Pakistan is a Catch-22 character, writes Hitchens. Yes, indeed!

Re-reading Catch-22 as a middle-aged fellow was one heck of an immeasurably more pleasing experience than when I read it a long time ago as a teenager.  Of course, reading it against the backdrop of insane wars, it was breathtakingly insightful.

One can, therefore, easily imagine how much my excitement multiplied over when I read the opening lines of Christopher Hitchens' column at Slate:

In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Lt. Milo Minderbinder transforms the mess accounts of the American airbase under his care into a "syndicate" under whose terms all servicemen are potential stakeholders. But this prince of entrepreneurs and middlemen eventually becomes overexposed, especially after some incautious forays into Egyptian cotton futures, and is forced to resort to some amoral subterfuges. The climactic one of these is his plan to arrange for himself to bomb the American base at Pianosa (for cost plus 6 percent, if my memory serves) with the contract going to the highest bidder.

One of the very few times I know exactly what Hitchens is writing about!  What a neat way to start a new academic year :)

Anyway, Hitchens writes that Pakistan is operating like Minderbinder.  How does this guy so easily connect the otherwise unconnected dots in the literary and geopolitical worlds!

Hitchens remarks that Pakistan makes an amateur out of Minderbinder:

In return for subventions of millions of American dollars, it now turns out, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency (the ISI) can "outsource" the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and several other NATO and Afghan targets, to a related crime family known as the Haqqani network. Coming, as it does, on the heels of the disclosure about the official hospitality afforded to Osama Bin Laden, this reveals the Pakistani military-intelligence elite as the most adroit double-dealing profiteer from terrorism in the entire region.

Minderbinder, er, Pakistan presses on full steam ahead; its foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar struck a defiant note:

Ms. Khar, however, lashed out at the role of the CIA, which most recently orchestrated the covert strike against Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. She said to Al Jazeera channel: “If we talk about links, I am sure the CIA also has links with many terrorist organisations around the world, by which we mean intelligence links.”

In a remark that raised eyebrows in both New York and Washington, Ms. Khar added: “And this particular network, which the U.S. continues to talk about, is a network which was the blue-eyed boy of the CIA itself for many years.”

Finally, we are all bound to lose it the way Yossarian did, after Snowden's blood and guts spill out on to him :(

The only saving grace is that, even though this might sound like "other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" the overall level of violence in human history has been decreasing, and decreasing really fast in recent years.

Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species.
The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth. It has not brought violence down to zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.

If Pakistan played well with the rest of the world, we can speed up the process even more ...