Like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge

The Taliban know that every girl who learns to think and every father who teaches his daughter to think, subverts  the backwardness and evil of fundamentalist Islam. Thinking is a threat to their fervently chosen ignorance. The Taliban are more than willing to kill in defense of their radical refusal to grow into liberal society.

Sirajuddin Ahmad, the spokesman for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, said that Ms. Yousafzai became a target because she had been “brainwashed” into making anti-Taliban statements by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai.

“We warned him several times to stop his daughter from using dirty language against us, but he didn’t listen and forced us to take this extreme step,” he said.

Both father and daughter remain on the Taliban’s list of intended victims, he said.

This reminds me Kurtz's apologia in "Apocalypse Now":

I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do!

Kurtz's eventual response was a descent into the heart of darkness, into monstrous depravity, into insane homicide.

What should our response be? Could we retain our moral character, retain our judgement, which Kurtz called our defeat, and nonetheless issue a secular fatwa that anyone who harms Malala Yousafzai or her father Ziauddin will be subject to a U.S. lethal finding?

Moderation needs space and time and tolerance to grow. Extremists of all stripes know this and murder moderates. Would it benefit moderates to exact a deadly cost from the extremists, or would it simply drive others into their arms?

America is already using drones for targeted assassination as a tool of war, if not statecraft, despite a long-standing inclination not to - in reaction to out-of-control spy agencies during the Cold War. Israel has used assassination. Killing the guilty, the enemy, the vicious murderer of your children has visceral appeal, and there's often no civil authority in these cases. Has that been for the good or the bad? It's hard to tell.

It's hard to imagine our government could responsibly manage vengeance orders, when it can't manage a just civilian death penalty. It can't even manage political asylum very well.

But I know that I wish Sirajuddin Ahmad dead. The shooters who have gravely wounded Malala, I wish dead. Their commanders, dead.

Traditional war-making has proven a very poor tool to accomplish those just deaths without a mortgage of further deaths uncounted. This reasoning is how liberals like me get to law as the best tool to accomplish punishment of the guilty. It lacks the immediacy of gunning down your enemies, but it lasts better.

Public domain photo from the Library of Congress, found here.

A vile and disgraceful act

A man who can brutally suffocate his own daughter has an alien idea of fatherhood than I have. There is evil in every culture. In fact, the evil of treating females as chattel has only recently been extirpated from our social norms - and not entirely from our society.

There is no such thing as an honor killing. Murder of those whom you owe love is an oxymoron, evidence of sociopathy in a social norm.

Laughing at Pakistanis

... when we should be laughing at ourselves.

A Pakistani man has "invented" a way of bullshit-olyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen. Is this a sequel to "The Saint"? (Much as I like Elisabeth Shue, even in this movie, her performance as a scientist was completely free of the slightest credibility.)

As in America, there are qualified Pakistani experts who've spoken out against anti-scientific fraud:

It shows “how far Pakistan has fallen into the pit of ignorance and self-delusion,” wrote Pervez Hoodbhoy, an outspoken physics professor, in The Express Tribune, a national English-language daily. He added: “Our leaders are lost in the dark, fumbling desperately for a miracle; our media is chasing spectacle, not truth; and our great scientists care more about being important than about evidence.”

Hoodbhoy has had about as much impact as scientists in America when they share their knowledge of evolution, global warming, health, economics, etc. - that is, very little.

Remember, we live in an age when people take literally* the metaphorical aphorism that perception is reality. When American conservatives have built an entire media apparatus intended to provide the resolutely ignorant with excuses to remain ill-informed. When one entire major political party is devoted to lying in order to cover up the plain fact that all it really cares about is the continued establishment of oligarchy.

The pit of ignorance and self-delusion. We Americans are right there with the Pakistanis. Sadly for all of us.

---

* So sue me for anachronism, but I'm using the literal meaning of literally, not the currently dominant debased meaning that is its exact opposite.

See no evil

Click image for full Randy Bish/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review cartoon.

No comment necessary

Waziri leaks

In all the hue and cry over Wikileaks, I haven't seen much to get too bent out of shape over. Most of it was, duh, obvious. A lot of it had already been reported.

While governments need to be able to keep their conversations confidential, even some that are merely embarrassingly frank, the main damage has been the need to blush a little.

Still, imagine this: You're a foreign service officer talking with your opposite number in another country's diplomatic corps. You know how certain you would be that he will keep your confidences, small and large! C'mon, no one is that naive.

Instead of laughing off the embarrassment, governments have pursued Julian Assange, arrested him, and locked him up on unrelated charges that look trumped up (h/t Digby). These governments have certainly responded with much greater focus than they would have had he been, say, Brett Favre or Kobe Bryant.

The biggest take-away from the whole affair so far has been how thoroughly inculcated the media is in the culture of secrecy that they are supposed to expose to light. Sure, they've reported on the leaks, but I'm starting to wonder how thoroughly.

