Fear The Pushtun Bogeyman Or Scaring Children As An Imperialist Habit

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

He is the author of Engaging the Muslim World. He has a regular column at Salon.com. and writes the Informed Comment blog.

He has now written what I think is the first piece that connects modern day American imperialist paranoia in Afghanistan to 19th century British imperialist paranoia in Afghanistan. In a piece called Armageddon On Top Of The World: Not! he reminds us that:

What most observers don’t realize is that the doomsday rhetoric about this region at the top of the world is hardly new. It’s at least 100 years old. During their campaigns in the northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British officers, journalists and editorialists sounded much like American strategists, analysts, and pundits of the present moment. They construed the Pashtun tribesmen who inhabited Waziristan as the new Normans, a dire menace to London that threatened to overturn the British Empire.

He goes on to remind us that:

In fact, few intelligence predictions could have less chance of coming true. In the 2008 parliamentary election, the Pakistani public voted in centrist parties, some of them secular, virtually ignoring the Muslim fundamentalist parties. Today in Pakistan, there are about 24 million Pashtuns, a linguistic ethnic group that speaks Pashto. Another 13 million live across the British-drawn “Durand Line,” the border — mostly unacknowledged by Pashtuns — between Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. Most Taliban derive from this group, but the vast majority of Pashtuns are not Taliban and do not much care for the Muslim radicals.

Lets repeat that statement once again: Most Pushtuns are not ‘Taliban’ nor ‘Islamic Radicals’. That there are fringe lunatics with guns and an overbloated rhetoric of armegeddon that is given undue and unjustified attention by scabarous and weak minded journalists and photographers is a crucial issue we prefer not to discuss.

It would be the equivalent of an Al Jazeera reporter insisting on covering the USA only from the eyes and from the hot-air rhetoric of militia groups in montana and nebraska, or the lunatic-fringe christian evangelical congregations in Florida!

The fact remains that bandying about the bogeyman makes for easy journalism, easy photography and easy sales. Fear sells. We know this well. The unfortunately an entire people, the Pushtuns, have been demonized, humiliatated, murdered, displaced and criminalized.

Mir Abbas Khan returns to his home destroyed by Pakistani Army bulldozers and helicopter gunfire. Near Kalooshah, South Waziristan

In 2004 I was in Waziristan, and spent a month there with the tribes that were being lassoed into Pakistan’s desperate attempts to appease the American war-gods. The story eventually appeared in print in Mother Jones magazine. Titled Frontier Justice its most prescient part was the conclusion that writer Malcolm Garcia wrote – based on an interview I had done inside Waziristan:

Consider … Mir Abbas Khan, in the photo on the opposite page. Look at his eyes, his ruined home, and back to his eyes—full of fear and hurt, but mostly rage.

Indeed, consider Mir Abbas Khan’s face and his eyes….and his rage. An innocent Waziri, Ahmedzai tribesman whose entire life was torn to shreds because he happened to be in the path of American and Pakistan military power games. This is in 2004 and Malcom and I argued back then – an argument that got me in trouble with Homeland Security the one time they picked me up at Miami Airport for a 3 hour intense questioning, that it is inhuman, immoral, illegal and a clear violation of their human rights and rights to justice to kill them with impunity and from thousands of feet in the air.

The Pushtuns are not ‘a tribe’, or ‘a mass’, they are individuals and these individuals, their lives, their families are what we are crushing and killing in the blood-laden fields of South Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. We have made animals out of them, reducing them to mere objects that we kills, see in the distance and attempt to blow away. Our embedded photographers continue this trend, showing the Pushtuns as alien to us, distant from our humanity, their passions, emotions, sufferings, and humiliations unknown and unfelt by us.

“Asim”, his eyes looked at me pleading, ‘”is it not possible for you to imagine that we too can act only because we are human?”, I was with Waziri madrassa students in Peshawar in 2008, as they were trying to explain to me how life for them and their families had become a living hell since 2003 as the Afghan conflict began to spill over.”Sometimes we too, knowing that it is against our laws, our beliefs and our Koran, act because we are just human beings!”. His face tightened as if about to implode “I want to kill because I may have seen my brothers body parts torn all over a room – I want to kill not because I am a fanatic, but becuase I am a brother” He looked at ‘Is that no possible for us?” I had no answer for him. We sat there in the silence, a dark madrassa dorm room, about 20 other students sitting around me, and just thought about what we had just heard.

