- FEBRUARY 9, 2010
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The Taliban bogeyman
Posted By Fatima Bhutto
Thursday, May 14, 2009 - 6:18 PM
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How Pakistan’s president is scamming the West.
By Fatima Bhutto
President
Asif Ali Zardari, less than a year into his reign, has managed to engage
Pakistan’s armed forces, the seventh largest army in the world, in a guerrilla
war with the newly formed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, our very own Taliban, in
the North West Frontier Province. Rumors of Talibanization air daily on
Pakistani television, radio and print media: The barbarians are at the gate, we
are told, and warned that if there was a time to rally around the nation’s
oleaginous president, a man known locally as “President Ghadari” or traitor in
Urdu, this is it. However, the time for scaremongering has past -- it is
precisely President Zardari’s politically expedient use of national hysteria
that has seen American drones welcomed over Pakistan’s airspace and has birthed
a war that this government cannot win.
In the aftermath and fallout of 9/11, Pakistan saw its elite -- the power brokers of the country’s politics and economy -- turn against their traditional allies, the United States for the first time. As U.S. forces occupied first Afghanistan and then Iraq, Pakistan’s elite took an unexpected turn; they welcomed resistance to American foreign policy and supported, as they had never quite done before, Islamic parties that took control of local government and provincial cabinet positions in the North West Frontier Province.
Islamic parties in Pakistan traditionally perform poorly in national elections -- garnering only a handful of seats in the assembly, but the 2002 elections saw them enter coalitions and alliances that brought them to power on the national level. For the nation’s elite, a powerful but small minority and the stronghold of Western interests, this was a dangerous turn of events.
In 2008, months after taking power in a hastily organized parliamentary election, Zardari drew upon Pakistan’s overwhelmingly anti-American sentiment and empowered the nascent domestic Taliban, which entered prominence roughly at the same time that the president did, by capitulating to their demands for sharia law in the Swat Valley (the very same region that the government is now, one month later, bombarding with American assistance).
With one hand, Zardari gave the militants what they wanted -- no vote or referendum was held -- and Taliban law was imposed on the Swat Valley by force. With the other, Zardari pointed a crooked finger at the rise of fundamentalism and capitalized on a golden opportunity to bring the nation’s elite back into the government’s obsequiously pro-American fold.
The Taliban were pointed out as the largest threat facing the urban elite of Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore -- they threatened our values, our dress, our lives, and they had to be dealt with for us to remain safe. While the Taliban have certainly made inroads into Pakistan in the last year, there is no doubt that they were only able to do so with the consent of the government, a very powerful backer. Without the government aiding and abetting the Taliban (as in the Swat Valley), they have a long way to go before they can exercise power in any cohesive manner.
Zardari’s double game may have brought him billions more in American aid and assistance -- U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke being the president’s loudest champion in Washington, warning Congress that if billions of dollars are not delivered immediately to Pakistan the war on terror will be in mortal danger -- but it has lost him Pakistan. As we watch the number of internally displaced people rise steadily toward two million our army kills our own citizens, it should come as no surprise when the BBC Urdu service reveals that the government controls only 38 percent of the NWFP province -- a number that is sure to fall as the weeks go on.
Fatima Bhutto writes for the New Statesman and the Daily Beast. She is working on a book on Pakistan to be published in 2010. She is a niece of Benazir Bhutto, who was married to Asif Ali Zardari.
Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
Is there nothing about Pakistan that isn't a matter of siblings and extended clans? Next, we'll learn that the Taliban leadership and Pakistan's elite are distant cousins!
I also feel like it's WW2 or pre-Korean War when Madame Chiang and Francesca Donner, respectively, charmed Congress for cash. Only Zardari and Haqqani aren't nearly so voluptuous.
