Pakistan's Biggest Threat?

It is us [Pakistanis]. A timely tie-in with this thread at PDF. (h/t: PakMarine)

Israeli-Palestinian Peace: Two Opposing Views

Consider first Barry Rubin's contention:

Why if the Palestinians are suffering so much won't they make peace?
Here's the answer: the Palestinian leadership wants total victory and Israel's elimination. They are willing to go on letting their people suffer for a century in pursuit of that goal. They hope that the world will give them everything they want without their having to make any concessions.

Next, a two week old column in The Wall Street Journal:

In June, the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl related how Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had told him why he had turned down Ehud Olmert's offer last year to create a Palestinian state on 97% of the West Bank (with 3% of pre-1967 Israeli land being added to make up the shortfall). "In the West Bank we have a good reality," Abbas told Diehl. "The people are living a normal life," he added in a rare moment of candor to a Western journalist.

Nablus stock exchange head Ahmad Aweidah went further in explaining to me why there is no rush to declare statehood, saying ordinary Palestinians need the IDF to help protect them from Hamas, as their own security forces aren't ready to do so by themselves yet.

The truth is that an independent Palestine is now quietly being built, with Israeli assistance. So long as the Obama administration and European politicians don't clumsily meddle as they have in the past and make unrealistic demands for the process to be completed more quickly than it can be, I am confident the outcome will be a positive one.

Put the two together and what insight pops out? That in the West Bank, both sides are working to create peace in all but name. But for the moment, Israeli troops are both needed and desired - hence the intransigence of the Palestinian leadership!

Cartoons

Courtesy of Solomonia:


Update, 12/5/09: Welcome Pakistan Defence Forum readers! The deleted post in the "Israel's cruel face" thread contained the lower of the two cartoons above. It was in response to this comment by "Barrett":

Israel is a zionist state, their policies are barbaric and satanic.
Israel should stop killing innocent human beings -

After the cartoon, I added the following, as close as I can remember:

Israel does its best to avoid casualties, but its enemies do their best to make that difficult. One American academic, Bruce Thornton, calculated back in 2006 that "Since World War II, some 25 million people have died in various conflicts, only 8,000 as a result of Israel’s attempts to ward off a chronic existential threat." link That's about the average number, by my calculation, of Iraqis killed by Saddam over a four-month period, or a bad hair day for Hafez Asad. Does this mean that Israel is "barbaric and satanic"?

My post was deleted by "taimikhan", who has been a moderator for about three weeks. He explained his reasons in a pm exchange with me. Because I consider taimikhan's response unbecoming of a moderator (this post violates no posted policy at PDF), and because he ignored my arguments to reinstate it, I reproduce it here. (I hope never to have to violate a pm exchange ever again.)

Me: "Big Fat Lie" is your reason for DELETING a post? Not that something isn't relevant, but because you THINK it's a lie? Are you not using your position to advocate a particular point of view? Do you really consider this the proper duty of a moderator? Please undelete my post immediately, thank you.

taimikhan: "The picture that you posted was one big fat lie and insulting to the thousands of innocent children killed by Israel. This is not what we say, it is said by the whole world. Lebanon War 2006 was a further proof where UN sanctuaries got hit having children in them. I remember seeing the pictures of dead children being taken out of a school, where around 40 or so children were murdered by Israel in a so called mistake. So don't make me started, i being a moderator doesn't means i have to see and do nothing to the lies that you or guys like you paste and put the blame on others, while Israel justifies itself killing women and children in the name of human shield. Whole world knows, nether the still cameras photos are photo shopped nor the live TV coverage showing dead women and children are lies. So don't give us your propaganda, use it in Israel or US to keep the mouths of people shut and get more weapons and money to kill thousands more in coming months."

The cartoon graphically illustrates why, in the opinion of many, many, Israelis and Jews, innocents are being killed. By withholding this you are denying non-Arabs knowledge of Israeli self-conception of Israeli motives.

