Wake-up call for Pakistan?

"I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. I was afraid [of] going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. Only 11 students attended the class out of 27. The number decreased because of Taliban's edict. On my way from school to home I heard a man saying 'I will kill you'. I hastened my pace... to my utter relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening someone else over the phone." (Malawa Yousufzai's blog, 3 October 2009)


Finally, it seems volatile Pakistan is united by a heinous Taliban act, the October 9th shooting of 14-year old schoolgirl, Malala Yousufzai, along with two of her school mates. Malala's offense? Her brave, public criticisms of Taliban restrictions on girls' having access to education. Calls for more aggressive action against Taliban insurgents in Pakistan are now widespread, embracing even conservative Muslim factions.

Up to now, little has been done against the Taliban, who have concentrated their presence in remote northwestern Pakistan, including the Swat Valley where Malala lives. As I write, Malala appears to be making a slow recovery after a bullet pierced her neck and traveled to her spine. While she's now able to move her hands and legs, following a reduction in sedatives, her prognosis for full recovery remains uncertain.

In a horrid compromise, Islamabad in 2007 agreed to the Talban occupation. After taking-over the Valley, the Taliban forced men to wear beards, blew up schools, many of them for girls, and forbade women access to the market place.

Pakistan's army entered the valley in 2009 following these outrages, causing Taliban leaders to flee into Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the Taliban remain a formidable presence.

Malala's ordeal isn't an isolated incident. It's happened in multiples, both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not long ago, it made headlines when Taliban gassed a school for girls in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, they recently beat-up a girl who wanted to go to school.

It saddens me that in the recent Biden-Ryan debate Malala's horrid fate never received mention, even when our Afghanistan policy entered into the debate and a woman reporter served as moderator. The unrepentant Taliban leadership meanwhile promises they'll try again, should Malala survive.

Surely such silence bodes ill for women in Afghanistan when coalition forces leave Afghanistan in 2014. Unless Islamabad opts for a decisive policy change towards its insurgent presence, the duress of women seeking self-realization through the liberation education provides is likely to continue. Up to now, Pakistan has sent mixed signals, more concerned with negating Indian influence in Afghanistan via destabilization than negotiated reconciliation with its neighbor that would also ameliorate life for many of Pakistan's own beleaguered women.

While presently Pakistan's military and political elite beat a path to her bedside, it's probable they'll re-clothe themselves in silence, unless Pakistanis continue to speak out.

One final thought: What's happened to Malala again reveals the horrid calumny of doctrinaire ideology, whether religious or political, when polemic turns into hate and spills over into intolerance.

rj

Bombing Iran: Big mistake!

This year, 2012, is fraught with danger. I write of Iran, which clearly has become our leading nemesis. Perhaps not since pre-Pearl Harbor has talk of a pending war, like the menacing sword of Democles, weighed so heavily upon our nation. It's a conflict that need not happen and that we should do everything to avoid.

The problem is that both the U. S. and Europeans have already pursued negotiations several times with little result, with a new round to take place soon. Just two months ago, the U. N. issued the findings of its International Atomic Energy Agency, with troves of evidence substantiating Iran's steady march towards a nuclear capacity far beyond its purported purpose of generating electricity and empowering medical reactors.

Several experts forecast Iran will have its bomb within the next three years, and that over the next several months, will have reached the irreversible point in its technological advances. In short, the window for a successful attack, knocking out Iran's capacity to produce a nuclear bomb, is rapidly closing. Even if such an attack were initiated, we would at best probably set back their program by maybe three years. It's simply not a viable option.

The consequences would be incalculable. Hamas and Hezbollah would attack Israel. It would unite much of the Muslim world, wreak havoc on our troops still in Afghanistan, and within hours, spike oil prices 50% higher, plunging the world into economic chaos.

Quite frankly, Iran holds all the aces in this dangerous political poker. We just may have to live with a nuclear Iran. We did so with the Soviet Union, then China and, presently, North Korea.

We have tried assassination of Iranian scientists, planted explosives inside facilities, conducted electronic sabotage, but to no avail. Thus far, sanctions have proven our best option and are clearly biting into the Iranian economy. Yet even here, we are countered by Russian and Chinese recalcitrance.

Meanwhile, there looms the possibility of Israel's launching a preemptive strike. We know Netanyahu and his cabinet have been engaged in secret discussion on a contingency plan. Ideally, they'd like the U. S. to initiate a strike, highly unlikely while Obama is president. As Romney put it, "Reelect Obama and Iran will have the bomb." Currently, Israel's relationship with the Obama administration is at an unprecedented low point.

