War in Pakistan

J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Afghanistan/Pakistan

William Dalrymple, reviewing Ahmed Rashid:

"The situation here could hardly be more grim. The Taliban have reorganized, advanced out of their borderland safe havens, and are now massing at the gates of Kabul, threatening to surround and throttle the capital, much as the US-backed Mujahideen once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late Eighties. Like the rerun of an old movie, all journeys out of the Afghan capital are once again confined to tanks, armored cars, and helicopters. Members of the Taliban already control over 70 percent of the country, up from just over 50 percent in November 2007, where they collect taxes, enforce Sharia law, and dispense their usual rough justice; but they do succeed, to some extent, in containing the wave of crime and corruption that has marked Hamid Karzai's rule. This has become one of the principal reasons for their growing popularity, and every month their sphere of influence increases."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22274
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
grim stuff.

good thread idea Josef.

i know Vim rates some of these also, in fact i found out about the first two from him not too long after finding out about them via Terry Glavin if you see what i mean (not all entirely specific but worth a look if unfamiliar):

Ghosts of Alexander

Registan.net

Terry Glavin

The Long War Journal

nightwatch

Small Wars Journal

The Stupidest Man on Earth

Frontline (The Hindu)

doubtless there are many more hard news sources around.

entirely OT and unfair to say given you brought him up but as a rule i run a country mile from any Dalrymple article (i will gladly expand on my animus toward him ;) )..

...a post earlier this month at Glavin's place quoting Glavin's own experiences and those of Joshua Foust (of Registan and sometimes the Columbia Journalism Review) are somewhat at odds with this NYRB piece, in parts.
you can find that post here.

BTW, Glavin takes brief, punchy aim at what he fears the new US strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan may mean here (note his mate's comment on Holbrooke!); here is the .pdf link to the White Paper on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, and there is also an interesting comment here responding to Hitchens on sharia in the Swat, which is here.
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
i'll not argue with Hank!! (did you see the way he tussles with Al Pacino in Heat?)

OT as i say, as Rashid on present day corruption is a good look; i was just shooting the messenger.

here's some stuff on various to amuse you over a Regensburg sossie

search results for Dalrymple at Martin In The Margins: a fair few pieces so you can scroll to your content, do get down to the bottom, honest (i generally trust Martin).

Hartley on WD.

Geras on WD.

Harry's Place has a lot on him, and invariably some of it will be good quality and i'm guessing some less so, so i'll not bother with them.
speaking of HP, i just saw this - 'Obama commits to Aghanistan' (their title; although some of their contributors are too kind to the POTUSA, in my book: that said i've not even checked all the links yet - car-crash posting at its finest! - and so there may be some good stuff therein).

basically WD is one of these dozy twats - speaking politically - who lets facts be shaped into his theories, and not the other way around.
 
P

polystyle

Well-known member
It's coming to a head in Pakistan ...
The India - Pakistan - Afghanistan stories coming up are going to be epic.
One of these three will loose a nuke -or trigger one.
:(
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
3004619606_35994044ea.jpg
 
J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
scottdisco said:
basically WD is one of these dozy twats - speaking politically - who lets facts be shaped into his theories, and not the other way around.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the links - having read them, I feel more sympathetic to WD then his detractors. But the bone of contention here, ultimately, is causes. What causes terrorism, what causes political Islam, what conditions its spread? I don't think WD is wrong to see sociopolitical and geopolitical issues at work - and I question the alternative model of causality being put forward by his enemies, which I am in fact not sure I fully understand.

The general line seems to me that that terrorists should be regarded as evil nihilists... perhaps they are, but evil nihilists are determined by circumstances as well.
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
i certainly wouldn't say he's silly to be looking at sociopolitical/geopolitical issues as regards your excellent question (i haven't read his NYRB piece properly yet, although i did notice from a quick skim that he appears to have changed his response somewhat to the recent Bombay attacks, which is perhaps hardly surprising given he was writing for an American publication); those blog links i posted were largely OT to the matter in hand, just a more general cache of replies to him on matters various (Margins from May 2007 on a bad history lesson is worthwhile, for instance, and i appreciate Geras flagging up another voice on the same subject in his post).