As has been said in the past, Pakistan is the only country that holds a gun to its own head, and says, "Give me what I want or I'll shoot." The problem is that the U.S. has very few good options, and plenty of bad ones. If we were to cut off all aid, as we did in the 1990s, then Pakistan simply starts starts to rot. And it was this situation that led to the Pakistanis organizing the Taliban. A Taliban nuke is unlikely - terrorists prefer to keep their technology simple, such as truck bombs, or in the case of the Bombay attack, maybe use smart phones equipped with Google Earth. But an entire province, such as NWFP, under Taliban control, would still be a threat - to Pakistan, its immediate neighbors, and the West.
The problem goes beyond Zardari
Fatima Bhutto’s analysis about Zardari’s hypocrisy is perfectly right but I think the real problem in Pakistan goes beyond Zardari. It’s a problem about weak political institutions in Pakistan. Is there any Pakistani political leader after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who has not personalized the political institutions in Pakistan? If Zardari is an incapable political leader then who is the option?
Moreover I don’t support this claim that Musharraf has or Zardari is appeasing the Islamic militant groups in Pakistan. The super-influence of Islam on Pakistan’s polity, society and military under General Zia has created a problem which no political leader of the country can manage single-handedly. It’s easy to advise that the political leadership should be on an all-out offensive against the extremists but we need to understand that this effort requires a lot of undoing. I am not supporting the Pakistani leadership in any way (on the contrary I am its most staunch critic); I am merely attempting to emphasize that the political leadership cannot be expected to legally/politically dislodge the dominant (sometimes skewed) influence of Islamic extremism in Pakistan. What Pakistan needs is a social revolution supported by all political segments of Pakistan. Hopefully the blame game gives way to collective responsibility.
http://thetrajectory.com
Great title for an otherwise insipid article.
Can anyone tell me what's new in this article (save possibly its author's reputation) that any Pakistan observer doesn't already know?
The article is just a rehash of what's already being widely debated in various fora, within Pakistan and without.
I expected Ms. Bhutto, because of who she is, to bring deep insight into how Pak's future will unravel in different scenarios (to raise just one: what if the Taliban does get the better of her Uncle-Prez and his party's gutless government).
It seems like Fatima B's hatred of BB and AZ is making her suggest that the Taliban is not really that bad, or Islamism is not such a problem. Assume for the sake of argument that Zardari was really playing brinksmanship by letting the Taliban get stronger so he could build up the momentum and support (both in Pak as well as the US) to crush them. Is that such a bad thing, tactically ?
I only care about the final outcome, that Pak wholeheartedly drops its theory of keeping extremists alive in case they come in handy against Af or India.
Imagine that some foreign nation much stronger than the USA told us we had to clear the fundamentalist christians out of the US south.
And when we were slow to get results they started bombing churches and parsonages etc, and announcing the results. "Today a Botswanan flying death robot executed Pat Robertson, the number three leader in the Pentecostal movement, in an attack on his hideout in downtown atlanta. About three hundred other fundamentalist fanatics were also killed along with a small number of women and children. Yet another setback to the Pentecostal plan to take over the world."
I expect the US government would look particularly weak and indecisive.
>>>Imagine that some foreign nation much stronger than the USA told us we had to clear the fundamentalist christians out of the US south.
You keep peddling that tired old analogy. I'm not sure if "fundamentalist Christians" are just an easy target of convenience for you, or if you put some thought into your example.
Anyway, there are no xian militias that have taken over parts of the country, and demanded implementation of religious law. No state will tolerate that.
The last time a similar situation occurred here, the state responded in a similarly brutal way. During the American Civil War, the North did import "mercenaries" from Europe in order to crush the South.
Anyway, there are no xian militias that have taken over parts of the country, and demanded implementation of religious law.
There will be, pretty quick, if anybody tries to crush them with military force.
And some of our fundamentalists haven't been that far from demanding implementation of religious law, but so far they've been doing that through the political process and they haven't gotten the votes. Luckily we do have a political process they can use; if we had a junta running things they wouldn't have that option.
The analogy is not 100%, and I attribute the difference mostly to our functioning democracy. I do expect pakistani feelings about us bombing muslim fundamentalists are a lot like ours would be about a powerful foreign nation bombing american fundamentalists.
