Hey, have people forgotten about the war in Afghanistan?

We will soon mark the eleventh anniversary of the horrific events of 9/11. The infamous day could easily be the defining moment from the primary school years of the typical freshman students whom I will soon welcome when the fall term begins.

To those freshman students, it could also mean that the US has always been at war since their earliest memories—the war in Afghanistan began in October 2001. Since then, the US military fatalities in the Afghan campaign alone recently exceeded 2,100, with the rest of the coalition suffering another thousand. And then there are the thousands who have been injured, physically or mentally or both. We have to add to all these tragic statistics the combat fatalities on the “other” side and the destruction of civilian lives and property.

Unfortunately, the Afghan war is rarely ever discussed by the major party candidates for the Presidency of the United States. Even when any reference is made, it is almost as if it is a footnote in the policy discussions.

Along with the explicit war in Afghanistan, we have also been engaged in battles in Pakistan, even though officially we do not refer to this as "war." Perhaps because a significant aspect of the operations in Pakistan is conducted by the CIA and through unmanned drones, and not by the military and “boots on the ground?” We are barely past the midpoint of 2012 and the US has already conducted 33 drone missile strikes in Pakistan. The latest drone attack was during the celebratory festival of Eidul Fitr, which concluded the month‐long Ramadan fasting.

It seems that every year, even every day, is a critical one in shaping Pakistan’s destiny, and this year is no different. The highest court in Pakistan forced out the country’s prime minister, Yousuf Gilani, after he repeatedly refused to re‐open investigations on frauds committed by the president, Asif Ali Zardari. Even though he served only for a little over four years, Gilani holds the record as the person who served the longest continuous term in that office in the country’s 65‐year history. That record, by itself, is a huge measure of the fragile political conditions in Pakistan.

Gilani’s successor as the head of government, Raja Pervez Ashraf, has indicated that he will also refuse to comply with the judicial ruling. The confrontation between the parliamentary and judicial branches will further complicate governance in a country that is rife with problems, including the US drone attacks that the Pakistani people detest.

As more and more Pakistanis feel that the country’s government has lost even its feeble abilities to govern, yet again there will be worries, internally and externally, about the military exercising its influence through a coup before the scheduled general elections in February 2013.

With so much at stake, it is quite a shame that neither Obama and Biden, nor Romney and Ryan, have anything to say about Pakistan and how they will shape their policies towards Pakistan. I suppose that when Afghanistan and the war there receive such scant attention, it ought not to surprise us that there is practically nothing said about Pakistan!

I understand that an anemic economic growth and high unemployment will mean that the focus will be on domestic issues. But, it is not that the domestic economic issues are unconnected to the military conflicts. At some point in the very near future, the US will exit Afghanistan similar to the earlier “foreign” retreats, especially those of the Soviets and the British, and by when we will have spent a trillion dollars, in addition to the trillion‐plus in Iraq.  The Afghanistan war, along with the disastrous excursion in Iraq, has been significant factors behind the rapid growth in the US debt.

Further, the Afghanistan war and, therefore, our calculated interests in Pakistan, pre‐date the Great recession by six years and continue to haunt us even after the end of the recession. Don’t they deserve at least a little bit of air time? At least more than the time we spent discussing how the female body shuts down to prevent pregnancy during illegitimate rapes?

Pakistan working for world peace. No, not from the Onion :)

I have to enjoy these moments before school starts :)

Ever since the joker Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, I have become an irregular reader of that newspaper.  So, I had no idea, until now, that Pakistan had the following half-page ad in the WSJ, to mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks. (click on the image to view the entire A-10 page, and for a clearer ad.)

"Since 2001, a nation of 180 million has been fighting for the future of the world's 7 billion!"

Really?

Seriously?

I had no idea :)

Mumbai terror yet again reveals the difference between India and the US

I was reminded of one of my posts from almost a couple of years ago where I had excerpted from the prolific Pankaj Mishra:

India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
This is largely because many Indians still live with a sense of permanent crisis, of a world out of joint, where violence can be contained but never fully prevented, and where human action quickly reveals its tragic limits. The fatalism I sense in my village may be the consolation of the weak, of those powerless to shape the world to their ends. But it also provides a built-in check against the arrogance of power — and the hubris that has made America’s response to 9/11 so disastrously counterproductive.