"i being a moderator doesn't means i have to see and do nothing to the lies that you or guys like you paste and put the blame on others"

That's for you to respond and debate, isn't it? Only yesterday Reuters carried a report with the headline, "Israeli runs over Palestinian", you had to read far down the page to learn that the Palestinian had stabbed the Israeli and his wife first. The mainstream media is full of this sort of bias - do you really want to see it here, too?

I didn't start the "cruel face" thread. But think of what preventing me from answering the charge means. Do you really want the Forum to decay into a hall of mirrors, a receptacle for blind hatred?

And today, finally:

Since I consider you have ignored my previous pm, and in my opinion have acted in a fashion unbecoming of a moderator by expurgating a post that doesn't violate PDF rules, I am taking the unusual step of posting this private exchange on my blog.

You should know that I've asked to be banned from the forum. If my voice cannot be heard, the process of justice is corrupted and so the best choice is to leave the community and seek better company, rather than remain in what has proved to be an unholy community. For my people and by extension myself are accused of crimes yet forbidden to defend ourselves.

Why shouldn't I consider this another example of the sort of "toleration" Muslims boast of when they speak of the protection they offer Jews and Christians? Do you wonder why so few Jews remain in Muslim lands today?

Guest Post: Amotz Asa-El

Dubai crisis is the Arab economy’s opportunity

What began as a pharaonic construction site is suddenly sinking in economic quicksand, its future as an archeological attraction possibly more promising than its pretensions as a global financial center.

Dubai, which until last week loomed tall – literally – as an enterprising, cosmopolitan, glitzy and happy antithesis to the Middle East’s economic stagnation, has now emerged as a sad monument to all that is ill about the pan-Arab economy, which includes more than a quarter-billion people but is smaller than Spain’s.

Once the dust settles over Dubai World’s debt-default announcement last week, its many Western victims would do well to probe not only the way the emirate’s authorities treated their money but also the relationship between the entire petrodollar elite and the pan-Arab economy.

The Dubai crisis originated in a brave dream: that the Gulf’s oil riches would buy rather than produce a great financial center.

Had this transpired, it would have defied historical precedent, whereby the great modern financial centers — from London, Frankfurt and New York to Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore — both followed and fed monumental industrial revolutions.

Those financial centers rose after millions had moved from the countryside to factories, where the process of their economic empowerment began, eventually giving rise to the broad, educated, affluent and socially mobile middle classes that are the backbone of healthy economies.

Metropolis in the Dunes

In the Gulf, despite the complete absence of middle classes and an industrial base, a financial metropolis was emerging from the Arabian dunes.

Dominated by Burj Dubai, the $1 billion turret that at 2,500 feet is the world’s tallest structure and by its trademark palm-shaped system of artificial islands, Dubai invested $200 billion in tourism infrastructure. On top of that, it put $20 billion into a property venture that included 30,000 houses, luxurious hotels and an artificial lake, and an additional $4 billion for 300 artificial islands.

Dubai’s emir, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Makhtoum, openly spoke of the need to prepare for the morning after oil, which some suspect will arrive within several generations, whether because the resource will be exhausted or alternative energies will take precedence.

But the construction frenzy transcended Dubai. To the north, the Bahrain Financial Port was planned to employ 8,000 bankers and insurance agents, while at the other end of the Arabian Peninsula the Saudis laid the cornerstone for the $27 billion King Abdullah Economic City.

And real estate was but the most visible aspect of a spendthrift Zeitgeist that swept the entire Gulf area during this decade’s seven fat years of record oil prices.

It was the time when Emirates Airlines bought a $37 billion fleet including 45 state-of-the-art double-decker Airbus A380s; when Abu-Dhabi-based Mubadala Development bought a stake in Ferrari, and Dubai International shopped for U.S. seaports while other Gulf sheikhs bought skyscrapers in Manhattan and a chunk of London’s Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

No one abroad, let alone locally, seemed to ask who makes all those decisions and how, why and at what social cost, just as western governments never questioned their steady supply of Saudi Arabia’s estimated $20 billion annual military spending — about the size of Russia’s defense budget — and its social costs.