If Israel were to attack, it would optimally be just before the November election, resulting in substantial pressure on the Obama administration to support its staunch ally, which understandably sees its very survival at stake. In a replay of August, 1914, when Germany was forced into supporting its treaty ally, Austro-Hungary, resulting in World War I, the U. S. could find itself drawn into a military imbroglio that would make Iraq and Afghanistan seem mere excursions by comparison

Again, the stakes are too high to play brinkmanship. Ratching up the rhetoric in a political year only increases the danger of igniting a spark kindling global catastrophe. The wisest approach should be one grounded in calm, reasoned diplomacy, with Iran treated as an equal at the conference table. Sanctions are one thing, but surely we can try some carrots, too.

And if Iran does get the bomb, don't assume it means lights out. We have lived with nuclear adversaries a very long time. We can do so yet again.

They, too are family

The other day I came upon this picture of an emaciated Somali child. Unfortunately, we can multiply his number into the hundreds of thousands across the East Horn of Africa (Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti). A drought like this hasn’t been seen in 60 years. In Somalia, conflict waged by al Shabab, an extremist Islamist group, has added to the tragedy, killing aid workers and kidnapping would-be refugees desperately fleeing for help. We can’t do much about the gratuitous evil nature sometimes wreaks, but worse than the horrors of earthquake, tsunami, and drought is Man’s savagery across his recorded history. Voltaire once suggested we kill more in our wars than all the natural disasters, and he missed the two World Wars of the previous century. Ironically, throughout history much of this bloodshed has born the imprint of religion that frequently breeds intolerance. Reading history and following current events, I am distrustful of all euphorias, claiming to have found the the person or way. As Robert Brault puts it, "I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true."

In Kenya, there is now a huge refugee camp that’s arisen, a tent city sheltering perhaps 500,000 refugees who cross into Kenya at about 1000 a day. Some have walked for 15-days, only to reach the final 50-mile stretch frequented by bandits, often fellow Somalis, who rob and rape. The UN says that up to 750,000 may die in this drought. That’s sufficient horror in itself.

In the West, I think the vast majority of us don’t think about places like Africa and its teeming poverty, pickpocket governments, roving militants and, now, famine. Africa seems far away and the people very different from ourselves. It’s convenient to think this way, a way of walking across the street rather than encountering people who, shed of the cultural baggage, mirror ourselves with names, families and the same desire for love, security, and happiness. Geography is often accidental. By chance, we drew the lucky cards, born in the West, where even our have-nots are rich by comparison.

I went to India years ago, and not with a tour. It changed my life. Again, these were people like ourselves. Compassion doesn’t hide behind a fence. Drawn from empathy, the putting on another’s shoes, it overflows geography. Everyone should visit a third world country. Better, go as a helper. Nothing comparable helps us catch the vision: to see ourselves as one.

Crisis in the Horn of Africa

We’ve been hearing lots lately about the mass influx of Somalis into Kenya, desperately seeking help in their flight from devastating drought that threatens 3-million people with starvation, made worse by Islamic terrorism. It’s estimated that 29,000 Somali children under five have starved and that another 640,000 Somali children are severely undernourished. Though we're talking of Somalia, portions of Kenya and Ethiopia are also experiencing sustained drought, the worst since the El Nino gyrations of the 1970s.

Things are likely to get worse in the Horn of Africa. In just the last two decades, herders in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia have lost 80% of their stock due to starvation and disease.

But it isn’t simply climate change that’s the culprit here. Somalia is a failed state with no functioning government, characterized by an unstinting flow of weapons, piracy, and Islamic militants. Much of its chaos draws upon its colonial past and Ethiopian aggression that swallowed up the Somali populace, dividing them into five jurisdictions. On receiving independence in 1960, only the areas under British and Italian rule were reunited, the other Somali-speaking areas incorporated into Kenya, Djiboui, and Ethiopia. In turn, Somalia became an extension of the Cold War, as the U. S. and the Soviets competed for influence. The flow of weapons began and its violent aftermath continues in Somalia.

Somalia's attempts to regain its land from Ethiopia resulted in the disastrous Ogaden conflict of the late 70s, destroying its economy. Somalia hasn’t seen a functioning government since 1991 and the legacy of Cold War arms into Somalia has made Somalia a seminal trouble spot in East Africa. Some of this weaponry has fallen into the hands of al Qaeda linked militants such as Al Shabab, which has denied a famine exists and considers Western food aid a plot.