When I heard that the Pentagon was directing its service people and contractors that they were not allowed to read classified documents even after they were published on the Internet, I thought they were typically, bureaucratically overreaching. Just like the world's most command-oriented bureaucracy to pretend that the genie right there in the room was still safely in the bottle. Even a genie not nearly as revealing as Barbara Eden.

Then, today, the New York Times carried the story of the U.S. CIA station chief in Islamabad had fled Pakistan after his name got out into the open in local media. What is his name? The Times pointedly wouldn't say:

The legal complaint that named the station chief, who was working undercover and whose name is classified, was filed on Monday over attacks that killed at least two Pakistanis. The complaint sought police help in keeping the station chief in the country until a lawsuit could be filed.
The agent’s name had already been revealed in a news conference last month by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who filed the complaint this week, and the name had been reported in local media.

The rest of the world can know, but Americans can't! The big media is in on the suppression of information.

Of course, Google is still up, so it's easy to find out. No, not the character actor by the same name.

I'm showing fear here, too, by not simply typing the name. I don't want to be charged with espionage for "revealing" something that's widely known the world just because there's a Top Secret stamp marking a piece of paper locked in a vault that I've never seen. Think about what that fear means to an open society, without which democracy is a sham.

The name I'm omitting is probably itself a cover identity. Really, would the CIA send someone to Pakistan for covert action under his own name? Of course not. Yet the Times and I won't simply type the name, and it's itself a fiction. Am I still allowed to name Winston Smith?

Funny, I don't recall the American big media being so solicitous of the classification status of non-official cover identity when the exposed agent was Valerie Plame.

The question: How long before the U.S., like China, decides it needs to block sites that expose its own citizens to this slightly uncomfortable sort of truth?

Update (1/7/2011): Related comment on Salon.

Spitting into the wind

In an age of hype, bullshit, and willed credulity toward incredible claims, some people resist, among them David Aaronovitch. I'm not sure there will be enough of us.

This is telling:

There are entire societies where the default position is to believe in conspiracy theories, like in Pakistan or Iran. There are very few people in the Pakistan military, for example, who don’t believe that Bush was behind 9/11.

Our culture has succeeded because it has been willing to grapple with the actual reality, rather than sinking into the temporary comfort of wishful thinking. I often doubt that it still is.

Extremists need enemies

It's far from clear why Muslim terrorists attacked civilians in Mumbai, but extremists need enemies. Most of all, when under pressure, they need to share their enemies and their hatreds with the populations that they hide among.

It's easy to stir up long-standing secular and sectarian enmities between India and Pakistan. They're never far below the surface.

Even a war of words between these two nuclear powers will rally Pakistanis to all things Pakistani and all things Islamic, even terrorist organizations. That benefits all the terrorist groups that thrive on chaos.

The U.S. has enough electronic surveillance to know already where these terrorists attacked from. The NSA knows who took their calls in Waziristan. Whether we'll ever know is another question.

Boo!

In the same day, nine days before a Presidential election, the U.S. made cross-border raids into both Pakistan and Syria, nations with whom we are not at war. Karl Rove would be proud.

Any administration that was scrupulous about not injecting military action into politics would have refrained from this for a couple more weeks. But 'scrupulous' is not a word that should ever be applied to the Bushists.

By now we know that the initial reticence about the Syria raid and promises to investigate by the military were bullshit. The Bushists now defend what they previously would not admit doing.

No doubt there were bad people across each border. There were probably innocents as well.

There is even justification in crossing borders into anarchic zones such as these. But to do it in a way that appears to be for political benefit abuses the American consensus for partisan ends.

Palin and foreign affairs

"You are a verry gorgeous woman, but in my country a woman with a voice as verry annoying as yours would keep verry quiet. Can I give you a leetle squeeze?"

Funny how being patronized by a foreign leader is a good thing. Not her fault, of course.

But when Obama suggested it...

... airstrikes in Pakistan to kill al Qaeda personnel was evidence that he didn't have foreign policy smarts. Now? Down the memory hole.

Hitting a fly with a sledgehammer

Upgrading F-16s (fer chrissake) is counterterrorism only in the sense that we have to keep bribing the Pakistanis to keep claiming in public that they care about the Taliban. What they do and what they say in private? What do you expect for $230 million?

“Using F-16s this way is like hitting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said one senior Senate Democratic aide.

The Bushists don't give the smallest shit how Congress designated the money, and a real counterterror weapon like an A-10 (already durable in close air support) or whatever the C-130-derived gunship is would seem to make a lot more sense if helicopters aren't flashy enough. But none of this matters to Duhbya. He's already on the way out and nothing he can do now will have much effect on the likelihood of terror for the rest of his term. 2009? Who cares?

A different kind of power

In the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan, a friend wondered whether we would get more from the money we were going to spend on force, however justified it might be, by sprinkling the countryside with schools instead. The people there live in abject, grinding poverty. They would not have needed a palace such as Oprah endowed in Africa.

