Talibanistan: The Talibs at Home
Nicholas Schmidle
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Fall/full-Schmidle-Fall-2009.html

It’s easy to like writers saying what you would (if you could) just as it is easy to defend the right of someone to hold opinions which are the same as yours.

The current orchestration of the failed state narrative by the Obama administration is very tactical and short-term oriented. It is an effort to apply public pressure on the Pakistani government to make it support the floundering war in Afghanistan by taking military action against the insurgents. There is very limited leverage that can be applied to Pakistan – about the only leverage left is aid money. The Pakistan aid bill has been in front of congress and the failed state narrative gathered steam in the last few months reaching a crescendo at the time of related congressional committee hearings in the last few weeks. Now that the hearings and the aid bill are done and whatever limited Afghanistan war support could be got out of Pakistan has been worked out, my prediction is that we will see very little further failed state discussion. It could rear its ugly head again if the situation on the ground in Afghanistan gets worse, which is quite possible.

Re. the East Pakistan discussion. Of-course, the presence of genocide in Pakistan’s history does not have anything to do with future state failure, just as the history of Native American genocide has nothing to do with the potential for state failure of the United States – life is never fair. The East Pakistan discussion and more broadly a discussion on the history and potential future scenarios for ethnic conflict in Pakistan is an important discussion that should be carried out but it will not be a fruitful discussion if it is carried out within the context of the current tactical, narrowly focused, goal-oriented American orchestration of the failed state narrative.

If we ignore the failed state narrative and focus on the potential for future ethnic conflict, then it is entirely appropriate to discuss the East Pakistan experience and draw conclusions about the future direction of the current military operations in the NWFP. While the current military operations are not ethnically directed, the potential exists for the war on the Taliban to morph into multiple ethnic struggles. Theories that this will lead to the further dismemberment of Pakistan (ala East Pakistan) are far-fetched. But such ethnic conflict could lead to large scale violence. A discussion on strategies for pre-empting this dynamic would be quite appropriate for folks with some empathy towards the Pakistani people.

“Even without actually using the words “brutal” or “savage,” Hoagland successfully uses language to construct Afghan and Pakistani Muslim men as both: “The recent U.S. strategic review, … depict[s] the struggle in the desolate Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier as being rooted in fierce nationalism, the region’s ancient warrior culture, the failures of nation-building and the rebirth of jihadist terrorism.” Ancient warrior culture, huh? If that doesn’t convince you that these brown guys are also the bad guys, then what of “the desire of Pakistani and Afghan men to be left in peace to deal with their womenfolk as they see fit.”? Or “The savage misogyny and feudal fury of the Swat Valley are alien to modern, urban Turkey…” ? ”

http://www.altmuslimah.com/a/b/a/3035/

“may be people should think carefully before lumping everybody with a “BEARD and Shalwar Kameez” as “Taliban” then Taliban with Al Quaida and then all of the above with a Global Muslim Caliphate from Spain to Indonesia. Now I understand that this thought of Muslim Caliphate taking the world over, kept GWB awake at night for 8 years”

What? You mean to say, the threat of a global caliphate is not true? But I thought CAIR, MSA, and ISNA had “linkages” with Muslim Brotherhood, that has “linkages” Hamas & Hizbullah, and H & H is linked with AlQaida and Iran, and Alqaida with Taliban, and Taliban with ISI and JI&JUI etc, JI&JUI with other groups in Malaysia and Indonesia etc. ;-)

“The MSA [Muslim Students Association] is in fact an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization, which has created a network of “front” groups to conduct a stealth jihad in America, including CAIR, the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Society of North America. ” http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32034

Secondly, I find it odd that a blog/writer who has (just to take examples from recent weeks) criticized the Taliban’s imposition of jaziya on Swat’s Sikhs; questioned the nationalist myth of Pakistan’s founding that is the bedrock of the “standard” account of the nation’s birth; and routinely criticized the military that has acted as the self-appointed guardian of Pakistan’s national well-being for most of the last five or six decades; should be accused of nationalist obfuscation. i.e., while I am (somewhat) less sanguine about Pakistan than sepoy is, I don’t see his greater optimism as allied to “orthodox” Pakistani nationalism — I am all too familiar with that phenomenon, and it has a very different flavor than Chapati Mystery does.