I regard your civil war analogy as even more flawed. If we hired out the US military to work as mercenaries under afghan/pakistani orders, the local people would still be upset. But if the chinese army was hunting terrorists in the USA and most of them didn't speak english and they emphatically were not responsible to americans, we'd be a lot more upset about it than we were about european mercenaries in the 1860s.
I agree that lack of pluralist thinking is bad.
That said, there's a huge difference between telling someone he will go to hell and putting him there.
While a fundamentalists' thinking is flawed when they call me a heathen because I don't agree, I give them credit for not killing me. I can't say the same about the Taliban.
A better analogy for the Taliban in Pakistan would be Nazi Germany or perhaps the KKK.
CmDunn, that works for me.
So OK, at a time when the relative strengths are very different, the chinese army has declared that the KKK is a major international terrorist threat and they are over here bombing fundamentalist christians. They say that KKK is the militant wing of fundamentalist christianity and it's a permanent war between christianity and rational humanity, which they have no choice but to win. They bomb prominent pentecostals and claim they are making major strides against KKK. They insist that the US military must do more to combat the KKK and doubt our sincerity unless we wage a large-scale invasion and occupation of georgia, alabama, mississippi, and louisiana with US troops.Meanwhile they do spot raids and airstrikes that kill tens of thousands of americans and leave millions of americans as refugees, and they claim that their intelligence has revealed a large KKK infrastructure that dominates the rest of the southern population. Most southerners are afraid to inform on the KKK, but chinese intelligence is so good that they know just which houses to drop 2000 pound bombs on.
Thank you, that was a good suggestion.
Wahabi is to Fundamentalist Christian as the Taliban is to the KKK.
Wahabi is to Fundamentalist Christian as the Taliban is to the KKK.
Yes, very good!
And efforts by a foreign power to bomb KKK would tend to give it its first legitimacy. To the extent they could redefine themselves as NOT against blacks, catholics, jews etc but FOR christianity, they could spread more easily. And a foreign superpower declaring war on christianity would help them do that.
And of course the foreign superpower would tend to regard any armed christian group as KKK. Certainly any armed christian group they attacked which defended itself or counterattacked would be labeled KKK.
A few points about the Taliban, and how the KKK isn't (at present) quite the same:
1) The Taliban are having a generation gap. Young Taliban join primarily as a source of income, while older join for more idealistic reasons.
2) The Taliban exist as a byproduct of a corrupt and weak government who can't provide basics like infrastructure and health care. In Pakistan, wealthy landowners are also most often politicians. Therefore, poorer Pakistanis in the villages ate shut out of government. The Taliban spreads it's ideology and power by acting as Robin Hood.
3) The Taliban got in trouble with the US when they formed an alliance with al Qaeda, who attacked the US. The KKK have not formed any alliances with international terrorist groups.
Frankly, if the KKK was both allying itself with international terror groups and threatening a coup d'etat, we might be wise to invite our strong allies to help us fight back. That Pakistan's thinking is that India poses a bigger threat than the Taliban, even as Taliban forces advanced towards Islamabad, raises enough concern to justify drone attacks. Please note that the US and NATO forces are respecting Pakistan's sovereignty enough to not send ground forces except upon request, and are using transparency with respect to the drones.
Your basic arguement seems to be "do unto others as you would have done to you." It's a noble thought, but I think all the variables should be exactly equivalent before we proceed. Right now, the US seems quite capable of defending itself from domestic extremist groups like the KKK, and such groups are not threatening a takeover of our capital city. If we could say the same for Pakistan, then we could justify not assisting them with the clear and present danger that the Taliban presents.
Your basic arguement seems to be "do unto others as you would have done to you."
No, I want a chance to see it from the other guy's point of view, and that's hard. Imagining how it might be applied to us is a start. Not perfect because they aren't like us, but some ways they're pretty much like us.
If a foreign superpower did flying-death-robot attacks on US civilians, would that truly help the US government? Can you imagine circumstances where it would truly help the US government and the US government thought it would, but they couldn't admit it in public because that would hurt them?