We are precipitating a genocidal campaign against an entire people because we can’t be bothered to see them as human beings.

This war, which perhaps we once tolerated and remained quiet about, has lost its mooring, and we have lost our moral compass.  It, like Iraq, is a dishonorable war, that is being fought dishonorably and will bring nothing but dishonor to those who plan it and fight it.

No Pharaohs In The Modern World: The Liberal Muslim & Indian Democracy

The stranglehold of the orthodoxy, especially in its political and religious form, has to be loosened and slackened. The answer lies in more and more Muslim communities moving towards democracy. There is no short cut to democracy. . . . There is no place for pharaohs in the modern world. (Mushirul Hasan)

Martha Nussbaum has had a deep and committed engagement with India – a land she calls ‘her second home’, for many years now.  This American philosopher with an interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics, has found a deep interest in modern India’s struggles with democracy and ethics.

Nussbaum is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown where she held the rank of university professor.

Her latest missive on the situation in India comes as a bit of a surprise because it addresses a subject few have had the will to address; liberal Muslims confronting violence, discrimination and injustice, and yet choosing the path of the law, non-violence and intellectualism to confront it.

A new essay Land of My Dreams: Islamic liberalism under fire in India Martha Nussbaum offers a fascinating history of one of Delhi’s great liberal educational institutions, the Jamia Millia Islamia.  As Nussbaum describes it in her piece:

Jamia was born radical. Its curriculum emphasized the study of nationalism as well as the study of Islamic history and the Qu’ran; its admissions policy welcomed male and female, Hindu and Muslim; its pedagogy emphasized debate and contestation in the teaching of all subjects, including religion, denouncing the mere “passive awareness of dead facts.” The school had strong links with theorists of progressive education such as Bertrand Russell and Rabindranath Tagore and thus gave substantial weight to the arts and vocational education.

The piece is as much about the Vice-Chancellor of the institution, Mushirul Hasan, whose story, as Nussbaum points out, reminds us of 3 things:

First, the values we associate with classical liberalism-such as the defense of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and procedural due process-are not exclusively Western values. During the independence movement in India, they were reinvented by a colonized people who had seen just how little their Western masters honored such norms.

Second, these values are not tepid and centrist, as we sometimes hear, but rather, truly radical in a world of nations increasingly under pressure both from external violence and from internal quasi-fascist forces.

And finally, Hasan’s story shows that there is a distinctive and genuinely Islamic form of liberalism, long-lived and drawing inspiration from religious texts and their central concepts.

Unfortunately The Boston Review magazine allows people to comment on the essays they publish.  The reactions to Nussbaums’ piece stretch the realm of decency and coherency. I suspect that in the coming weeks the number of ‘comments’ consisting of slurs, abusive dismissals, sexist denigrations and outright insults against this scholar, philosopher, humanist and ethicist will only grow. These commentators do a disservice to not just Nussbaum, but to the very community that apparently think they are defending by abusing the writer and her works!

Martha Nussbaum is also the author of a book on the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and the threat to Indian democracy called The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future which was reviewed by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books

Play It Again Sam!

There are articles/essays that I find myself repeatedly returning to. They stand the test of time and in this age of throw-away journalism and me-too punditry, these masterpieces are reminders of why real writing and engaged journalism holds such an appeal and how it can cut past prejudices and indifference.  I will continue to link to others in this post as I think of them.

Ken Silverstein’s Parties of God is perhaps one of the clearest and most honest pieces written about the emergence of popular democracy in the Middle East and in particular within Islamic political institutions. Its appearance in a mainstream American magazine was surprising, and necessary. Favorite paragraph:

Talking about political Islam, or Islam at all, is difficult for Americans because our stereotypes are so strongly held. Islamists are imagined as poor, uneducated fanatics who, having turned to God for comfort and sustenance, are particularly prone to irrationality and violence. They do not allow their women to drive (when in fact women drive in every Muslim country except Saudi Arabia); indeed, every woman in a veil is seen as a victim of male oppression. When Islamists in Indonesia attack Playboy or Muslim Brothers in Egypt denounce racy Lebanese dancers, it is a sign not only of backwardness but of sexual repression, which is smugly asserted to be a root of Islamic terrorism. (It is doubtful that Osama bin Laden, who has at least three wives, turned to terrorism out of sexual frustration.) Fear of appearing sympathetic to movements that are frankly hostile to the U.S. government is, I suspect, another barrier to frank discussion of Islamic movements, as is the media’s clear bias in favor of Israel.