Re: “They have rights just like Bengalis had and just like all Pakistanis do.
So if we are ashamed of happenings in Bengal, then believe me people are going to be ashamed of these atrocities also.”

I think Akbar has articulated a very important point here: the number of people displaced in a mere 1-2 weeks is mindboggling. I have previously argued in CM (and still maintain) that I do not believe the Taliban cannot be dealt with without some use of military force, but the scale of displacement here raises some serious questions, perhaps about the Pakistani military’s competence (the BBC has aired multiple refugees claiming that army shelling has been utterly indiscriminate; that houses and livestock are being destroyed, etc.), or perhaps about its good faith — does it/the government want to raise the stakes to show the world that it is serious/deserves aid, a kind of political theater as it were? I should add that the Indian establishment does not appear to be convinced by the drumroll of experts announcing the imminent failure of Pakistan — perhaps this proceeds from India’s paranoia of Pakistan, or perhaps India has good reason for believing so, but my point is that it is surely not only crypto-nationalists who do not believe that the Taliban (actually, IMO, the multiple groups operating under that name) are on the verge of causing Pakistan to implode.

Spencer
I am well aware of the atrocities in East Pakistan( I heard the first hand accounts of these from one of my first cousin who was held as POW in India and returned through Wagah) and I have also heard it from my Bengali colleagues here in USA. And also majority of west pakistan was being made to believe that our Lion hearted soldiers were only killing “Hindus and their Bengali collaborators”, which was essentially propaganda and bullshit. So I am not trying to trivilize that sad/shameful chapter in Pakistan’s history. But the point I am trying to make is that as West Pakistan population was being propagandized day and night and Innocent people were being slaughtered and raped and destroyed, may be may be people should think carefully before lumping everybody with a “BEARD and Shalwar Kameez” as “Taliban” then Taliban with Al Quaida and then all of the above with a Global Muslim Caliphate from Spain to Indonesia. Now I understand that this thought of Muslim Caliphate taking the world over, kept GWB awake at night for 8 years,and he had 28% approval while leaving office.So those 28% delusionals are still out there. This “Taliban in Pakistan ” issue has come to center stage like wild fire in tandem with Obama’s policy announcement of AF-Pak. What is happening in Pakistan is extra judicial Killing of its own citizens at the hands of military, (especially SWAT has a very distinct history until 1969, when a dictaotr Yahya Khan Federalized it.). They have rights just like Bengalis had and just like all Pakistanis do.
So if we are ashamed of happenings in Bengal, then believe me people are going to be ashamed of these atrocities also. Now comparing even all of Pushtuns some 40 million on both sides of border with Nazi’s etc is simply Lunatic and fringes on delusion.
A better course for noble well wishers of Pakitan would be to read the 1973 constitution of Pakistan (Preamble of the 1973 Constitution , the existing constitution)
“Whereas sovereignty over the entire Universe belongs to Almighty Allah alone, and the authority to be exercised by the people of Pakistan within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust;……Wherein the Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and Sunnah)
Now this constitution was ratified by elected representatives from all four provinces. I am not a great fan of this but what Swatis are demanding is their comstitution right, unless the democratically elected parliments amends the constitution to the liknigs of us all,

and help the democratic set up work.What is not being discussed is that since August of 2008, two things happened

1) The drones attack have increased inside Pakistan.Here is what Ron Paul has to say about it while questioning Mr Holbrook
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/05/10/ron-paul-why-escalate-into-pakistan/

2)About sametime, US military aid to Pakistan was stopped, failed state rhetoric was everywhere, that crashed the stock market and foreign investors fled, economy crashed Rupee suddenly went fro 60 per dollar to 60/dollar. So that is the classic tactics that empires use to squeeze unruly satraps. Now that military again started extra judicial killing of its own citizens and emergency AID is on the way, bills are in the congress and even IMF gave relaxations yesterday.Now who are we kidding that this fight is about womens rights or democracy or freedom!
Here is what PEPE Escobar has to say about pipelinesatn,
http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2009/05/12/pipelineistan-goes-af-pak/

On the balance if you look at 1.8 trillion dollars budget deficit this year and DOD estimated cost of 770,000 dollars per year for keeping one US solidier in Af-Pak, you can understand why propnents of war are falling like ton of bricks on Pakistan ARMY, because that is only cheao alternative. Believe me they are not upto the job, Iam no fan of military but they were incompetent, atrocious retards in East Pakistan in 1960s, they did the same in Balochistan in 1970s, again replay in Sindh and Karachi in 1980′s to both sindhis inder ZIAand Mohajirs ,later. So all the noble well wishers of womens rights / enlightened moderation be careful while putting all your bets on military.