I can imagine circumstances where we help the pakistani government by doing airstrikes over their public objections, and it's worth what it costs the USA in pakistani etc public opinion. But those costs could be large and partly delayed. We don't really know the costs.There's strong reason to believe that it's a stupid choice.
If we want to help the pakistani government, probably we should let them choose our airstrike targets. Their intelligence is probably better than ours about that.
For that matter, Taliban intelligence is probably better than ours about airstrikes. They can use cellphones and track exactly what to say to call in an airstrike on a particular location. They get perfect data about when and where our airstrikes come. We get very poor intelligence about exactly who we blew up. Are they getting us to bomb orphanages and local holy men and such, to generate hatred for us and support for them? Maybe not. Maybe they're utterly incompetent at that kind of thing.
Would the KKK do that? You bet, as fast as they found out how.
How much "support" against christian "insurgents" would the US government actually get, from foreign troops that mostly don't speak english?
Pakistanis are different from us, but not that different. If some foreign nation did the sort of things here that we've done in pakistan I'd be pretty upset. If the US government let them get away with it I'd be upset with the US government. I don't think they're that different from us in that respect.
I'm an urban educated fairly-secular american and I expect that urban educated secular pakistanis probably feel a lot like I would. So why haven't they told us that? Well, to some extent they do say that and we don't listen. And to some extent they figure we're the overbearing superpower who won't listen. And then there's Ms. Bhutto's claim that they're scamming us....
If the US economy was a basket case and some superpower wanted to catch KKK in the US south, would the US govenrment be willing to lead them on a snipe hunt? I have trouble imagining it. After all, it's US voters they'd be killing and displacing. It would be a pretty cynical US government that allowed that just for a few hundred billions in swiss bank accounts.
Um, so what did happen to all that missing iraq war-and-reconstruction money?
First of all, it's commendable that you want to put yourself it someone else's shoes. I do wonder if it's less incediary to visit the region instead of making imperfect comparisons. Besides avoiding the awful suggestion of China bombing the US South, you put the problem in the proper cultural context of Pakistan.
There are no perfect solutions to the Afpak crises. It would be easier to solve if their cultures were casual and direct like the West and America, but it isn't. South Asian culture is full of reading between the lines, and saving face is important. You can't guarantee a straight answer.
The other issue is corruption. Bribery is just another way of networking, and many lower paid employees depend on it as a supplement of their incomes.
Also, not all Pakistanis are of the same mind. Add to this a weak central government, and you have a real puzzle.
Any solution, for it to be accepted, must take into account cultural context. Better to come to S Asia and find out what works for yourself.
I do wonder if it's less incediary to visit the region instead of making imperfect comparisons.
Cmdunn, that is utterly impractical for 99.99% of US voters. But we have to find a way to look at it, or else just trust the experts. And so far our experts have done an exceptionally bad job.
Besides avoiding the awful suggestion of China bombing the US South
Is that so much more awful than suggesting that USA bomb NW pakistan? If so, why?
It would be easier to solve if their cultures were casual and direct like the West and America, but it isn't. South Asian culture is full of reading between the lines, and saving face is important. You can't guarantee a straight answer.
Have you ever spent much time in the USA? You think saving face isn't important here? You get a lot of straight answers? Can you even read a US newspaper without having to read between the lines a lot? We americans have a veneer of "casual and direct" but it's more like a cover story. It's a style more than anything fundamental.
The other issue is corruption. Bribery is just another way of networking, and many lower paid employees depend on it as a supplement of their incomes.
Yes, we don't have that at a retail level, except in texas. We save our bribery issues for big important things where significant amounts of money change hands. This would be a problem for the local governments, except that everybody expects it.
Any solution, for it to be accepted, must take into account cultural context.