Westerners preferred to look at the happy side of all this financial momentum, which besides welcoming rich foreigners included a genuinely progressive quest, like Qatar allowing U.S. universities to open local campuses for Arab students, a large number of them women, and like Saudi Arabia earlier this decade launching a $50 billion plan to build new roads, hospitals and schools.

Economic alchemy

Alas, it was all part of one big exercise in economic alchemy.

Financially, the Dubai crisis is rooted in the region’s disbelief in transparency. Until this moment the extent of Dubai’s debt and resources remains unclear. And the suddenness of its default announcement was in keeping with the local idea of corporate governance, which recently saw the emir of Dubai sack the Ivy-League-educated chairmen of Dubai World, Dubai Holding, and Dubai International Financial Center, and replace them with his relatives and cronies.

With more transparency, the markets might have made the usage of the region’s minerals a bit more prudent and balanced. Yet that drawback is dwarfed by the Gulf vision’s social aspect.

Bluntly put, the great development along the Arabian coastline was part of an effort to freeze the Middle East’s deformed social structure, whereby hundreds of millions of impoverished and uneducated Arabs live almost immediately under a well-born moneyed elite, with hardly any middle class between them.

That is why the Gulf’s Arab oil producers did not use their wealth to build — in their own lands, let alone elsewhere in the Arab world — the kind of assembly lines that revolutionized the economies of China, India and Brazil. That is why Dubai and its neighbors import millions of Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis as their unskilled workforce, even though nearby Egypt and Syria have chronic labor surpluses.

That is why a place like Dubai at any given time has more foreign residents than locals; and that is why the burgeoning financial center’s profits (while they were still being made) went abroad rather than where they were needed most: in the slums of Cairo, Casablanca, Damascus, Khartoum and Sana’a, where hope is as close to the destitute masses as the Burj Dubai’s 160th floor is to the ground.

Like Pharaoh’s Egypt, the Gulf economy rested on abundant resources, cheap labor, and a disregard for social solidarity. Economically or morally, this was no way to build a modern financial center.

The fact that Western institutional investors happily flocked to the Gulf should surprise no one, although one wonders just what all the bankers who are now fuming at Dubai’s leader were thinking when they signed deals with him. Did they think that the laws of economic gravity would not apply where islands were being imposed on the sea and castles were being planted in the sand? The bankers’ short-sighted attitude in this theater is but an extension of their failings during the era of greed that preceded the meltdown in Wall Street. Chances that they will now fix what they helped ruin are therefore low.

The ones in a position to make the repairs are Europe and America — if not because they care for social justice then because they care for the poverty that feeds Europe with a Middle Eastern immigration it does not want and Islamist terror with the fresh recruits it very much wants.

Europe and America can therefore use this moment of perplexity to help restore confidence in the vision of a financial center in the Gulf, but the proper way: with more transparency, social concern and regional investments, with less extravagance and with a real economy attached to it.

Amotz Asa-El is a former executive editor of the Jerusalem Post.

A Quick Summary of Judaism

An extract from the “Islam ≠ Fundamentalism” comment thread at Crossroads Arabia, out of a conversation with ever-bright "Sparky":

Solomon2 I know you are Jewish but I don’t know if you are a Orthodox Jew but I wouldn’t ever be able to follow the strict rules Jews are supposed to. when I was a Christian, I had read the Torah numerous times and I thought God had wanted Jews to have some sort of mental breakdown with all the cleanliness bits and rituals. I believe such might lead to OCD of course less than a psychosis but who knows what God is thinking up there???

Me:

Most Jews would class me as Orthodox since I keep strictly kosher, don’t drive or flip electric switches on Shabbat, and attend an Orthodox shul.

