Friday, June 17, 2005
Granta's "What we think of America" and Mishra's article on jihadistsWe flew to LA today to visit friends, and on the plane I read most of Granta's post 9/11 issue, "What We Think of America,"
which includes 24 short essays about America and the ideas we
represent, and a collection of longer essays on other subjects,
including a photographic essay of Afghanistan and an essay by Pankaj
Mishra, "Jihadis." 7:34:30 PM | The 24 shorter essays range from a heartfelt, pro-American piece by Czech writer Ivan Klima to an anti-American rant by British playwright Harold Pinter. Most of the essays, though, were somewhere in between, noting the incredible hope our ideals give to others in the world and the disconnect between these ideals and our actions, which at times are decidedly counter to our notions of democracy. Some are quite personal or local-centric, and those are the ones I enjoyed the most, including this one by Irish writer Fintan O'Toole about President Kennedy's visit to Ireland in the 1960s and Raja Shehadeh's story of growing up in Ramallah. The cliche is true, I guess, that politics are personal (and vice versa, of course). Pankaj Mishra's essay on Jihadists is remarkable: it not only details the history of the rise of jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it also presents personal stories of Muslims in both countries, giving us glimpses into their motivations. (Unfortunately, Mishra's essay is not available online; it's 35 pages, so clearly I can't reprint it here.) This history includes our sordid involvement in the rise of bin Laden and the jihadists, some who became the student-run Taliban, in our attempt to defeat the Soviets, and the intervention of Iran and Saudi Arabia in the sectarian jihadist wars that left Afghanistan in even more of a mess after the Soviets left in 1992. Here's one of the most disturbing passages from the essay: [...]
The Carter administration had long been waiting for the Soviets to slip
up in Afghanistan. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to
President Carter, whose stated aim was to 'sow shit in the Soviet
backyard', had arranged for clandestine aid to the radical Islamists in
Pakistan a few months before Soviet troops arrived in Afghanistan. The
Soviet intervention gave them the pretext they needed to up the ante.
The day the Soviet army entered Afghanistan, Brzezinski wrote an
exultant letter to Carter, 'Now we can give the Soviet Union its
Vietnam War.' The CIA, under [director William] Casey, deepened this
trap for the Soviets throughout the early and mid 1980s by providing
billions of dollars worth of arms and aid.
In fact, Casey wanted the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence Agency] to involve the Muslims of the Soviet Union in the jihad; he wasn't satisfied with the ISI-arranged smuggling of thousands of Qur'ans into what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, or with the distribution of heroin among Soviet troops. [...] (Giving the Soviet Union their own Vietnam War. Great. Naturally there was no thought given to how Vietnam was a war against civilians, just as every other war has been, meaning that the war in Afghanistan would be too.) Mishra is not sympathetic to the violent methods of the jihadists, nor does he make excuses for the Taliban's abhorrrent behavior. He does, though, give a background to their rise to power, which is instructive the same way the Downing Street memos investigation is. I'm going to send this essay to my husband as soon as I can because it can only help him over there. He has told me about how Afghanistan is a kleptocracy and one of Mishra's informants seconds that: It
was the first time [Mishra's informant] Rahmat had heard about the
students -- the Taliban. There had been several Afghans at his madrasa,
but he had kept away from them. The Afghan refugees had a bad
reputation in his part of Pakistan; they were seen as robbers and
thieves.
Just like in Iraq, if we don't face up to the reality of Afghanistan we will never "succeed." I will try to excerpt more of Mishra's essay in future posts because I think it's so important for us to know how Afghanistan became what it is today. I suspect I won't have much time this weekend here in LA, though. Sorry! 
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The Chicago Tribune is patheticThis is why the Chicago Tribune has lost a number of subscribers and has become meaningless to a huge percentage of Chicagoans, who vote, incidently, about 90% democratic: 6:57:32 PM | Here we thought Sen. Dick Durbin had a cushy job that
he likes. Truth told, he's auditioning for the job of
Speechwriter/Silly Similes at Amnesty International.
And they're supposed to be a legitimate, professional newspaper. What a joke.
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Joe Conason on the press's coverage of the Downing Street MemosThanks, Joe, for telling it like it is: 6:42:23 PM | [...]
Mooing in plaintive
chorus, the Beltway herd insists that the July 23, 2002, memo wasn't
news -- which would be true if the absence of news were defined only by
their refusal to report it.
They tell us the memo wasn't news because everybody understood that George W. Bush had decided to wage war many months before the United States and its allies invaded Iraq. The memo wasn't news because anyone who didn't comprehend that reality back then has come to realize the unhappy facts during the three ensuing years. The memo wasn't news because Americans already knew that the Bush administration was "fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy," rather than making policy that reflected the intelligence and the facts about Iraq. Only a very special brand of arrogance would permit any employee of the New York Times, which brought us the mythmaking of Judith Miller, to insist that new documentary evidence of "intelligence fixing" about Saddam's arsenal is no longer news. The same goes for the Washington Post, which featured phony administration claims about Iraq's weapons on Page 1 while burying the skeptical stories that proved correct. [...] How foolish and how sad that all these distinguished journalists prefer to transform this scandal into a debate about their own underachieving performance, rather than redeem mainstream journalism by advancing an important story that they should have pursued from the beginning. This is a moment when the mainstream press could again demonstrate to a skeptical public why we need journalists. Instead they are proving once more that their first priority is to cover their own behinds. [...] And on Oct. 8, 2002, the Times noted approvingly that in requesting a congressional war resolution, Bush had said: "Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable." The next day, the paper of record reported that around the world, politicians, journalists and ordinary citizens had derived hope from those words. Those hopes were misplaced, as we now can be certain. Instead of pretending that we all knew what we know now, the Washington press corps should stop spinning excuses, stop redefining what constitutes news and start doing its job.
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Last update: 8/24/05; 8:18:14 PM .