(edited: to be brief, as the above paragraph ties itself in knots: i appreciate the need to understand motivations, and as it reads like some of the blogs above are willing to disparage WD on that score, my bad. i like the tone of the Geras and some Margins piece, i must say. there's even one or so lines of value, in their own blunt way, in the Hartley. but overall, understanding the popularity of, say, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is a very worthwhile thing, yes.)

i must say i appreciate his respectful attitude to Sufism in that final NYRB paragraph.

the actual first set of links all examine, in their own way, circumstances on the ground in these countries that i don't think WD, or anybody half-sane, would have any quarrel with, and the second set of those tossed-off blog links were very much me demonstrating some aspects of WD's thinking that bug me, personal atavism style.

they should be safely ignored, perhaps ;)
 
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scottdisco

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i wonder if some of the above blog links on WD - and by extension, my endorsements - rather don't fall into this sort of category

The difficulty arises in trying to address such matters in the moral terms on which Hitchens bases his analysis, as for instance when Hitchens attempts to characterize the European fascism of the 1930s and 40s in terms of “arrogance,” “bullying,” “greed,” “wickedness,” and “stupidity” [WOM, 7]. Such moral and intellectual flaws have, after all, plagued humankind throughout its history, and for this reason alone they provide an inadequate basis for conceptualizing something so distinctly and exclusively modern as fascism. Similarly, leftist politics, while it may be rooted at the individual level in a certain moral impulse, can never be guided by that impulse alone. While Hitchens’s expressions of moral disapproval are in themselves unobjectionable and indeed often rhetorically powerful, they hardly suffice as categories of political analysis.
Click to expand...

(source.)

i apologise if my sledge-hammer --> nut was a bit two-footed..
 
J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Actually, I think Hitchen has a point. Consider this paragraph, from an Economist review of the book Nixonland:

Mr Perlstein’s biggest contribution to his subject is to set Nixon’s private resentments in the context of a broader culture of resentment. “Nixonland” is a study of how the consensus of the early 1960s turned into the cacophony of the late 1960s, when “regular” white Americans found everything they held dear thrown into question: threatened by black activists, looked down upon by pointy-headed intellectuals, vilified by student radicals, corroded by a rising tide of lawlessness and vulgarity and fatally challenged not just by the anti-war movement but also by America’s failure to achieve its aims in Vietnam. As far as Nixon’s supporters were concerned, the swinging sixties were the seething sixties. Mr Perlstein rightly points out that many people supported Nixon not in spite of his boiling rage but precisely because of it.

**

Organized politics seems to me to consist in large part of harnessing particular emotions and directing them. Nixon became the president of the United States and the "United Symptoms" of all of his followers... The Nixon campaign was built on resentment, and translated in practice into a politics of resentment. I think all politics does this, with regards to their own affects.

"The Will to Power" wasn't incidental to Fascism.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Good stuff on this thread. Now everyone's bored of Iraq, the action is moving to Pakistan. I have some more academic resources if anyone is interested.
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
very good point Josef.

on the one hand: some clerics and leaders can direct popular ire toward injustices and crimes committed against co-religionists in the occupied territories, Afghanistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Kashmir and Gujarat?
their own narratives emboldened by the facts on the ground that an al-Jazeera dish will help to demonstrate, weaving together a self-serving mythology.

links aplenty please Vim!

this interested me recently.

New Al-Zawahiri Tape: The ICC Warrant against Al-Bashir Is a Plot to Destroy Islam in Sudan: The Crusade Sets its Sights on the Sudan
Click to expand...
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
Militants in northern Pakistan have triggered a medical emergency by refusing to allow health officials to conduct a polio vaccination campaign.
Taliban militants in the former tourist destination of Swat Valley have obstructed officials from vaccinating over 300,000 children.
...
Dr Abid said that militants have not allowed polio vaccinations to take place at a critical time.
“Polio vaccination is effective in first three months of the year when virus transmission is lowest and so there is no interference with the vaccine virus,” said Dr Abid.
...
“It’s a US tool to cut the population of the Muslims. It is against Islam that you take a medicine before the disease”, said, Muslim Khan, Swat’s Taliban spokesman, speaking by telephone.
...
Militants in the tribal areas of Bajaur and Mohmand have also opposed polio vaccinations.
Dr Abdul Ghani was killed by a roadside bomb in Bajaur in 2007 as Islamist militants tried to halt a polio immunisation campaign.
Click to expand...

here
 
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