Most of my usual conversation (passing/commenting on links) has moved to twitter, so doing a sunday link post seems almost, well, retro.

Still, things I do for you, gentle readers, will always be en vogue. Because that is how awesome you are. Each and every single one of you.

• Drake Bennett’s Changing History, Boston Globe, Feb 7 2009, puts forth what our new approaches are going to look like: enviormental, pacific, archeoscience, and neurohistory. Without taking away the merit of Mr. Bennett’s piece, it is clear he is no historian. Still, worth your thoughts.
• A couple of posts from the NYRB blog (really, you should just read it regularly): Malise Ruthven on French Talibans and Max Rodenbeck on Jaipur Literary Festival. Our friend William Dalrymple is a man of many victories.
• A history of Tamil cinema from The Hindu.
• Staying in Hindoostan – the Big Picture showed some amazing photos of Republic Day 2010. I think the pink motorcycle crew deserve a beer.
• This Ethan Bronner controversy is silly. NYT is not “objective” when it comes to Israel/Palestine issues, Middle East or the global South in general. Let the man’s son do whatever he wants to do. What difference does it make to us?
• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s site is awesome. Start here.
• Zunguzungu, Things You Can Do With An Umbrella. Ella, ella, ella, eh.
• I have been thinking what the Pakistani equivalent of the Gandhi Rupee would be.
• “…I suddenly realized that I knew the luminance of the moon – 250 c/ft2. Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this luminance on Zone VII; 60 c/ft2 therefore fell on Zone V, and the exposure with the filter factor o 3x was about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film.” Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.

Dear Dr. Lapata

In an effort to speed up the publication schedule and work through our backlog, we are attempting to collect any remaining permissions from authors who are moving up in line for publication. Our records indicate that we still require permissions for the image(s) contained in your article, “(redacted).” Please return these permissions as quickly as possible or update us as to the status of your attempts to obtain these permissions. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

Thank you for your interest in The Journal of X, and congratulations again on the acceptance of your essay for publication.

Best regards,
The Journal of X

——

Dear [The Journal of X],

Thank you so much for your note. I was very grateful when you accepted my article for publication in your journal seven (7) years ago. Since that time, approximately five (5) years ago, you forgot that you had accepted the article and re-sent it through your review process, after which you sent me a rejection letter based on the insane rants of an inflamed tea-partier (anachronistic, I know, but it gives you an idea of what I mean). After I brought this imbalanced review to your attention, you rescinded your rejection and re-accepted the article for publication. A year later you sent me a letter similar to the one above. Since I had several years before supplied all the permissions, I grew tired of our little back and forth, stimulating though it had become, and rescinded my acceptance of your re-proferred acceptance. Soon after, I also lost the article in a devastating hard drive crash, and subsequently quit my academic career. Since I no longer had a stake in feverishly publishing my feeble pensées in poorly-run academic journals, I thought no more of the matter, until today.

Best wishes to you and the entire Journal of X family,

Lapata

Seriously.

Last week I gave a small talk to a group of Model UN students at Hildesheim U. Thought I’d archive the presentation – and share it here. Not much going on. My main concern was to show the difference between internal and external public/policy debates*. And maybe also to step away from (inter)national narratives. I didn’t have any pre-written remarks so, you can play karaoke with the slides and just imagine what I said. I am sure long-time readers (and frequent callers) will have no problem. I am a broken record.

*The Kerry slide was a complete dud. I need local political quotes.

Doing some research, I came across an official Pakistan government publication celebrating the 5 year anniversary of its existence. I scanned a few of the adverts in the issue. The paper I am writing concerns the “long history” of Pakistan such that allowed Mortimer Wheeler’s Five Thousand Years of Pakistan: An Archaeological Outline (1950) to become a standard account of pre-Partition “Pakistan”. Here, the ads themselves speak towards the need to assert the primacy of the Pakistani history.

Here are some other, random, images. Enjoy!

With thanks to Francesca Orsini, Alok Rai and his family, and Fran Pritchett, we have a scan of the only photo portrait of Mirza Asadullah Ghalib. Incredible.

I am slowly cooking some posts – in the meantime, I discussed Pakistan/US on Worldview yesterday. Have a listen, why doncha?