I wouldn’t ever be able to follow the strict rules Jews are supposed to…I had read the Torah numerous times and I thought God had wanted Jews to have some sort of mental breakdown -

Your sympathy is appreciated, sometimes I think the same! The thing is, the “rules” don’t exist in isolation, but in relation to each other; you have to grasp at understanding the whole to understand the bits. (A good Talmudic education or rabbi helps.) So Jews aren’t out there burning witches, for example. We also realize (most of us) that it’s quite possible to follow all the “rules” and still mess things up with God. There are many fine Jews who are Conservative or Reform, and some Orthodox who have a bad attitude towards others because they think, erroneously, that greater observance gives one license to be contemptuous of others.

The best short summary of Judaism is still Hillel’s Golden Rule, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn”. Implied in that are timeless concepts of truth, justice, modesty, conduct – all salted with what nowadays we call “common sense”. We don’t necessarily have to “know what God is thinking” (indeed there is great room for doubt), for the rituals we observe are all meant to reinforce these principles as our obligations to God – and if they take some effort to do sometimes, that may make the reward of inner peace all the greater.

So Jews may be neurotic about what their conduct should be, yet rarely psychotic because they know they are to deal with the real world, not impose something “perfect” upon others.

Even most “non-observant” Jews feel they follow these precepts. Consider, for example, the disproportionate number who pursue law, science, and accounting as their trades, and the attachment many have to the ideals of economic fairness and justice towards all men and women, regardless of religion, race, or creed.

I apologize for this too brief, incomplete, and awkward explanation. If I was a rabbi and had greater learning I think I might be able to explain it rather better.

Guest post: An Open Letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Your Excellency,

Allow me to apologize to you for not being able to be present during your address to civil society at the hallowed campus of Government College University in my beloved city of Lahore. Much as I would have wanted to benefit from the wisdom of your analysis and foresight, I could not make the journey quickly enough from the remote town of Chilas where I was in consultation with the proponents of a major dam which shall displace 32,000 people and submerge 32,000 ancient rock carvings if and when built. Allow me to further explain that since flights were cancelled from the nearest airport in Gilgit, a tedious five hour journey on the Karakoram Highway, I was compelled to take the road journey over the Babusar Pass situated at an altitude of 14,000 feet above sea level, travelling a total of eighteen hours to Islamabad.

Your Excellency, it was during this eighteen hour journey through some of the most desolate yet spectacular landscape of my country that I imagined speaking to you, being unable to join the privileged few who were invited to hear you speak both in Lahore and in Islamabad. As the vehicle carrying us made its way carefully over open culverts fashioned by the able engineers of the China Construction Company, as it slid over six inches of freshly falling snow, as it dipped into crevices swirling with glacial melt, and as it glided smoothly over the bits of tarmac which have survived the devastation of the 2005 earthquake which killed 70,000 people in these remote parts, I spoke to you, imagining that you were truly interested in what I, an ordinary citizen of this, my beloved, blighted country had to say.

But before I put those words down on paper, Your Excellency, allow me to welcome you to my country, this broken jaw of your kingdom. Allow me also to congratulate you, belatedly, on your appointment as Secretary of State of the most powerful nation on earth. That President Barak Obama had the prescience to see a woman in this commanding position is also a move worthy of appreciation. That you were his opponent in the Democratic Party’s primaries shows the objectivity and wisdom in President Obama’s selection. That you are a woman signifies the possibility that you will bring sanity to the White House, and by extension, to the Pentagon. For if the world was to be run by women, Your Excellency, it is quite possible that today we may not be mourning the brutal deaths of millions killed in the many wars over the past many centuries.

Your Excellency, it was at the outset of the second Gulf War in March 2004 that I resigned from my honorary position as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations to which I had been appointed by Dr. Nafis Sadiq, then the Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund. For five years I had tried to bring to the attention of my department the fact that the issue of population, poverty, and peace cannot be addressed without empowering women to deal with all of these. It was, and still is, my firm belief that women will not choose war over negotiating peace, that given a choice, they will not produce children who must go hungry, that they are the backbone of a nation’s economy and cultural articulation, and that they hold the key to the myriad conflicts which rage like an uncontrollable conflagration, destroying a world built by men and predicated on inequity and injustice.