In a subsequent post, I’ll touch on the growing refugee crisis across the world, not just Somalia, that promises to become one of humanity’s greatest challenges as global warming converges with failed economies, radical religion, and corrupt government to exact unprecedented suffering.

Do they not also bleed?

 

The news media has widely reported the capture yesterday of the notorious Bosnian Serb war criminal, Ratko Mladic, wanted for his leadership role in the massacre of 7,500 men and boys from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995.  He will now be handed-over to the International Criminal Tribunal to face trial.  It’s justice long overdue.

Concurrently, yesterday saw the capture of one of history’s worst mass killers since Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and yet it’s a story you have to search for diligently, since it’s been so grievously under reported by Western newspapers in their callous, ethnocentric dismissal of third world people. Do they not value their own lives, too?

In any event, the UN announced yesterday the arrest of 52 year old Bernard Munyagishari in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  He was wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda in 1994.  Bad as Mladic’s crimes are, they pale in the context of Munyagishari’s chilling machete bloodbaths, resulting in the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in 1994, while the Western world and Africa itself looked the other way.  Obviously, white, European Yugoslavia and African politics were in play, not the black members of a minority tribe in a distant country once colonized by the Belgians.  Former President Clinton, however, did recently express regret for his administration having looked the other way and the American government has been offering a 5 million dollar reward for information leading to his capture.

A former teacher and soccer coach, Munyagishari  became the major leader of the Hutu militias that carried out the genocide taking place in just 100 days between April and June 1994. He also co-founded the Interahamwe, a militia whom he stocked with weapons.  Their specific mission was to capture, rape, then murder Tutsi women.

Munyagishari will be extradited to Tanzania, where he will stand trial before the Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).  Since 1994, it has rendered 46 judgments, with 8 acquitted and 9 under appeal.  Recently it sentenced army general Augustin Bizimungu to a 30-year term for preparing lists of Tutsis to be executed.  Unfortunately, there are still nine other major players being sought, among them Felicien Kabuga, a financier at the time.  A number of Hutu militia may have emigrated to Canada.

It’s been 17-years, confirming that often the wheels of justice grind slowly and, alas, sometimes not at all.  What sticks in my throat, however, is our frequent Western indifference and ignorance, for  cruelty has no border.  I remember the poet Yeats’ trenchant observation of volatile contemporary life:  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  We are all brothers and sisters, whatever our color, ethnicity, religion, or politics.  The horrors of Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo retain their indelible wounds and cry out for justice, but do those of the third world bleed any less?

A people set apart

“What doesn’t kill makes one stronger.”

--Japanese proverb

For two weeks now we’ve watched horrendous news footage on TV of  Japanese suffering following the 9.0 earthquake and its tsunami aftermath of 30 foot water swirling into Sendai streets, bursting over banks, uprooting houses from their foundations, turning ships upside down, drowning everything within its mindless path; even then, in Job-like fashion, venues of more calamity and angst with the loss of electrical power necessary to cooling the six reactors of the nearby Fukushima nuclear plant and daily heroic efforts to limit radiation fallout and, worse case scenario, prevent meltdown. 

But nightly we’ve also seen the Japanese people up close in their dignity and discipline.  While sorrow abounds and mounts—at present count, 6700 dead and thousands more missing, whole towns and villages swamped by the sea, their inhabitants presumably dead__there isn’t any panic or looting.  Soldiers are here to rescue, not impose order.  In personal interviews the tenor is the same:  a stoic acceptance of life’s engrained insecurity; the solace of being alive; the sense of dependency on each other.  I shudder to think what might be the situation in our own country were we to experience a calamity on the scale of what’s befallen the Japanese.

I’m not surprised by their equanimity, orderly and quiet resolve, absence of rancor at the failure of government to react quickly and sufficiently, and refusal to politicize calamity by pointing fingers.  (I think of our BP disaster in the Gulf last year, high in economic consequences, but low in fatalities.)