 How counterproductive?  Like so:

Afghanistan.
     Iraq.
          Pakistan.
               Yemen.
                    Libya.
                         Somalia.

And counting :(

Prosecuting terrorists: America and Obama wimp out, and India has the cojones!

So, Obama has backtracked, yet again.  It is getting difficult to keep count anymore!

This time, with the decision not to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the criminal justice system, as he said he would.  Instead, Obama is going the Bush route of military trials in Guantanamo.  I understand that a "principled politician" is an oxymoron, but still ...

Compare the American situation with the horrendous acts of terrorism in India.  The world was stunned by the events that unfolded in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, and the images of a terrorist methodically killing innocent civilians were simply surreal.  While nothing can be done with the terrorists who died, the survivor is a parallel to 9/11's KSM, right?

So, how was that lone surviving terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, handled?

On 3 May 2010, an Indian court convicted him of murder, waging war on India, possessing explosives, and other charges.^[5] On 6 May 2010, the same trial court sentenced him to death on four counts and to a life sentence on five other counts. Bombay high court has upheld the death sentence on 21 Feb 2011

No special military trials. And, wrapped up in a little over two years.  Despite all the potential for all kinds of fallout, given the high levels of tensions between India and Pakistan.  India's government and politics were confident and secure enough to carry out the trial.

Not so, here in the US.  What a shame!  It is now almost ten years since 9/11, and we are still fumbling around because we are afraid of how to work this through the criminal justice system?  Dahlia Lithwick puts it bluntly: "Cowardly, Stupid, and Tragically Wrong"

Every argument advanced to scuttle the Manhattan trial for KSM was false or feeble: Open trials are too dangerous; major trials are too expensive; too many secrets will be spilled; public trials will radicalize the enemy; the public doesn't want it.

What the heck has happened to the US, eh!

Lithwick writes:

The only lesson learned is that Obama's hand can be forced. That there is no principle he can't be bullied into abandoning. In the future, when seeking to pass laws that treat different people differently for purely political reasons, Congress need only fear-monger and fabricate to get the president to cave. Nobody claims that this was a legal decision. It was a political triumph or loss, depending on your viewpoint. The rule of law is an afterthought, either way.

Isn't it awful, pathetic, and scary too, that the rule of law has become an afterthought?

Christina Green: life book-ended by tragedies

The nine-year old, who died at the terrorist assassination attempt in Arizona, was born on 9/11/2001.  One of the many tragic and ironic coincidences in life.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Click here for profiles of the other victims of this horrendous act of terrorism.

Cartoon of the day: on the mosque at Manhattan

The geography of top secret America

I would love it if the Association of American Geographers invited the Washington Post journalists, Dana Priest and Williiam Arkin, to be speakers at a plenary session at the next Annual Meeting in Seattle.  It will be fantastic to listen to them talk about their two-year investigation into the geography of the ultra secretive American government since 9/11.  The map and the geographic database they have assembled is bloody frightening--that in a democratic society we could have such a system!

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

The Matrix seems more and more real, and less and less fictional :(

ht

Am not going to Arizona. For now.

I am not going to Arizona anytime soon, unless their immigration law is repealed or declared unconstitutional and void.

It is not any hyperbole, which unfortunately fills the airwaves and drowns out the genuine concerns.  In my case, my decision not to visit Arizona is simply because I remember all too well the awful feelings of sudden awareness of my brown-skinned ethnic appearance and accent after the horrific events of 9/11. 

I lived in Bakersfield, California, when the towers of the World Trade Center in New York tumbled down to dust.  Later that day, when it was early morning half way around the world in India, I talked to my parents and assured them that I was safe and that they needn’t worry about me.

After a momentary pause, my father slowly said something like “maybe you should consider shaving your beard off, at least for a few weeks.”  His concern was that a passionate mob might think that I am one of “them”, which could then have disastrous results.

I laughed it off.  I did not want to scare him by admitting that the thought had crossed my mind as well, and that I had already planned to restrict my movements outside the home only to the bare essentials.  There is, after all, millennia of human experiences distilled into the statement, “better safe, than sorry.”