And any american solution for those countries must also take into account american cultural context -- it has to be acceptable to US voters or we will reject it. So we can't find out about US agents directly bribing local government leaders -- even when that's necessary for us to help them improve their economy. It's taking a great big effort to get americans to accept us torturing prisoners and we haven't even thought about summary execution or airstrikes based on "profiling". Poison gas would be unacceptable even if the cultural context made it absolutely necessary.
So OK, I don't understand the customs there the way I would if I spent decades there interacting with them. But some things are pretty much universal. I'm pretty sure that their reaction to our airstrikes are a lot like our reaction would be to the chinese bombing the KKK. There are surely differences in detail -- they probably don't write to their congressmen about it or publish inflammatory comments in their blogs or argue about whether it's more GOP or democrats at fault. But it's got to be counterproductive.
I can imagine that there might be some targets that are worth the outrage. Possibly as many as two of them a year. I'm not familiar enough with the culture to say how much outrage two airstrikes a year would cause. Maybe too much. But I'm pretty clear that one a month would be too much.
This is a tool we use because we have it. "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." It is mostly not worth doing. I don't have to spend years in pakistan to know that.
If we can't win there without airstrikes on houses that are distant from US troops, then we can't win and we need to get out. If there's a plausible way to win without that, tell it to us.
Any acceptable outcome in afghanistan is looking daily less plausible. The local government we tried to install appears to be corrupt even by afghan standards. They get little support except from us. But we can't bring ourselves to vote them out with our own "votes" and it isn't clear how we'd replace them. Find a "moderate wing" of taliban to replace them? How would that go over in the USA? Meanwhile our long and convoluted supply lines are getting constricted, to the point we're considering moving supplies through russia! And I haven't heard anything that sounds vaguely like a plan.
So I hear rumors of an idea that we can win in pakistan easier than we can win in afghanistan, so we should do that first. But I haven't heard about a strategy to do so....
My guess is that pakistanis are deeply divided, they have a large minority that's "westernised", that has a wstern-style education and lots of western technology etc. And there's a majority that's poorer and has less of all that. And the elite is considering grabbing what it can and running. This happened in iran -- lots of iranians didn't like the way things went after the Shah was gone (not to say they liked it before) and so 1.6 million iranians are living in the USA and 300,000 to 600,000 additional iranians have gotten US citizenship. Roughly an elite 2 million iranians who left.
Paskistan could go the same way. And it's the people who're getting ready to run if they need to, that we are trying to buck up into fighting in rugged terrain against larger numbers of their relatives and strangers.
With your deep knowledge of the cultures there, do you see a strategy for us to follow that looks better than getting out?
I'm not asking for a perfect solution. Just something that's better than cutting our losses.
So far the best I've seen is this concept of staging a sort of commando raid on the pakistani nukes. Grab those and then bug out. I guess we'd want to also bomb or sabotage their various nuclear facilities and murder as many of their nuclear scientists and technicians as we can find to delay their making more. Then we run away like bunnies with nukes, yelling "HAHAHA WE WON!".
Somehow I don't find this best strategy very reassuring.
Just so you know where I'm coming from, my "expertise" as you call it extends from being an American expat in India for the past 2 years. I'm one of those kinds of people who loves to talk with anybody who will listen about anything, and I've made local friends who will tolerate all my questions. Additionally, I like to follow a few socially conscious Pakistanis on Twitter, just for balance in perspective. Though, except for the past 60+ years, they have shared history, relations are of course strained over Kashmir, terrorism, and the refugee crises during the partitioning and the Bangladesh war with Pakistan for independence. (The latter resulted in Bangladeshi refugees migrating to NE India, which changed the face of Calcutta in the 1970s.)
It seems important to remember that our goals in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Islamabad's goals, and Kabul's goals are different, though related. Pakistan's purpose for attacking the Taliban is to protect their capital from an enemy who behaves not unlike the Borg on Star Trek (resistance is futile). America's goal is to find OBL, who is said to be harbored by the same Taliban in the same region. Kabul is just trying to get control of its country and avoid it from being retaken by the Taliban.