Le Roi de Lahore (1877) was the second opera written by Jules Massenet (1842-1912). The tale depicts the romance of the King Alim and the temple girl Sita against the backdrop of Mahmoud Ghazni’s invasion of Lahore.¹

Théodore Pavie (1811-1896) the French traveller and writer of exotica for Revue des Deux Mondes studied Sanskrit in Paris, from 1835-39 and went to Calcutta in 1839. He spent two years in India and the stories and sketches of India were published in his 1853 collection Scènes et récits des pays d’outre-mer. One of his stories, “Les babouches du Brahmane”, became the inspiration for Leo Dalibés’s opera Lakmé (1883).²

Pavie also translated the story of Padmini, the fourteenth century queen of Rajputs, from James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan in 1856, La Légende de Padmani, reine de Tchitor. From this Louis Laloy (1874-1944), the French literary critic, helped write a two-act opera for Albert Roussel (1869-1937), called Padmavati (composed, 1914-8).³

Enjoy.

1. Sita is at the temple in Lahore, where Timour, the head priest, jealously guards her while Scindia, her uncle and the minister, also desires her. Sita confesses her love for an un-named suitor, and Timour rabbles up a whole lot of people against her. At the last minute, Alim reveals himself as the lover. Alim is also the king of Lahore. Then, he has to go defend his city against the Muslim invaders. They lose the battle, the King dies. Scindia becomes the King and he takes Sita. Alim, now in Indra’s heaven, pleads his case. He is sent back to earth as a commoner but bound to Sita (and doomed to die). He shows up in time to see Sita’s wedding to Scindia. They run off together, and are chased into Indra’s temple. Where Sita stabs herself and Alim is also returned to heaven.
2. It tells the story of British officer Gerald who happens across the beautiful Lakmé and they fall in love. Her father Nilankantha is not so happy with this and he stabs Gerald. Lakmé hides Gerald in the forest and nurses him to health. Once better, he returns to his service. Lakmé chews some poisonous leaves and kills herself.
3. I trust you know that story?

Via Naim Sahib comes the sad news that Simon Digby, 79, passed away in Delhi. Anyone who has touched any scholarly/popular work on medieval to colonial India – esp. aspects of religion and art – has seen the fruits of his amazing intellect reflected in those works.

I will try and find a full biography but let me note the following from on-line sources:

SIMON DIGBY is a former fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and a former assistant keeper in the Department of Eastern Art, the Ashmolean Museum. He continues to serve as honorary Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, a position he has held since 1971. The foremost British scholar of pre-Mughal India, he has written numerous foundational essays on Indo-Persian Sufism as well as contributing to The Cambridge Economic History of India, volume 1.

In 1919 the Royal Asiatic Society established a formal lecture in the name of Sir Richard Burton, the British traveller, scholar and translator. In 1923 it decided to bestow a medal upon the lecturer. The recipient of the medal is required to have been not just a dry-as-dust scholar but someone who has actually engaged, as Burton did, with Asian societies in the field. Among recipients of the medal have been St John Philby and Freya Stark, both renowned for their Arabian explorations, and more recently W.G. Archer, the Indian Civil Servant who collected Indian village songs and tribal art as well as introducing courtly traditions in the visual arts to the general public, and David Snellgrove, the scholar-traveller in the Hindu-Buddhist worlds of South and Southeast Asia. In 1999 Simon Digby, the scholar of Indian Sufism, was the Burton lecturer.

And his list of publications.

A great loss.

update: More details on his life and times appear in Indian Express: After a lifetime loving India, historian Digby breathes his last: in Delhi (pdf). He was truly the last great orientalist (it is high time to reclaim that word from Said).

update 2: My thanks to Prof. Shahid Amin for sending in the photograph/pdf from Indian Express.

update 3: Photograph from Indian Express, Jan 15th.

update 4: An obit in Telegraph India by Rudrangshu:
Mukherjee: “Simon was one of the last of the truly amateur scholars.”

Speaking Truth to Power by Kathy Kelly
January 8, 2010

There’s a phrase originating with the peace activism of the American Quaker movement: “Speak Truth to Power.” One can hardly speak more directly to power than addressing the Presidential Administration of the United States. This past October, students at Islamabad’s Islamic International University had a message for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. One student summed up many of her colleagues’ frustration. “We don’t need America,” she said. “Things were better before they came here.”

