands for more money that we cannot afford. In return for the help we have provided, Pakistan allows people who are actively trying to destroy our country to operate, train and plan inside their borders. Those that are not directly supporting al Qaeda and similar groups passively do nothing to stop them. So, like many others, I just have a very difficult time caring.”

What’s wrong with this picture? Both writers – Pakistani and American – are indulging themselves with self-pity and a willful refusal to acknowledge each other’s humanity. It’s an unedifying spectacle, on both sides of the looking-glass. And what’s notable about the self-pity is that it’s not even properly personal, but nationalist. We see the human suffering on our own side all too easily, and just as easily reduce many millions of people into mere cogs in the other side’s state machine. This truly is pitiable, because it’s inconsistent with any individual’s self-respect.

Identify your own interests uncritically with those of the state – any state – and you will inevitably end up both betrayed and brutalised. As George Orwell wrote in a great essay from which I keep finding myself quoting: “The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.” Nationalism in any form is anathema to humanity. I fear this is what we’re dealing with today, in both America and Pakistan.

You might have noticed that since September I’ve been appearing more often on Dawn.com, but that some of my contributions are excepts from articles that appear in full on my own website. The way it works is that, starting in late September, my editor and I agreed that instead of writing once a week on issues relating directly to Pakistan, I will do that on the first and third Fridays of every month and, in addition, publish every Monday on my own site a column about American topics, which Dawn.com will excerpt.

My American column is ironically titled “Home Free,” which will also be the title of a book I’m planning to write next year subtitled “An American Road Trip.” I bring it to your attention now because its purpose is consistent with – in fact identical to – the purpose of all my writing on Pakistan: to help sustain humanity and undermine nationalism. Nationalism’s tactic is always to score cheap points on behalf of “us” by simplifying and reducing – dehumanising – “them”. This is ultimately not very interesting, and George Orwell (and others) saw through it a long time ago, but it’s surprisingly durable, because people are all too gullible. So it needs to be undermined anew in every generation.

While I am American – rather, because I’m American – I claim the right that my country’s founders explicitly acknowledged, to disagree with and even to work against the intentions of its government. Nothing is more dispiriting, or aggravating, to me than when Pakistanis lecture or abuse me personally simply because I’m American, unfairly assuming that I must support American actions or state policy, or that I’m fair game even if I don’t. I don’t do that to you, and I go out of my way to urge other Americans not to do it to you – so please don’t do it to me or to the millions of hapless Americans who, yes, “enable drones with votes, taxes, and opinion polls,” but in most cases know not what they do. They need to be educated, not disdained and dehumanised. I don’t support American state policy, but I do love and cherish my own society (warts and all), just as you love yours (warts and all).

A postscript on a related subject: a Pakistani reader, Mahvesh Khan, has written a thought-provoking guest article at my invitation, responding to one of my own recent articles about Greg Mortenson. “If money is being sunk into development projects,” Mahvesh writes, “I would suggest that the citizens themselves ensure that the project is actually carrying out the work it is supposed to be doing. Physical verification of that work, and an impact analysis, would be good ideas. After all, it’s hard-earned money. Why waste it?” I invite you to read, share, and comment on Mahvesh’s article, “It is indeed about Greg Mortenson.”

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.