Pankaj Mishra’s 3 part essay on Kashmir – Death In Kashmir, The Birth Of A Nation & Kashmir: The Unending War, about the conflict there remains amongst the best primers on the situation ever put to the news/magazine page.  A must read for anyone trying to figure out what is going on in Kashmir, even though it was written in 2000 at the height of the militancy, it still remains relevant and honest and insightful.  There are too many favorite paragraphs but here is one that reminds us that life in this so-called ‘heaven on earth’ was very difficult and cruel even before partition:

The oldest among Kashmiris often claim that there is nothing new about their condition; that they have been slaves of foreign rulers since the sixteenth century when the Moghul emperor Akbar annexed Kashmir and appointed a local governor to rule the state. In the chaos of post-Moghul India, the old empire rapidly disintegrating, Afghani and Sikh invaders plundered Kashmir at will. The peasantry was taxed and taxed into utter wretchedness; the cultural and intellectual life under indigenous rulers that had produced some of the greatest poetry, music, and philosophy in the subcontinent dried up. Barbaric rules were imposed in the early nineteenth century: a Sikh who killed a Muslim native of Kashmir was fined nothing more than two rupees. Victor Jacquemont, a botanist and friend of Stendhal who came to the valley in 1831, thought that “nowhere else in India were the masses as poor and denuded as they were in Kashmir.”

Dude, Where Is My Anthrax?

Deadly chemical and biological weapons may be missing from the stockpile of one of the world’s largest producers of such weapons of mass destruction

These ‘agent’s’ may fall into the hands of dangerous lunatics who may decide to reek havoc on innocent civilians!

Why are we not scared?

Why has our media not inundated us with slogans, graphics and a symphony of melodies to draw our attention to this ’sensational development’?

Because the nation in question is our own United States of America and the ‘agents’ are missing from the inventory of a U.S Army institution that has already been confirmed as a source of deadly biological weapons, and whose employees have already carried out attacks against civilians!

Why are we not scared?

Read on.

∞

In late 2001 and early 2002, journalists, politicians and others began receiving Anthrax laced packages and envelopes. The attacks killed 5 people and seriously injured 17 others. It was quickly labelled Al-Qaeda’s ’second wave’ – 9/11 attack at the World Trade Center being the first.

Intoxicated by the hysteria in the aftermath of 9/11, many a respectable journalist, pundit and politician fell over themselves to ‘reveal’ evidence of Saddam’s Hussein’s involvement in this chemical weapons warfare.

It was obvious to all who the attackers were after all they were signing their packages with statements like ‘DEATH TO ISRAEL’ and ‘ALLAH IS GREAT’.

We were quickly told, obviously told, that it could only have been those damn towel heads again – the bane of American existence and way of life, them with their penchant for irrational acts of violence as taught to them by their hateful religion (here I am paraphrasing the respectable but fear ridden Pope Benedict XVI – more about his insanities and idiocies in a separate post!), them who ‘hate us for our freedoms’ as someone so eloquently put it!

We went to war. Saddam was hung. The Anthrax was forgotten, at least mostly.

Justice achieved?

∞

A few days ago the far-from-the-mainstream, non-profit press reported that the United States Army has decided to shut down its research at the U.S Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).

Lest you think that this will significantly harm our research into health cures, the USAMRIID is in fact a U.S. Army biological weapons research facility in Maryland a.k.a. a germ warfare research and development center.

And the reason for the closure – the Army is unable to maintain an accurate inventory of all the deadly biological agents in its refrigerators and laboratories!

(WHAT!)

Even more shockingly, this is the same facility that the FBI has identified as the source of the Anthrax used to in the 2001 attacks! And the employer of the man now confirmed to have been the perpetrator!

(No, sadly it was no towel head)

It is now known that Bruce Ivins, who worked at this very lab for over 18 years, engineered the attacks, stealing the deadly materials with ease and bypassing the lax inventory and control mechanisms, sending out letters to his intended victims by signing them with the words ´DEATH TO ISRAEL´and ÁLLAH IS GREAT´.