The students were mourning loss of life at their University where, a week earlier, two suicide bombers walked onto the campus wearing explosive devices and left seven students dead and dozens of others seriously injured. Since the spring of 2009, under pressure from U.S. leaders to “do more” to dislodge militant Taliban groups, the Pakistani government has been waging military offensives throughout the northwest of the country. These bombing attacks have displaced millions and the Pakistani government has apparently given open permission for similar attacks by unmanned U.S. aerial drones. Every week, Pakistani militant groups have launched a new retaliatory atrocity in Pakistan, killing hundreds more civilians in markets, schools, government buildings, mosques and sports facilities. Who can blame the student who believed that her family and friends were better off before the U.S. began insisting that Pakistan cooperate with U.S. military goals in the region?

In neighboring Afghanistan, 2009 was the deadliest year for Afghan children since 2001, according to the Afghanistan Rights Monitor. In a January 6 statement, the group noted that in 2009 about 1050 children had died in suicide attacks, roadside blasts, air strikes and the cross-fire between Taliban insurgents and pro-government forces, both Afghan and foreign. The group’s director, Ajmal Samadi, noted that this figure amounted to nearly three children per day. It’s estimated that nearly one third of these children’s deaths were caused by US/NATO coalition forces. This week, hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets in protest after the Afghan government said its investigation has established that all 10 people killed by U.S. led forces on January 3rd, in a remote village in Kunar province, were civilians and that eight of those killed were schoolchildren, aged 12-14. The London Times reports that the U.S.-led troops were accused of dragging the innocent children from their beds, handcuffing several of them, and then killing all eight of them.

Stories of carnage, horror and impoverishment aren’t new in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. Ten years ago, each of these countries suffered under severely repressive governance and extremes of poverty. In the case of Iraq, these conditions were made immeasurably worse by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions that punished innocent Iraqi citizens for their inability to rise from under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, all the while rendering them completely dependent on Hussein’s regime to meet their basic survival needs. Yet in all this suffering that preceded the U.S. invasions of the region, there were very few accounts of suicide bombings in the lands where the U.S. is now at war. The “kidnapping and torture for ransom” industries, now rife in all three countries, had not developed, and their entire economies had not been hobbled by blatant official corruption.

What has U.S. invasion and occupation unleashed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? And how are these wars creating security for U.S. people?
The New York Times reported on November 14, 2009 that, according to internal U.S. government estimates, it costs one million dollars to keep one soldier in Afghanistan for one year. Consider this sum in light of the fact that, in Afghanistan, district governors earn 70 dollars per month. Their operation budget is 15 dollars per month, and half of them have no dedicated office. Or, in light of the UN estimate that the Gross Domestic Product, per capita, in Afghanistan, is less than $1,000 per year. Or that The United Nation’s Children’s Fund, better known as UNICEF, says Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be born, having the highest infant mortality rate in the world with 257 deaths per 1,000 live births. Only 70 percent of Afghans have access to clean water.

Kai Eide, the outgoing Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Afghanistan, briefed the UN Security Council on January 5, 2010. With regard to military activities, he bluntly stated that “civilian casualties, house searches, and detention policies are sources of recruitment for the insurgency.”
President Obama’s administration is soon expected to request another “emergency” supplemental expenditure for the Iraq and Afghan wars, this time for between 40 and 50 billion dollars. If (some would say, when) this figure is approved, it will make 2010 fiscally the most costly year of the ongoing War on Terror, surpassing President Bush’s expenditures by a significant margin. Before the year is out, President Obama will also have submitted a budget item to fund the wars in 2011, with military services already planning to request something in the range of $160 to $165 billion.

The U.S. Constitution states that Congress shall make no law to abridge the right of people to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance. We are deeply aggrieved by the folly of these wars. Our right to free speech is irrelevant if we don’t exercise it, and so we intend to raise the lament of those who bear the brunt of our wars but whose voices seldom reach U.S. government figures.

For two weeks this January, leading up to the date when President Obama is due to submit his budget for Fiscal Year 2011 to Congress, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and friends will gather in Washington D.C. for a “Peaceable Assembly Campaign” project. We’ll be meeting with elected representatives to raise questions about the folly and the crime of war, holding daily vigils at the White House, and engaging in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to emphasize our refusal to cooperate with the war makers.

We urge you to join us in this year-long campaign, whether in Washington D.C. this month, or participating locally where you live. Please make sure to visit the Voices website, www.vcnv.org, to learn more about ways to become involved, both locally through this coming summer and in the Days of Resistance in Washington. We’ll be there from January 19th through February 2nd.

Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence

Related: We want to keep this American here

And a bit behind the curve: S. 1010: National Foreign Language Coordination Act of 2009

But the problem with my analysis is, you will say, that Cameron is not the Department of State or Labor nor is he the official mouthpiece of some quasi-empire. You would be right. Yet Avatar is consensus. It is the consensus of nearly $300 million dollars – pored over every lovingly rendered pixel flesh and woodenly crafted “I got this!”. It is more importantly, a global consensus of consumption – fast approaching the $1 billion dollar mark. As such, I think it provides a credible archive against which to read the past decade.

Sitting through Avatar reminded me of the edifices of empire – not the halls of power (palace and parliament) but those edifices constructed for both the citizen and the colonial subject – simultaneously convincing one of the righteousness of the imperium and the other of the sheer inevitability of imperial power.

Avatar mirrors the techno-capital apogee of this American empire as well the grave ambivalence at the heart of it. Avatar is our Crystal Palace and our Delhi Durbar of 1911 as well our Hastings/Burke moment.

There are more than enough readings out there on the inherent biases and contradictions in Avatar. Read Aaron’s take, for one. Or Bustillos, as well. There is both merit and substance to these readings but I am much more interested in parsing the broader milieu which has produced Avatar. Where previous Empires (without going into whether America is or isn’t one) created magnificent physical edifices of their power and glory, we build monuments of light and shadows (3D) that provoke much of the same reactions: awe, glory, camaraderie. We are united in our appreciation of the technological wonder that created this spectacle and united in our consumption of it. Note that the end-credits stretch across the North (digital houses from New Zealand to California to London). Note as well that from Cairo to Dubai to Bombay, Avatar is playing to packed houses.

Where the Mughals borrowed curlicues from Damascus to Vijaynagar or the British incorporated “Eastern” motifs into the Lahore train station, Avatar borrows the Iraq War. It serves a decorative purpose. Mind you, that doesn’t make it a “throwaway” or “inessential”. On the contrary, it constitutes the very ethos the project itself – which is, after all, a simulacra itself. “Shock and Awe”. It will forever be the curlicue glued to the outside of any edifice – either with a wink, or a nudge, or with a scowl. When Avatar employs it, the audience (in Berlin) smirks loudly. They got this. The parallels are now as explicit as a minaret. No one notes the irony that the company has too few troops for the job. It is only a matter of time before the “surge” happens. But, let that be. Let’s just go back to the Iraq War. Some have suggested that there is a “critique” of the Iraq War buried inside the movie. The war in Avatar is not between the haves and the have-nots (one with tech, the other without; one with mineral resources, the other without) but between different ideas of having and not-having. At some level, however appropriated, Avatar grants some equivalence to the notion that these two civilizations can indeed differ in their reading of what constitutes as essential for survival. But the debate over the Iraq War is not, and will not be for a while, about granting equivalence – either hypothetical or literal – to our civilizational mission (democracy and freedom) and their claim to self-rule and self-governance. In that frame, there may be a mild nod towards Iraq, but there is no critique of war in Avatar. It is pro-war all the way. Eco-tech vs. mech-tech.

I greatly enjoyed Avatar. I will probably see it again on DVD and I will certainly try and teach it in class. Here are some thoughts – out of order – but in the order that they occurred to me.

related: Aaron expands his comments

Gentle Readers,

I wish you all a best of 2010. Posting will be sparse for a little while but I hope to pick it up in the new year with tons of exciting insight into celebrity lives.

yours,

sepoy.

My friend Atiya Khan has a piece in The Platypus Review, The poverty of Pakistan’s politics (PPP), in which she takes me and Faisal Devji (finally, together!) to task for making “concessions to the Right” by not understanding, or not conceptualizing, or not realizing the “crypto-fascism” of the Taliban. This, accordingly, corresponds to the death of the Left in Pakistan since 1970.

Since her piece is in print, I will respond in print as well – either by sending in a letter or printing up flyers for Hyde Park. In the meanwhile, every one should go read her critique and reach their own conclusions (and discuss, of course).

“Yet the Army leadership is refusing to strike at the heart of the Taliban command in Baluchistan Province.” declares another editorial from NYT today. If only these Pakistanis would realize – why won’t they just realize – that this is their wars, not ours.

Think back to March 2009. Then, the Taliban were on a march to Islamabad – mere 60 miles away – and the editorial chided the Pakistani army and civilian elite of not understanding their mortal threat. Invade Swat, became a mantra of pundits and editorials alike. After hemming and hawing – and filling up its coffers – the Pakistani Army did. It went in with guns blazing from every hill-top. It watched the million walk out of the valley with their houses gone and their livelihoods vanished. Never did the NYT or the Administration pause to even consider what were the local histories, the local demands, the causes which would have allowed the Taliban any foothold at all in Swat. Not once was Swat’s precarious constitutional structure discussed or attention paid to the Swati demands for expedient justice, equal opportunities and resource sharing. Not once. The drums of war drown out any other voice. All the Empire seeks is immediate action. In the here and in the now.