And on ’71, I am more sympathetic to Spencer L’s point: Akbar, “the nation” cannot be absolved of the atrocities in East Pakistan because, while the details of the killings and the rapes were not known, there was widespread view that the Bengalis were “traitors”, and that they needed to be “taught a lesson”, etc. It is glib in the extreme to say that because both groups were Pakistanis, the victims’ “innocence” rubs off on those who did nothing (by this yardstick, both Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat 2002 were Indians/Gujaratis; Germans and (at least German) Jews were both Germans, etc.) 1971 has long been Pakistan’s biggest blind spot, and to this day there is no reckoning, no discussion, no acknowledgment.

I was not citing examples of “dispensable” populations, but of populations that needed to be eliminated for political ends: the German approach in Namibia was NOT to be indifferent to the fate of the Herrero — it was to KILL all the Herrero, including by poisoning their water supplies and starving them to death. In Argentina in the 1830s, concerned with the effect of so many indigenous peoples on the “blood” of the whites, the Argentine state basically actively wiped out the country’s native populations (to this day, Argentina is a lot more “native-free” than most other countries in Latin America).* To equate this with inhuman working conditions and vagrancy laws strikes me as morally obtuse.

*[I will add an Indian example, although here there was no attempt at extermination. The British classified entire tribes as "criminal", with the legal effect that the tribes' "propensity" to crime could count against an accused in a court of law -- even absent evidence of individual wrongdoing! This is astounding, and shows how far the racial sciences of the late-19th century had affected the British imperial project; a far cry indeed from the Indian-marrying nabobs of the 18th century Company, let alone from John Stuart Mill and Locke. This stigmatization and legal disability imposed on entire peoples was also applied to certain peoples in Africa by the British, and later on by the Germans as well in their short-lived colonies.]

To be honest you actually didn’t do this. Initially you made a point at a general level about “numerous media outlets” which you later qualified several times. Saying that left wing party have their own media products is kind of pointless, given that few read them outside the supporters of these parties and even here there aren’t too many serious readers. The Hindu-Frontline family are the only exception in the mainstream media, which is why your initial quote puzzled me.

I would say that you mistake an electoral strategy for party organization. Leftist parties do not aspire simply to have electoral strategies, but to organize workers to politicize everyday life. This is, quite simply, impossible to do in the case of peasants. Not even Mao really attempted it on anything close to an all-China scale.

I think that is a simplistic and incorrect analysis of party organisation of the Left in India. In West Bengal, there was a concerted attempt to win over key sections of the rural peasantry and marginal farmers; ranging from sharecroppers to the jotedar class. It was this strategy that paid divided after the 1977 elections and is the base of the CPI(M)’s support; this network has increased through expansion of the surplus farmers and other intermediaries in the PRI system further entrenching party rule in the countryside. The CPI(M) has only managed to organise the formal workers in the industrial sector; it has failed quite miserably in organising and mobilising those in the informal sector; like most Left parties in India. In anycase, a purely ‘worker’ based strategy won’t get you very far in India given the preponderance of the rural population and the restricted nature of Indian capitalism that has a dual-sector characteristic. In adopting the path of parliamentary socialism, rather than revolution; the CPI(M) has had to address this issue and built up its rural programme which saw it come to power.

So you think the Hindi press represents something like a different world, a different subjectivity than does the English press? Are there two Indias, one that speaks the vernacular and one that speaks English? I don’t think so.

Oh yes, the Hindi ‘public sphere’ is very different from the English one; the political idioms and the concepts are very distinct. These two overlap somewhat and people move in both spheres but they are quite distinct; which is why the English media get caught napping on how the vernacular sphere views issues such as reservations, communalism, minority rights etc. Language apartheid is a fact in India; the only thing I will say is that given the status of English; I have seen an almost unbridled desperation by hindi-speaking parents as well as illiterate ones to make sure that their children get some access to English-medium education. Unfortunately, English is still seen as the route to social status and mobility. Lastly, I kind of wonder what you are basing your arguement here if you can’t speak Hindi and so don’t know what the vernacular press in this language is like?