I first met the Japanese as a 17-year old serviceman enroute to Korea.  Dakota Air Base outside Tokyo was my initial touch-down.  Their cleanliness, kindness, and ubiquitous honesty lent a lasting impression.  Leave something behind in a restaurant or train station, rest assured, they’ll keep the item for you.  Theft, like most crime, is generally rare in Japan.  Travel books abound with the good news that Japan’s a place where you don’t have to look over your shoulder.  When I think of Japan, I associate several prominent characteristics unique to the country that help us see their present response in cultural perspective:

1. collective identity:  The Japanese value the group more than the individual. They think as one.   It’s not what’s in it for me, but how will it affect others—nation, family, friends.   Westerners sometimes disparage this, finding it regimentation or group sanctioned inhibition of self-identity.  But I think this a shallow view prejudiced by contrary cultural values.  We have personal freedom to do pretty much what we like in the West, but at what cost?  I lament our greatest loss and primary source of our national and personal fractiousness: the erosion of the communal ethic.  That ethic remains salient in Japanese culture, particularly with regard to the primacy of family.  Japanese find it difficult to fathom that parents might live 3,000 miles from their children or that children might seldom visit an aging parent.  The Japanese language itself reflects the culture’s guardianship of the interiority of the family and its special intimacy and potential solace in a wider, impersonal world pursuing material values. There are separate vocabularies designating family members:  one for family and one for outsiders.

2. Discipline:  Perhaps it derives from Buddhism, reflected in Zen, that you have this sense of integration, or self-mastery, the ability to delay gratification, a sense of the goal and the patience to pursue it.  Discipline was at the heart of the samurai warrior code and is embedded in today’s Japanese schools that are centered in more than the academic as repositories teaching pragmatic values:  social etiquette, obeying the law, esteeming the nation.  In the home, parents reenforce these values as well.  Japanese children are well-behaved. Through self-discipline, the Japanese are often better able to master deprivation and pain.  I’ve watched with fascination their patient queuing in line, accepting their beverage and bread stick in the crowded shelters.   

3. Courtesy:  related to discipline, it’s a fine art in Japan and another aspect of the primacy of the social fabric.  When we think of Japan, we often notice the extended politeness on saying hello in its accompanying ritual of bowing. The lower you bow, the more respect you convey.  Humorously, this ritual is so engrained that often you’ll see Japanese bowing as they converse on their cell phones.  Rites of etiquette extend seemingly everywhere.  There are conventions for entering and leaving trains, getting on and off an escalator.  I remember my GI delight visiting a department store in Fukuoka (Kyushu) and being taken on and off escalators by the white gloved hands of dimpled, smiling Japanese girls. 

4. artistry:  I can’t think of any place I’ve been where the creative is so much a staple of daily life from flower arranging to public  gardens and tea rituals.  Westerners sometimes say that Japanese art is imitative rather than creative.  This simply isn’t so; in fact, we’re more apt to imitate them as seen in our own penchant for Japanese gardens. One of Japan’s contemporary artistic legacies is its  sophisticated anime and comic book genres, along with video games.  We’re still catching-up.

5. Simplicity:  There exists an understated elegance to Japanese culture in its advocacy of minimalism, whether in gardening, the haiku and tanka poetry genres, or its cuisine, a simplicity that seeks not to use, but reflect nature.  Living on a crowded archipelago of  islands, the Japanese are nonetheless able to bring nature into their very living rooms with bonsai renditions of pine and cypress..  Traditional Japanese homes are furnished lightly, tables and chairs low to the floor, beds that are futons folded and stored each morning in keeping with a spatial emphasis allowing, reconfiguration.  Materials in a Japanese home are drawn directly from nature: fine woods, bamboo, silk, rice straw mats, and paper.  Colors are always subdued, light diffused.   I experienced all of this first hand when I stayed briefly in a mountain inn, or ryokan,  in the vicinity of the Shinto shrine city of Nikko in northern Honshu, wearing the kimono, eating Japanese food, largely fresh from the sea, sleeping on the floor  

It isn’t a perfect society.  In recent years the economy has struggled as other Asian nations, principally China, compete with Japanese exports in the global market; women have yet to gain full equality; the population is aging, with 1 out of 4 Japanese over 65; vestiges of an ugly nationalism is on the increase; and there exists a defensive hostility towards other ethnicities (Japan remains a homogeneous society).  While all nations have their freckles, the virtues of the Japanese nevertheless far exceed their blemishes, underscoring their likeliness to right themselves.

In its long history, Japan has faced many crises and always transcended. 1n 1730, an earthquake killed 130,000; nearly a century later, a tsunami killed 27,000; then, in 1923, in Japan’s greatest natural disaster, an earthquake striking the Kanto plain near Tokyo and subsequent fire took up to 200,000 lives.  More recently (1995), an earthquake struck the Osaka area, taking 6,000 lives. The Japanese are a resilient people who will rebuild just as they have always done.  They did it after WWII.  If character is fate, then surely the Japanese are a people set apart.