It is unfortunate that I was unable to convince my department of the value of the genuine empowerment of Pakistan’s women, beyond the provision of services and family planning counselling. It is equally unfortunate that I was being seen as the face of the United Nations at a point when this esteemed organization was totally impotent in the face of your country’s insistence on invading Baghdad. My protest at this incapacity led to my resignation, something I have never regretted and would do time and time again, for protest is my right, and practically the only thing left to me to use with clarity, dignity and purpose. And it is through this fissure that I hope to be able to insert these words, Your Excellency, through the cracks in the daunting security which surrounds you during your visit to my country.

Your Excellency, before me, wrapped in a piece of fabric stained with grime and fragile with wear, lie the gifts I received from the family I recently visited in the hamlet of Thor which straddles a glacial stream rushing down the majestic Karakoram mountains. This parcel was given to me by the woman whom I met while conducting a Cultural Heritage Impact Assessment for the proponent of the Diamer Basha Dam. It contains what she had gathered in the fading light of autumn from the forest surrounding her stone hovel which she shares with eight children, her husband, several goats, a cow, two dogs and a ginger kitten with a broken leg. Lying inside this piece of fabric were a couple of pomegranates, some dried mulberries, and a handful of apricot kernels.

When I shook out the piece of cloth containing these precious gifts, I realized that it had been carefully embroidered with intricate designs resembling the motifs I had seen etched into the dark surface of the igneous rock which lies scattered across hundreds of miles of this desolate landscape, described as the “abomination of isolation” by the British who wished to consolidate the far reaches of their empire in the nineteenth century. That this family lived just besides the 19th century British-built rest-house, perched on a cliff over-looking the thundering rivulet running down from the melting snows, appeared to me a fitting irony: rampant poverty living in the shadows of the greatest empire of the modern world.

I listened helplessly as my host explained in a language unknown to me that her husband was being threatened by the powerful land-owners of the area to give up his little patch of land on which his family eked out a meagre existence. This patch of land shall not be submerged by the 100 kilometre long reservoir of the proposed dam, but before the river is dammed, this family, and many like them, shall be damned to displacement, dispossession, and the absolute disarticulation of everything they have known for centuries: their music, their songs, their stories, their way of life. There shall be many like them, “collateral damage” in the path of progress of a country starved of energy and full to the brim with contradictions which flame the fire of terror.

Why do I tell you this simple story, Your Excellency? Why should you be concerned about the lives of an obscure family living in some remote region of a country considered to be the pariah of nations for its involvement in the breeding of terror? Why should your mind be cluttered by the details of the lives of ordinary Pakistanis who struggle to survive all sorts of neglect and deprivation? After all, the simple mantra chanted by your government and those before it is that by bringing democracy to these conflicted lands, the world shall be a safer place. And democracy is what supposedly describes the dispensation in our Parliament today, and even for the several years before that, despite the fact that the self-appointed head of state was nothing but a military despot wearing the disguise of well-cut suits.

I tell you this simple story for the simple reason that perhaps the problem lies in the details, Your Excellency, in the details of ordinary lives. The problem itself is simple, and the solution is not as simplistic as American foreign policy would like us to believe. The problem, Your Excellency, is the wilful and malevolent perpetuation of a universal state of inequity and injustice – a state of dangerous contradictions poised to implode despite the many hasty and ill-thought out designs to alleviate the burden of poverty and privation. Today I see you standing before a computer, accompanied by a permanently beaming President and a stately Minister who gives away money to the needy, once a month, as long as the needy are defined by a certain parameter.
Your Excellency, apparently you are to push a button on the computer which shall randomly select a winning family which shall benefit from the munificence of a government functioning almost entirely on the rhetoric generated by martyrdom. That this family is then to return the awarded amount while those in government have loans worth millions of dollars written off is an irony as sharp as the fact that the family in Thor Nallah had never heard of this benevolent scheme, nor have they ever received the benefit of electricity which could possibly power a computer on which their names could be listed.