In urban Maharashtra (in Pune, Nasik, and Mumbai, for instance) it is very common to find people subscribing to both an English and a Marathi paper. In fact, the biggest Marathi paper in Pune, Sakal, has recently launched an English edition

I don’t think urban Maharashtra is very representative here of India. This is the case in South India from what I am told as well. My experience really recounts what is happening in the Hindi belt- where most of the population actually live.

You make my point about Bengal for me. The point was that it’s hard to generalize.

No, actually if you read what I said; I didn’t. The largest language daily in Bengali is not leftist at all and neither is the Telegraph; the other main English daily, the Statesman can be said to be mildy progressive on most issues but is no a left-orientated newspaper, at least on economic policy. Simply having some liberal social views and endorsing a secular line, hardly makes one a ‘left’ paper. My point was the exact reverse of what you were saying.

I don’t really see as particularly virtuous being decisive about non-issues or in the outright mass obscurantism in which non-left (and Stalinist) parties engage. I would rather view that decisiveness itself as expressive of a deeper authoritarianism.

Yes and no. The problem with traditional left thinking is that they have no answer to the language and idiom of caste; which is the sharp reality in much of northern India; and effectively they have abandoned any adherence to an alternative economic strategy as their state govts show but merely are implementing reforms “with a human face” so why should those outside the upper caste elite pay much heed to them? The only stream to take a lot of the burning social issues, especially in the countryside seriously are the Naxalites, something acknowledged by those Dalit intellectuals who disagree with them and which is why the Naxalites have proved so resilient and difficult to eradicate, even in the most reactionary and violent parts of the country.

It does not; it simply recognizes that distinctive ideologies, that “newness”, is not creation ex nihilo. Even the Final Solution has a history, a genealogy (the Final Solution is an “event”, something new, and is of course not reducible to that genealogy). To take one example, as I mentioned earlier, the legacy of Christian anti-Semitism explains why Jews would be the “enemies” above all others for the Nazis (as opposed to Catholics). To take another example, the legacy of European imperialism and settler-colonialism helps explain how Nazism got to where it got to. It doesn’t get one all the way there, but I never said it did; that’s so obvious as to be banal.

I think the fundamental disagreement between us on this point is that you seem to be suggesting that the legacy of imperialism and settler colonialism sheds NO LIGHT WHATSOEVER on Nazi practices, the Final Solution, etc. I read the historical record very differently (and my claim is rather modest on this point) — I might add that you have offered no narrative/argument/reasoning that would account for it, you simply have asserted repeatedly that it is misleading to adduce examples from that history. I repeat my earlier question: HOW is it misleading?

Re: “What about the concentration camps for the Boers? Wouldn’t that also be a part of the story?”

I certainly never claimed to be citing every relevant example. The Boers I did think of, but did not cite them for a rather banal reason: I am quite unfamiliar with that conflict, and thus stayed away.

Re: “I’m not sure that Hitler was ever simply motivated by merely practical considerations (such as the duration of the war) to implement the Holocaust as the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

Two points:

1. I obviously agree with you that Hitler was not “simply motivated by practical considerations” to kill millions of Jews — for the simple reason that absent a certain ideology, it could never have been necessary to kill millions of people in this manner.

2. You misunderstand the point I am making: my point is that the Final Solution was — notwithstanding Nazi ideology — not the first resort of Nazism, but the last. I don’t think there is serious debate on this: the historical record is very clear that the Nazis preferred the emigration/reservation/Bantustan “solution”, and when that proved unachievable, decided to kill off all Jews.

[Somewhat tangentially: (2) does not make the Nazis "less", but in fact MORE atrocious in my eyes. If it is possible to "grade", this admixture of instrumentality, one might even say the impersonal nature of the Final Solution, is even more de-humanizing than the sheer hatred that leads one to want to harm the other. With the latter, one has the dignity of an enemy; with the former, one is nothing, and may -- to use Agamben's formulation from Remnants of Auschwitz -- be "killed without crime"; I've always found that more disturbing.]