My worry was justified to some extent by the news that a Sikh had been shot and killed because his beard and turban made him look suspiciously similar to the images of the bearded and turbaned Osama bin Laden and his followers.  Incidentally, this tragic incident happened in Arizona—in Mesa!

It was a strange time, for the country and for me.  After years of living in the US without having to think twice about my skin color and my beard, I now had to systematically think through the potential downsides of being brown-skinned, bearded, and with an accent. 

I did not become clean-shaven, and nor was there even one single incident where I was even remotely threatened.  Even at the security screening at airports, I went through without any special treatment—just like anybody else.  And, yes, the scientific training reminded me about the data that showed that there was no large-scale and systematic targeting of people like me.

But, it was a while before my perception of the reality would return to the pre-9/11 days when I did not have to be self-conscious about my ethnic appearance.  I suppose I am like most humans in that we need to be convinced within ourselves that our fears are unfounded. 

Which is why I am not in favor of visiting Arizona.  How much ever their elected officials and public safety officers claim that brown-skin will not become a blip in their enforcement radars, they have planted a worry in my head about a probability that I could be asked to prove my citizenship if I am in Arizona. 

Earlier this year, I met a Hungarian environmental attorney, who was in Eugene for ten weeks as a visiting fellow with Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW.)  I chuckled when she made sure that she had her passport before we stepped outside for coffee.  “Even in Hungary I always carry my passport” she said. 

I thought it was horribly bizarre that a Hungarian citizen had to walk around in Budapest with citizenship papers in case the police asked for it.  “But, this is America” was my response.  I explained that like most people, I never carry my passport with me when I am in the US.  To top it off, I joked that we would sue the police if we were asked to prove our legal right to be here. 

Well, it is not a joke anymore, I suppose. 

I worry that the possibility exists—even if a low probability—that I could end up in a jail in Arizona because I don’t carry my passport while within the borders of these United States of America. 

Well, I would rather bypass the Grand Canyon State.

We do too little for the place we all should call home: Africa

Register Guard, Dec 27, 2009

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — When students asked me about my winter break plans, my favorite reply was a simple one-liner: “I am going home.”

Their typical response was something along the lines of, “Oh, how long will you be in India?” That is all the opening I needed to engage them in a discussion of how Africa is the “home” for all humans. The “roots” of Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte are connected to our own collective narrative as well.

Tanzania offers a compelling argument for why it is home to humans — going back to hominids, who were human-like precursors to our kind. The evidence, in this case, includes the well-preserved footprints of hominids in northern Tanzania, estimated to be 3.75 million years old.

Further, with coffee having originated in Ethiopia, the stretch of Africa that includes Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia is an important ancestral home to this avid coffee drinking human.

Tanzania is merely one country in the African continent, and at almost a million square kilometers, Tanzania has about four times the area of Oregon. Yes, four times — that is how large the country is. Dar es Salaam, the capital city, and its neighboring region has a population roughly equal to that of the entire state of Oregon. One can, therefore, easily imagine the challenge at the very early stages of planning the trip — how choose the parts of Tanzania to visit over the three weeks I will spend here. Of course, I am here to focus on a research question, but more on this later.

As I continued to work on my going-home travel plans, I brought in Africa and Tanzania as examples at the appropriate moments in my classroom during the recently concluded fall term. For instance, during a discussion on global climate change, I used maps to point out that the electricity consumption in New York City alone was equal to the consumption in all of sub- Saharan Africa, with the exception of South Africa. Yes, it caught the students’ attention.

Students’ response has been the same over the years: They are excited to learn about the continent of Africa when provided with the chance, and utterly disappointed if there is nothing presented despite their genuine interest in learning more. I remember one African-American student in particular who was visibly disappointed that there was nothing about Africa in the schedule of social science classes.

Even if the rest of us are not like that student, who was innately driven to understand Africa, the post-Sept. 11 world in which we live requires us to give Africa the attention it deserves. I hope that we have not forgotten the significant pre-Sept. 11 incidents in Africa. First, in 1998, came the near- simultaneous bombings at the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Kenya, the work of al-Qaeda. Responding to these incidents, President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes on precise locations in Sudan in an attempt to neutralize Osama bin Laden. Ten years later, al-Qaeda sympathizers have yet another safe haven in Somalia. Its capital, Mogadishu, has earned notoriety as the world’s most dangerous place.