I wouldn't doubt that our drone attacks are in part information gathering, and in part cover for special ops trying to find OBL. We could probably assume that if there are US ground forces in the Pakistan side of the border region, only those with clearance would know about it. We need to respect Pakistan's sovereignty, right?
Of course, this is conjecture, but conceivable. How could we be successful in a war to find OBL with one hand tied behind our back? And if Pakistan won't allow us to officially cross the border, then you do it unofficially.
So, our beef is less with the Taliban and more with al Qaeda, but our conflict does not exist in a vaccuum.
I do agree that the use of drones stinks politically, but when your enemy behaves like the Borg (assimilate or be destroyed), then you do what is less risky for your troops (as less worry for their families back home in the US).
Cheers.
Cmdunn, it sounds like you have a better grasp of the region than I do. I've talked with a number of americanised pakistanis, and my wife's best friend's husband is from bangladesh, and some things like that.
My experience has been that most cultures have a similar repertoire, but they express it somewhat differently. Like, I have a friend who spent part of his high school years in syria, and he'd tell stories like:
I was sitting with these two kurds, and they were smoking hashish, and we talked.
"I'm going to kill Ahmed."
Pause. "Why would you do that?"
Pause. "He stole my sheep."
Long pause. "Are you sure?"
Pause. "Yes. I'm sure."
Pause. "If you're sure, then I'll help you kill him."
And if you change hash to alcohol, kurd to redneck, and sheep to girlfriend, it could have been in my own highschool. But there were also differences in tone that don't show up so easily.
It seems important to remember that our goals in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Islamabad's goals, and Kabul's goals are different, though related.
Definitely.
Pakistan's purpose for attacking the Taliban is to protect their capital from an enemy who behaves not unlike the Borg on Star Trek (resistance is futile).
Are you sure? Fatima Bhutto appears to me to say that their goal may be to get billions in US aid, by crying wolf. Only their actions are causing refugee problems etc and might stir up more problem than US aid could justify.
America's goal is to find OBL, who is said to be harbored by the same Taliban in the same region.
Are you sure? OBL seems increasingly irrelevant. If Taliban gave us OBL would we go away? I think maybe we don't know what we're fighting for any more in afghanistan. We want victory and we'll know it when we see it.
Kabul is just trying to get control of its country and avoid it from being retaken by the Taliban.
Yes, plus get aid from us into swiss banks etc, just in case they fail to keep the country again. Isn't this the next generation of the bozos who couldn't hold onto afghanistan with the russians helping them?
We have this repeated problem. We ran into it with Chiang Kai Shek in china.And with Diem and successors in vietnam, and Allawi etc in iraq, and karzai in afghanistan, etc.
The local strongman tells us that he understands his culture and he knows how to handle the problem we present to him, and we say no, he has to do things our way because we know better. And then when we're pulling out usually he's too polite to say I Told You So, since after all at that point he's our dependent and we could ship him back to the insurgents if we were too upset at him.
We could probably assume that if there are US ground forces in the Pakistan side of the border region, only those with clearance would know about it.
True if we're careful never to leave any witnesses alive....
I do agree that the use of drones stinks politically, but when your enemy behaves like the Borg (assimilate or be destroyed),
then you give the locals a clear choice. Do they support the Borg that wants to assimilate them, or do they support the Borg's opponents who tend to blow them up by mistake?
Somehow this reminds me of the cathar story. The cathars were a group of rebel christians, fundamentalist fanatics who did not recognise the church's authority. They *believed* at a time when the church was mostly corrupt and didn't get a lot of belief. They spread like an epidemic, and the church didn't know how to stop them. So the first approach was to send in armies to kill them, and it didn't work very well. To some extent the foreign armies tended to increase conversion rates, and it often wasn't clear which people to kill, leading to the famous saying "Kill them all, the Lord will know his own". The foreign armies tore up southern france but didn't stop the cathars.
So then the church set up the Dominican order. They accepted doctrines of poverty and good works similar to the cathars, and they developed something like a cathar zeal. They looked and behaved rather like cathars except they were loyal to the church. They moved in and got support, and they killed off the cathar leaders in gruesome ways, and eventually the whole cathar movement went extinct except perhaps for small very secret groups.