The FBI has revealed that the evidence against this man, who committed suicide before he could go to trial, is indisputable – see recent article in Science magazine.

However, this is the FBI, and I seriously doubt that we know the whole truth. The blame for the entire episode has been placed on the shoulders of one lunatic, but I at least find it unlikely that it ends there!

We may never know the extent of this or who else was involved and may still have access to the deadly materials.

We may never know the truth.

But we do know the lies.

∞

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks these Anthrax attacks played into the hands of the scaremongers, and those desperate to find an argument to go to war against Iraq.

The atmosphere of that year derailed many a fine journalists – so many ‘award winning’ journalists suspended their responsibilities, common sense and intellectual courage and refused to challenge the slop that was being cast at them. A couple of examples from 2 major international papers to support this point:

The Guardian: Iraq ‘behind US anthrax outbreaks’

The Wall Street Journal: The Anthrax Source

Then there were the professional scaremongers, those who anxiously commit all their reserves to feed their prejudices and paranoias without waiting for any evidence. Laurie Mylorie, publisher of something called ‘Iraq News’, was repeatedly interviewed and featured as a ‘journalist’ which allowed her in an interview in 2001 to say things like :

There is also tremendous evidence that subsequent anthrax attacks are connected to Iraq. The cumulative evidence that Iraq was a key player in the September 11 attack and subsequent anthrax attacks is overwhelming. (Newsmax archive)

And in another interview, she continued thanks to her ‘research’ with this line without actually stating any sources for her claims that:

…at least two labs have concluded that the anthrax used in the U.S. was coated with two additives linked to Iraq’s biological weapons program: bentonite and silica.

Bentonite is a trademark of the Iraqi weapons program. Iraq is the only country in the world that uses it.

The German newspaper Bild also reports that according to Israeli security, Mohamed Atta, who organized the 9/11 attacks, was given a vacuum flask of anthrax when he met with the Iraqi counsel in the Czech Republic.

We also know that Saddam has enormous quantities of anthrax. In 1995, before U.N. weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq, they estimated that he had produced 2,000 gallons of anthrax – enough to kill every person on earth. God knows how much he has now, in addition to his weaponized smallpox and other deadly biological weapons. (Newsmax archive)

Oh, by the way, what is this unique and deadly ‘additive’ called Bentonite? A quick research on any geological and mining book will tell you that Bentonite is mined extensively in Wyoming and South Dakota. It is not “a chemical additive” and it is not unique to Iraq. It is widespread and common, it is mined and used for drilling mud i.e. getting the rock chips out of a drill hole when drilling for oil or deep water. Oh, it is also mined for the clumping-type kitty litter.

And in case we comfort ourselves that this is just one lone moron or a few exceptions, we just have to turn to The David Letterman Show to find that in fact a US Senator by the name of John McCain (remember him?), went on TV and gave these statements in an interview:

LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine …. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase – if I could just make one, very quickly – the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may – and I emphasize may – have come from Iraq.

LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that’s when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.

Oh come on, he did not say that! Yes, he did, and thanks to the internet, you can watch it here!

(Aside: by the way, this is the same interview in which John McCain, when asked about his ‘counter terrorism approach’ responded by saying “The more serious these people [terrorists] think we are and believe we are – and we are serious – then I think they might, you know, go back to selling camels or whatever enterprise that they might want to engage in.”)

Interestingly, there have not been as many journalists or celebrity US Senators speaking out since we learned that in fact the attack was carried out by an American, who worked at a US Army germ warfare research facility, who stole the weapons grade Anthrax from a lab that had trouble tracking its inventory, who had become delusional and who signed his letters with ALLAH IS GREAT and DEATH TO ISRAEL to exploit the racism and Islamophobia being fostered in the post 9-11 America.

In the meantime, innocent scientists working at this lab were harassed and abused simply because of their ‘Arab’ ethnicity.

The USAMRIID center is now being closed because it cannot track its inventory!

The germ warfare programs are being investigated because there is evidence to suggest that they are in fact a greater source of danger to America than any delusional belief in imagined chemical terror attacks.