I admit that I was skeptical. Faced with the implacable destructive power of fundamentalist Islamism, frequently expressed by the then-ruling Taliban, I had a hard time imagining that any school more enlightened (and subversive) than an Islamist madrassah would survive long in the desolate Afghan backcountry.

The numbers, however, did add up. For the $25 billion we naively thought we would spend on arms and bribes, I estimated we could build and permanently endow teaching staff for a million spartan one-room schoolhouses. In impoverished Afghanistan, $25,000 buys a lot of brick and mortar and would surely leave more than $20,000 behind to pay for a teacher out of medium-risk investment returns - 5% would provide $1000 a year in a country where the per capita income is about $300.

Now, some Turks are doing this on a smaller scale in Pakistan. They are limited to the cities, and I'm sure their cultural goals are different from ours. But it does make me think, What if?

Image from Wikimedia Commons, generously released into the public domain.

Tin ear?

Let's move political news to the Style section, how 'bout it? That's what we're getting, anyway. I guess the New York Times feels it has to keep up with Robin Givhan's vacuous pieces in the Washington Post. It's a race to the bottom all right, but who's bottom?

I suppose it's possible that Mark Leibovich has a pitch-perfect ear for politics and that everything he writes about the atmospheres of the Democrats' rallies provides us with deep insight into their meaning. I suppose it's possible that the Beltway conventional wisdom reflected by his story is 100% spot on.

Possible, but not likely. Here's the last paragraph, in regard to a conversation with Pervez Musharraf:

“We also talked about the importance of the upcoming elections,” Mr. Edwards said, meaning, presumably, in Pakistan, not Iowa.

Why would anyone presume that? Wouldn't it make more sense to think that Edwards was talking about both elections, that he was talking about change coming and telling Musharraf that he had better be on the democratic side of that change?

Or is that just too damn complicated?

Blown

To start with, the U.S. blew the U.K.'s investigation of a 2006 terrorist plot by pushing Pakistan to arrest Rashid Rauf immediately.

This left the Pakistanis claiming they didn't have enough evidence against him in the plot.

Also, the Pakistani interrogation was untrustworthy because it may have included torture.

But the British still wanted Rauf in connection with a 2002 murder.

Then, the Pakistanis let Rauf slip through their fingers, and we're supposed to believe that (a) this was an accident and (b) they really, really want to recapture him.

Did I leave anything out? The Keystone Kops, maybe.

One percent doctrine

Under Darth Cheney's one percent doctrine, America should invade any country that has a 1% chance of conveying nuclear weapons to terrorists. So why aren't we in Pakistan? Good question.

A sane one percent doctrine would prepare for 1% chances, war game them, create mitigation plans and scenarios, build infrastructure, keep some resources ready for rapid deployment, etc. The war gaming at least appears to be what the Pentagon is doing without any White House sponsorship (though it is possible the White House just couldn't acknowledge it), and I say good for the Pentagon.

One of the bonuses of being in Afghanistan is that we're right next door to the single most likely source of nuclear weapons for Islamic terrorists. I hope that we have a go team standing by at all times for possible interdiction or rescue. That would be a hell of a thing to try to put together on the fly. I'd rotate the duty, too. No team can stay sharp if it's sitting around the base yawning about alerts that always stand down.

Further, if we're not directing all the best of our satellite and electronic intel into Pakistan, we're idiots. Which is yet another reason to fear the results of having such incompetent morons in the White House.

Duhbya "truly is somebody who believes in democracy"

Pervez Musharraf believes in democracy, just not for Pakistanis. Like our Dear Leader.

What they do, not what they say

Sheryl Gay Stolberg is completely captive of the Bushist narrative. She starts out with the assumption that their propaganda is unassailable fact.

Duhbya is not interested in democracy, not in the Middle East, not in Russia, not in Pakistan, and not even at home. He never has been interested beyond his own and Karl Rove's ability to manipulate democratic institutions. The voters are onto him now. Who knows whether the press will ever come along.

Duhbya's use of democracy is as propaganda for the consumption of voters and the press. Like the flag, democracy is popular as a slogan. Duhbya used it that way as a pretext for accretion of power through war.

I'm sure Karl Rove will take this to his grave, and we won't get confirmation, but I believe that Rove's shallow analysis of history convinced him that WWII was the tipping point that made FDR's majority permanent. He thought that Iraq would finally reverse the New Deal and what came after once and for all.

Good news on nukes

Sounds like an oxymoron - and still could be - but helping Pakistan's military government guard its nuclear weapons is a good idea. Of course, the protective effects of our dollars is not nearly as great as if our people were on site. Basically, we're spending on promises, but it's still short money.

I expect this of my government: We have programs that track every single nuclear weapon at every single site in Pakistan and that we are prepared to respond immediately with force to any breach of their facilities by our enemies.

What Benazir Bhutto has

She actually stands for something, unlike the Congressional Democrats. She shares ambition with them as a character trait, and that's probably driving her insurgency of the human rights lawyers, but she's willing, unlike Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, to take a stand and put herself at risk.