From an economic perspective, Tanzania and most of Africa seem to be falling behind the rest of the world. Globalization, which columnist Thomas Friedman popularly refers to as the world getting flatter, has delivered a double whammy to Africa. On the one hand, the trend of globalization has further pushed the heavily populated nations of China and India closer to the United States and Europe. On the other hand, most African countries rarely register a blip in our academic and journalistic radars. The economic playing field does not seem to have been leveled for Tanzania and most of the rest of Africa.

Yet we continue to marginalize Africa, even though doing so serves neither our academic interests nor the geopolitical interests that govern our realpolitik. I suppose the election of Barack Obama as president has given us a wonderful opportunity: Instead of arguing over where he was born, why not channel all that energy into understanding Africa?

Wouldn’t we want to know more about our roots? 

A tale of two countries and their catastrophes

Writes Pankaj Mishra:

India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
This is largely because many Indians still live with a sense of permanent crisis, of a world out of joint, where violence can be contained but never fully prevented, and where human action quickly reveals its tragic limits. The fatalism I sense in my village may be the consolation of the weak, of those powerless to shape the world to their ends. But it also provides a built-in check against the arrogance of power — and the hubris that has made America’s response to 9/11 so disastrously counterproductive.

The other 9/11s

In talking about the latest wave of globalization, Thomas Friedman has often remarked that 9/11 was an important date, and this was before the events of 2001.
It was on September 11, 1989 that Hungary opened its border to the free world, and created a channel that eventually brought down the USSR itself.
And then, in even more coincidence, on November 9th, written as 9/11 in most of the rest of the world, the Berlin Wall fell.

This opinion piece in the LA Times tells the story, and it is worth reading in full:

[In Hungary] a new generation of reform-minded communists had taken charge. Almost overnight, they wrote a U.S.-style constitution and began speaking openly of a free press, free markets and free elections. Emboldened, a small group of local Sopron activists decided to celebrate the new spirit. Their modest aim: put up some tents, hire a brass band and let the beer and good vibes flow. One of the organizers came up with an especially inspired idea -- to briefly open a gate through the barbed-wire frontier to Austria, allowing people to casually stroll back and forth across the border for the first time in four decades. They called it the Pan-European Picnic.

Because anything involving the border was a matter of extreme sensitivity, their request for a permit came to the attention of Hungary's young prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, the man behind so many of the Gorbachev-like changes taking place. Immediately, a light bulb went off in his head.

Every summer, tourists from East Germany descended on Hungary, where "goulash economics," mixing Marxist industrial planning with a measure of free enterprise, provided things unavailable elsewhere in the grit-gray Soviet sphere: nice restaurants, ample food, good wine. But this year would be different. This year, Nemeth decided to use Hungary's visitors as pawns in a great geopolitical chess game.

Since 1988, Hungarian citizens had been allowed to travel relatively freely. But East Germans were still not allowed by their government to cross into Western Europe. Although they could vacation in Hungary, there was a mutual treaty in force obliging the Hungarians to ensure that East Germans did not escape to the West.

Earlier in 1989, before the seasonal onslaught of East German tourists, Nemeth had very publicly ordered the electricity in the barbed-wire border with the West turned off. Border guards began ceremoniously cutting down large swathes of the barrier -- filmed by Western TV crews summoned for the occasion. Nemeth intended this as a clear message to Hungary's East German guests. Look folks, he declared in effect, a hole in the Iron Curtain. There's nothing to prevent you from "escaping" through it to freedom.

Nemeth hoped to unleash a flood. He believed that a mass escape of East Germans from Hungary would pose an existential threat to the regime of Erich Honecker, the dictatorial boss of the German Democratic Republic. He also believed that if Honecker fell, it would bring down the Berlin Wall -- and with it the entire communist bloc. Amid the chaos, he could realize his true goal. Hungary too would gain its freedom.

The rest, as they say, is history.