by David Steven | Feb 9, 2008 | South Asia
These are dark days for Pakistan.
Eighteen months ago, when I was first in Islamabad, Pakistanis could see a route that would take the country towards greater democracy and political stability. For sure, there were fears about rising extremism and anger about American influence, but the general mood was confident.
Pakistan would not follow Iran towards revolution; Afghanistan towards anarchy; or Iraq on the road to disintegration. Its society and institutions were more resilient than that. Progress might be messy and compromised, but things were unlikely to get worse.
But then on 9 March 2007 – less than a year ago – came the disastrous clash between General Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan’s Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Musharraf was stunned when Chaudhry refused his order to resign and by the protests that followed. His humiliation was complete when Chaudhry was reinstated to his role in July.
Overnight, the general was transformed from world leader to tragic figure. Not in the trivial sense that we should feel sorry for him, but with the original meaning of a man whose flaws had begun to trap and entangle him. Suddenly, the talk was no longer of his power and competence, but of his vanity and weakness. He had lost control of his own destiny. At any time, his supporters in the army and US administration might decide enough is enough, and abandon him to his fate.
But still the country had options. One was Nawaz Sharif, the man Musharraf ousted in his 1999 coup. When I was here in October, Nawaz tried to return to challenge a man he loathes and despises. But he got no further than the airport lounge, before being sent back into exile in one of his lavish overseas pads.
And then there was the deal with Benazir, Pakistan’s most famous daughter. Musharraf saw it as his get-out-of-jail card and the international community was falling over itself to be supportive. Whether or not they liked the proposed fudge, the Pakistanis I talked to understood it. They took comfort in the fact that they knew what was supposed to happen next.
But now they don’t, because of two further cataclysms.
On November 3rd, Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, moving against Chaudhry, the rest of the legal establishment, and the media. And finally, on December 27th, the assassination of Benazir, after a couple of months in which a squadron of suicide bombers had tracked her around the country.
Reportedly, Bhutto was resigned and fatalistic in the days before her death. Perhaps this explains her reckless decision to leave the safety of her bomb-proof car, sticking her head through an escape hatch to wave to supporters as the car inched away from a rally. Her attacker was standing only 2 metres away when he exploded the bomb, crushing her skull against the lip of the hatch.
It is hard to overestimate the shock that her death caused here in Pakistan or the mood of apprehension that has followed. People I have talked to describe is as the most traumatic day in Pakistan’s history, whether or not they were Benazir’s supporters. It marked the point where people began to give up hope and to consider the possibility that they do indeed live in a failing state.
“The crunch is coming,” a veteran political campaigner told me yesterday in Lahore.
“A good crunch or a bad crunch?” I asked.
“It could go either way,” he replied gloomily, “but it seems that we are staring into a black hole.”
by Alex Evans | Feb 8, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Via John Robb, a great story about how a local radio station in California became an open source co-ordination hub for disaster response during the California wildfires last year. John explains,
Here’s the problem. When a disaster strikes, widespread distribution of granular/real-time information on the unfolding event can reduce the public’s panic/fear and improve the community’s recovery — as in, solid/well-informed decision making at the individual level is beneficial to fast recovery and public participation in the process can increase information flow and provide real-time feedback on first responder successes/failures. Unfortunately, the public traditionally doesn’t get this detailed information. To the extent that this information exists, it has been reserved for the government’s first responders. In contrast, communications with the general public, either through official pronouncements or the mass media, are usually tardy and typically only provide high-level/generalized coverage.
Fortunately, we are slowly starting to see a shift. New technologies and approaches have made it possible to bring the public into the loop. To illustrate this, blogger Robert Paterson has a two part series on how a small Public TV/Radio station (KPBS) in San Diego, used creativity and some Web technologies (Google maps and Twitter) to become the epicenter of the community’s response to the recent wild-fire disaster.
Here’s part 1 and part 2 of the series.
by Alex Evans | Feb 8, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
Gideon Rachman was with the dynamic duo as they touched down in Kabul. He reports that the security was so tight that it would have been impossible for the pair to form any impression of their own of what was actually happening:
The “security situation” here is so dicey that the arrival of the American secretary of state and Britain’s foreign secretary could not be advertised in advance. In fact my Foreign Office companions became highly agitated when I mentioned on an “open line” (ie a mobile phone call home) that I was sitting in a motorcade at Kabul airport, with Rice and Miliband in the car ahead, waiting to be swept along to the president’s palace.
The security is so tight that it must be virtually impossible for visiting western dignitaries to form any spontaneous impression of Afghanistan. Rice and Miliband arrived early this morning on an unadvertised flight from London. They were immediately put on a military plane to Kandahar – but did not leave the military base there. Then it was back to Kabul, and a short drive to see President Karzai on a road that had been cleared of all traffic. Then it was time to visit some more troops in a gym at Nato HQ. And that’s it. Condi is off tonight. Miliband is staying for a formal dinner. I’m sure they will have had “frank discussions” with President Karzai. But they must be completely reliant on their diplomats for any impression of how things are going.