If it was fast mobile warfare, then it would make sense to bomb enemy command posts. Kill off their top officers and their strategy might fall apart. But I don't think that works well on the Borg. They don't depend on great military strategists for their battle plan. All they need to do is keep assimilating. So to me it looks stupid to do stuff that makes it even easier for them to assimilate more recruits.
Just plain stupid. And I think we do it because we can. We kept training horse cavalry until 1940, and we continued building battleships until 1944. It's very hard for us to stop doing something once we start.
Sure, people are people, but if the devil is in the details I can't dismiss cultural differences out of hand. I'll give an example. I had ordered a dosa, which is a south Indian paper-thin, almost pancake-like (though not sweet) flatbread. If you go to a dosa shop, they give chutney and sambar (best comparison is onion soup). I was eating my dosa in the car that day, so I skipped the sambar. As we were approaching an area where there are a lot of beggar kids, I considered donating the unused sambar to the hungry street kids. My driver, normally a charitable sort, stopped me. He said, "They'll be angry." When I asked why, he explained that you don't give one part of a set meal. They'll wonder why you didn't give the dosa, so you'll be insulting them. Of course, my thinking is I didn't want to waste food. Both arguements are valid, it's just a matter of different thinking.
When I first moved abroad, I spent too much time comparing the US culture to Indian culture. Sometimes when I came across a seemingly insurmountable inconvenience, it was just too easy to ask, why can't they do things more like us? After a while, I stopped getting frustrated by the inconveniences, and started managing them instead. Life has been easier since.
So, while people are people, what seems like a logical and possible solution in one part of the world is not always 100% possible elsewhere. Sometimes you just have to accept an imperfect solution and figure out how to manage the flaws.
The Taliban spreads by taking advantage of the imperfect social system in place, especially in the villages, where you often find the more traditional culture. Pakistan, even moreso than in India, has a system where it's most often the wealthy landlords who have political power, and they are a self-serving bunch, not giving a voice or financial support to the poor. So, the Taliban comes in like Robin Hood, promising support to the poor if they accept their thinking. Not surprisingly, many do.
It seems the solution is not unlike how the Dominicans overtook the cathars, where Pakistan (with the help of the US, if we can put aside the risk), mirrors the Taliban's recruiting effort by overhauling the imperfect system, thereby giving the general people a voice and jobs. The thing is, nation building is hard to accomplish when the enemy is not abiding by the rules of war. There are reports of violent hostiles taking innocent civilians hostage and putting them in harm's way. Nation building is best accomplished when relative peace has been established.
It seems we have a new US General in place. Luckily, he is reportedly not a traditional military strategist. Let's hope he can find a way to minimize civilian casualties in the region.
Sure, it's a risk to give funds to a country who is most likely taking advantage of our generosity. However, like a working poor man who asks for a bigger tip after he just fixed my electric problem, giving anyway might be the best answer if it encourages goodwill.
Sure, people are people, but if the devil is in the details I can't dismiss cultural differences out of hand.
Agreed. And we don't want to dismiss the similarities and simply accept that we cannot understand others at all.
In the USA if you see someone who holds a sign that says "will work for food" he will not be pleased if you give him canned green beans. He doesn't want to hold his sign with cans in front of him and he doesn't want to carry the cans around. You haven't much helped him, even though you don't like green beans and don't want the food to be wasted.
There are fundamentals that are usually pretty similar. All over the world, if you point a gun at somebody and say "Do what I say" in their language, they will stop what they're doing and watch you very carefully, making no sudden moves. The only exception I've heard of who are likely to attack you immediately instead are the Sikhs.
And all over the world, if you point a gun at somebody and say "Ech sonba stim waol" as if you don't speak their language, they will reliably get very upset. "Do what I say" implies you want them to do something more than you want to shoot them. If you point a gun at them and you can't tell them what you want, that's a whole different level of seriousness. How many US soldiers speak Pashto? Dari? Urdu?