Your Excellency, I had worked with my mother in the region of Gilgit Baltistan for thirteen years before her untimely death in the region she had come to love. For most of the people of this region, as for most of the people of the four provinces of my beloved country, such schemes have remained inaccessible, much like gainful employment, health care, education, land, and the most ubiquitous of all rights: justice. It is ironic that those who have denied the people of Pakistan these essential rights are the ones you are now accompanied by: the grinning and ingratiating folk who surround you on your visit. Your Excellency, how can we possibly be anointed with the ink of Democracy when the parchment we have been writing on is brittle with conflict, fragile with prejudice, and infested with a feudal ethos which eats into the very fabric of democratic principles? How can we, ordinary Pakistanis, believe that those with whom you do business are truly representing our interests, the interests of the family in the Thor Nullah and countless others like them in Awaran, in Badin, in Zhob, in Gwadar, in Dir, in Bakkhar?
Your Excellency: I am not trying to dissuade you from your noble mission to inform us of what is already written in blood, the blood of men and women and children killed in a war we did not create. As I write this, news filters in of the deadly bombing of the heart of my father’s beloved city Peshawar. Tonight the sound of mourning, of women wailing for lost children, of babies seeking lost mothers, shall fill the sky above my country. Can you hear that song, Your Excellency, that lament of despair, that elegy to a nation defeated by those who sold it for another song, a song of greed and a malignant lust for power? That is not a song anyone would willingly want to hear, and unless you and those in positions as significant as yours are willing to hear that elegy, I fear that very soon, too soon perhaps, there shall be no space for further burials in this beloved, blighted country of mine.
In closing, allow me to offer you the lines of the wonderful British poet who made America his home:

I am moved by fancies that are curled /
Around these images, and cling: /
The notion of some infinitely gentle /
Infinitely suffering thing.
(T.S. Eliot – Prelude)

Yours most sincerely,
Feryal Ali Gauhar
feryalkimail@yahoo.com

[Hat tip from the Tooth Maestro. Originally published in The News. Cross-posted at the Pakistan Defence Forum.]

Pakistan: A State of Denial

Ignoring the practically obligatory anti-Israel stuff at the end, this has, pretty much, been my line of thinking for the past several years - except that I now know that "recalling some historical facts" will do nothing to reduce anti-Americanism (or anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism) unless a populace is ready emotionally to accept them.

...Similarly, some conspiracy theorists believe that Al Qaeda does not exist and the Sept 11, 2001 attacks were the handiwork of Israeli agents. The fact that Osama bin Laden has taken responsibility for 9/11 and all those involved in it were Arab nationals has not deterred the ardent believers of conspiracies.

How should one explain such a state of denial? It is not a case of not knowing the facts. Actually, the conspiracy theorists do not want to believe anything that comes in the way of their firmly held views: firstly, that the US, Israel and India are the arch enemies of Muslims; secondly, that the militants involved in the struggle against anti-Islam forces must be absolved of any charge of brutal excesses...

What kind of mentality is helping create sympathy for violent extremism? How is it that extremists are attracting so many adherents? No doubt, the majority are drawn from madressahs where young boys are subjected to relentless brainwashing. But some supporters are well-educated people. It is important, therefore, to understand the phenomenon of ‘Talibanisation’ since military measures alone cannot destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In the final process, ideas must be fought with ideas...To counter Talibanisation and the religious fanatics, it needs to be emphasised, firstly, that they have done a grave disservice to Islam’s image by their senseless violence and brutality. Secondly, the rampant anti-Americanism that is providing so many recruits for Al Qaeda can be countered by recalling some historical facts...