We challenge lesser nations to prove themselves worthy of the weapons of the civilized. The Americans have constantly been worried about Pakistan’s ‘loose nukes’. In fact, the consistently Islamophobic New York Times Sunday Magazine recently published a major piece on how Pakistan’s nukes were ‘not in control’ – I wrote about this in an earlier blog piece called ‘The Most Dangerous Nation’.

And yet, here we are, in Maryland none the less, confronted with the real, factual event of a closure of a major germ warfare center, a center from which an American military researcher, a man who worked for nearly 18 years at the lab, stole weapons grade chemicals, and carried out terrorist attacks against innocent civilians on America’s shores.

And whose inventory of deadly bacteria, viruses and germs is not properly accounted for!

Who should we be watching?

Is anyone worried?

Echoes of Guantanamo

It begins with the Haitians.

HIV/AIDS infected Haitians in fact.

It begins with George Bush, the senior.

It begins in 1991.

Jean-Bertrande Aristide has been overthrown – a democratically elected President evicted by a military junta which later had to use excessive force to contain the protests of the citizens of the country.

Nearly 250,000 refugees fled the country in the face of the 1991 coup and a systematic campaign of executions and torture against Aristide partisans.

These ‘boat people‘ as George Bush’s administration labelled where, in clear violation of international law, forcibly repatriated despite clear evidence of threat to their lives.  The administration insisted on calling them ‘economic refugees‘ and forcibly turning them away from the shores of the USA.

In 1992 George Bush, sitting comfortably in his house at Kennebunkport, issued Executive Order 12,807, ordering the Coast G to return all boats and people to the country from which it came.

This order was onlly the latest in acts of indifference and cruelty that came years after a policy of forced repatriation that had already been in place – despite 4 years of the horror of the Duvaliar regime, and another 6 of a bloody military junta ensconsed in the palace at Port Au Prince.

The United States Supreme Court supported the actions of the government and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) – an act that led Professor Kevin Johnson of the University of California to call the decision ’shameful acquiescence’.

But continued pressure from human rights groups and from the U.N High Commission of Refugees, amongst others, led to a compromise.  The forced repatriation was a violation of international law, and it was hypocrtical since most all Cuban refugees were being given immediate asylum.

The government decided to do something.

And the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was born.

And nearly 34,000 refugees were detained there in the most decrepit and inhumane of conditions.  And with this came the arguments of the extra-legality of the facility that would later be perfected for the illegal incarceration of suspected ‘Al-Qaeda’ and ‘Taliban‘ supporters.

‘While conceding that the Haitians are treated differently from other national groups who seek asylum in the US, the Government argued that the U.S. Constitution and other sources of U.S. and International law do not apply to Guantanamo’ – (Powell, page 59)

Confronted with the realization that the refugees where being detained at the facility for long periods of time – nearly 2 years for some, without a meaningful hearing, the administration called upon the finest legal minds it could find to justify its practices.

So basically, US officials could intercept boats of refugees fleeing persecution and detain them indefinitely and without access to legal advice and a fair trail at the US detention center at US military base at Guantanamo because it was not on US soil.  A policy that led one human rights lawyer to state:

‘The US policy of forced repatriation violated international legal
obligations of the United States under Article 33 of the Protocol
relating to the status of Refugees and undermines the credibiity of the
US commitment to international law in the eyes of the rest of the world’ – (O’Niell, page 39)

And amongst these detained refugees, there were about 250 very special refugees; the ones identified as HIV+.  And they were sent to Camp Bulkeley, the ‘HIV detention camp’.

What happened to them there is best read in Paul Farmer’s powerful book on health and human rights called ‘Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor’ Suffice it to say that they were victims of the most inhumane, cruel and callous treatment at the hands of US military, health and legal officials.

There was little or no public outcry about the treatment of the Haitians.  Most Americans never even noticed the hypocrisy of a policy that gave instant asylum to even terrorists arriving at our shores from Cuba – men involved in the bombing of civilian aeroplanes or assassination attempts on President Castro.  We continue to harbor these terrorists on our shores today.

The Haitians however, fleeing from genuine repression, torture and killings, were repeatedly stopped and returned to the very shores where certain death awaited them.

In 2009 the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is expected to close.

Its legacy of torture, humiliation, beatings, illegal courts, and inhumane treatment of the innocent (as most nearly all of the even recent so-called ‘terrorist‘ detainees are), weak and suffering will not so easily be forgotten.