And, he adds, he’s been hearing some worrying comparisons:
I’m slightly disturbed by occasional echoes of the Russians’ unhappy period here. When there was some discussion about whether our plane would be able to land on a snowy Kabul airport, an Afghan remarked – “The Russians always landed in the snow.” And when there was talk of sending girls to school in Afghanistan, I was told that the Russians had been keen on that too.
by Alex Evans | Feb 8, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
Jared Diamond argued in Guns, Germs and Steel that it was to do with geography and biodiversity; David Landes, in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, that it was all about culture and values. Now, reports Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun, a new book – After Tamerlane, by John Darwin – sets out a more ambiguous case:
Mr. Darwin wants to show that Europe’s hegemony, which began in the late 18th century and crumbled after World War II, was the result of a contingent historical process, not the manifestation of some superior essence. Invoking Edward Said, Mr. Darwin attacks the “orientalist” assumptions behind Western historiography. “The European path to the modern world should no longer be treated as natural or ‘normal,’ the standard against which historical change in other parts of the world should always be measured,” he writes. “Europeans had forged their own kind of modernity, but there were other modernities — indeed, many modernities.”
Yet reading “After Tamerlane,” with its panoramic yet fine-grained view of six centuries of world history, it is by no means clear that Mr. Darwin has achieved his revisionist purpose. The clearest lesson of “After Tamerlane,” in fact, is that there were not “other modernities,” equally valid competitors with the West’s, which might have resulted in a different, more equal distribution of global power. On the contrary, it is precisely because modernity was Western — because it came flying the flag of England or France or America or Germany or even Russia — that it was so challenging and unsettling to the rest of the world. Non-Western civilizations were never at leisure to formulate their own visions of modernity, because they were desperately trying to stay afloat in the whirlpool caused by the West’s rapid progress. As even Mr. Darwin writes, “Being modern was not an absolute state, but a comparative one,” and it was Europe that always offered the term of comparison.
For Darwin, Kirsch says, history is all about empires. “Our current assumption that empires are “abnormal,” Mr. Darwin writes — that only the nation-state is a really valid form of government — must be discarded if we are to understand the history of Europe and Asia.”
Crucially, Mr. Darwin helps us to see European expansion as a dynamic system, in which commerce, politics, and culture reinforced one another. Non-Western empires were faced with an impossible dilemma. To join the modern world system meant ceding political autonomy to Europe, accepting a subsidiary place in the global economy, and jeopardizing local structures of authority and belief. On the other hand, refusing to join meant facing financial coercion or armed force from the European powers. Over the 19th century, the British in particular managed to strongarm their way into positions of dominance around the world, whether as outright colonial sovereigns, as in Africa and India; de facto rulers, as in Egypt, or bullying profiteers, as in China. Attempts to resist were met with concentrated fury: When the Islamic “Mahdist” movement rebelled against British rule in Egypt, in the 1880s, the British commander Lord Kitchener not only crushed the rebels, he disinterred their leader’s corpse and threw it into the Nile. “A word from Queen Victoria,” Mr. Darwin writes, “was needed to stop him using … the skull as an ashtray.”
So what brought Europe’s imperial hegemony to an end? For Darwin, the answer in a word is: disunity.
“The most vital prop of Europe’s primacy in Eurasia,” Mr. Darwin argues, “had been [the European powers’] determination not to fight each other.” When that determination failed, so too did the financial and cultural premises of European imperialism. In telling the story of the last 50 years, Mr. Darwin is on more familiar ground, and his analysis of the Cold War is fairly conventional. He ends “After Tamerlane” on a cautious note: Despite the current unipolarity of American power, he writes, history demonstrates “Eurasia’s resistance to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules.” This final judgment — so general as to be a truism, yet fruitful as a reminder of the diversity of history — reflects both the strengths and the weaknesses of Mr. Darwin’s book.
by Alex Evans | Feb 7, 2008 | Global system
The BBC and Globescan have just published another of their epic, 34 country opinion polls, this time looking at perceptions of economic globalisation. They found that majorities (of an average of 64%) in 27 out of 34 countries agreed that the benefits and burdens of “the economic developments of the last few years” have not been shared fairly.
Intriguingly, though, if you agree with that statement, your analysis of whether that unfairness results from globalisation proceeding too quickly or too slowly is likely to depend on whether you live in a developed or a developing country:
In developed countries, those who have this view of unfairness are more likely to say that globalization is growing too quickly – especially in France, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Japan, and Germany (and to a lesser extent Britain and the US). In contrast, in some developing countries, those who perceive such unfairness are more likely to say globalization is proceeding too slowly. These include Turkey, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, Kenya, Mexico and the countries of Central America.
The survey adds that “the view that globalization is growing too quickly is especially widespread in Egypt (77%), UAE (77%), Australia (73%), China (72%), Spain (68%), and France (64%)”. Here’s the full report.