When I first moved abroad, I spent too much time comparing the US culture to Indian culture. Sometimes when I came across a seemingly insurmountable inconvenience, it was just too easy to ask, why can't they do things more like us? After a while, I stopped getting frustrated by the inconveniences, and started managing them instead.
When you're part of a conquering army, it's much easier to manage such things by requiring that the local people cater to you. And they will, to a large extent, since they have no choice but to adapt to you in the short run. It may not make them like you better, but they don't have to like it. You're the conquering army and they're the locals.
The Taliban spreads by taking advantage of the imperfect social system in place, especially in the villages, where you often find the more traditional culture. Pakistan, even moreso than in India, has a system where it's most often the wealthy landlords who have political power, and they are a self-serving bunch, not giving a voice or financial support to the poor. So, the Taliban comes in like Robin Hood, promising support to the poor if they accept their thinking. Not surprisingly, many do.
Yes, exactly. Like the communists, and the zapatistas, and, well, pretty much everybody who promotes social change that the self-serving rich don't want.
... Pakistan ... mirrors the Taliban's recruiting effort by overhauling the imperfect system, thereby giving the general people a voice and jobs.
Why would the self-serving rich be willing to do that? In vietnam we asked them to do land reform and they told us to kill the communists. There are claims that we had the Viet Cong pretty much killed off but unfortunately the north vietnamese army kept us pretty busy after that. We relocated the villagers to new land where we could protect them better, which was kind of land reform, huh.
So OK, these people have a vision of a better life, and our job is to show them that they can't have that -- we'll give them hell, and if they give up their dreams maybe they can have some kind of jobs and maybe a voice so they can make suggestions....
The thing is, nation building is hard to accomplish when the enemy is not abiding by the rules of war.
Also the rich people don't do what we want. We tell them how to stop the insurgency and they insist on doing it their way. If only they'd do what we tell them to, it would be so much more convenient! "Give up the source of your wealth and be democratic, it will be so much better." And somehow they don't listen. Maybe it's because they have a different culture we just can't understand.
Oh, if only the poor people would wage war according to our rules! That would make things so much more convenient for us, and so much easier for us to win.
Nation building is best accomplished when relative peace has been established.
Yes, once the resistance is crushed, then it's much easier to get the survivors to go along with the people we support. They might not give their full cooperation before that. There was a time when they used that approach in the USA. When a union went on strike we called out the army.... After the communists took over russia we said it was communist agitators making people go on strike....
Let's hope he can find a way to minimize civilian casualties in the region.
What's his goal? If the goal is to crush the resistance, then minimising casualties has to be a secondary thing.
If the goal is to resolve the main complaints so the communist agitators won't get support, he won't get much help from any local governments, right? And how many of the languages does he speak? No doubt he's had academic courses explaining about cultural issues and how the US army needs to cater to local cultures so the local people won't get offended at us. I'm sure he takes that into account.
Oh, if only there was a government in place doing things we didn't like. We could support the Taliban in overthrowing them. It's kind of arbitrary which side we pick to intervene on, isn't it.
When Bush2 got us into this nefarious "War On Terror" we should have asked more deeper questions sooner. This effort has become out of control. We are obviously being duped by many people in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. We are being plowed under morally,physically emotionally and financially. This just reeks of another one of the foreign elite of nation states from afar trying to get anything the can before we implode and have to retreat to protectionism. Beware of the coming of the End.
It is very well known in Pakistan, that both Benazir Bhutto and one of her Generals, Nasirullah Babar, used to label Taliban as their children ... a product of their own wisdom and strategy towards the Afghan-Soviet-US-Pak war in 1980s. Pakistan is today reaping the harvest of Afghan-Soviet war, with the poisonous seeds of Taliban sown by all the characters of that era. In Pakistan the credit mainly goes to the late President Ziaul Haque and his protege like Nawaz Sharif, Jamate Islami and company.
January/February 2010
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