Then, in August 2009 came the second wave. The real battle is in Waziristan, not Swat where the Taliban’s real base exists. Why won’t the Pakistani army move in there already? Why are the wasting time in Swat? The timing was also good for a Pakistani “invasion” since Baitullah Mehsud had just been killed. Once again, the Army dithered until just long enough before finally launching an operation into N. Waziristan. Once again, the local population fled – but this time there were no IDP camps and no relief efforts. Apparently “most had relatives in the region“. Go figure that one out.

And because frontiers are “always empty”, the Taliban are now going to Baluchistan. So, let us send the Pakistani Army after them. It is fun, no? This chasing. Like a global game of tag. Get serious, Pakistan Army! Get into Baluchistan and crush those Taliban. Once again, who cares if the reality matches any of our discourse. Who cares that Baluchistan is not empty, and that it already has a war.

All clear?

Step 1: NYT (representing the Administration, of course) decries Pakistani Army needs to get serious on Taliban.
Step 2: Pakistani Army provides a suitable window of dithering, during which time a number of prominent pundits add their voice to the enfolding crisis.
Step 3: Pakistani Army gets more $ and then moves in to the “central area” in order to combat the Talibothra.
Step 4-40: Ignore any local issues; ignore the blowback of drones; ignore the constant bomb blasts in Peshawer, Lahore, Multan; ignore any political realities. Enjoy!

Sundays in Berlin are quiet affairs. The usual shops are all closed – groceries, pharmacies, booksellers, fruit vendors, bike shops, bakeries, discount stores. You get the picture. In some U-bahn stations, in some busy corners, there would be a lone bakery, a hold-out grocer. New Berliners, such as myself, collect these informational nugget, knowing that we will never have purchased enough milk or shampoo or toilet paper or sandwich bags on Saturday.

At first, I was bemused by this state. Sundays are a day of rest, my native informants told me. Yes, they are. I like to read my week’s worth of NewYorkers, RSS feeds, and watch the Bears/Flash Gordon on cable. That used to be my usual Sunday as well. Not necessarily “rest” but mindful inactivity. But, this closed businesses rankled me, a bit. I wasn’t living in some religious state, right? This was the heart of secular, capitalist EU where I oughta be able to buy some snacks and/or wine on Sunday. Then I learned that during the Advent calendar (four Sundays before Xmas), Berlin shops are all open. Yes! See, I told my native informants – here is consumerist world I recognize and love (and avoid): sidewalks crawling with overstuffed shopping bags and attached arms and legs, the best medley Mandy Moore ever sang with Paul Anka and five times the amount of perfume than is ever necessary wafting on every breath.

The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany decided on Dec 1st, 2009 that the Berlin ordinance allowing for the shops to be opened during the Advent calendar was unconstitutional. The suit was brought by the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg and the Archdioceses of Berlin and the Court accepted their argument that the abrogation of Sunday’s “restfulness” meant that the members of these churches could no longer have freedom of religious expression (ie. closed shops). Presumably, no other religion is laying a claim to a Sunday full of commercial activity. I really don’t understand the prezel logic.

The up-shot is that in another secular state, we the non-Christians, live under the tyranny (I know, too strong, but you catch my drift) of the theists.

Funnily enough, this is the same prezel logic that will have to define the implementation of the Swiss ban on minarets. After all, the might of the majority defining what constitutes proper architecture and what constitutes proper Sunday behavior are going to have to find similarly “secular” footholds in the Constitutions.

In a recent piece, Ian Buruma argues that the Swiss ban is less a sign of concern about Muslim religiosity and more a reflection on Europe’s own drift to socialist, atheist utopia:

Much has changed, thanks to global capitalism, European integration, the stigmatisation of national feeling by two catastrophic world wars, and, perhaps most importantly, the widespread loss of religious faith. Most of us live in a secular, liberal, disenchanted world. The lives of most Europeans are freer now than ever before. We are no longer told what to do or think by priests or our social superiors. When they try, we tend not to take any notice.

Hard to see where he gets that idea, isn’t it? Sure, the perception holds – and maybe those northies are indeed so free and disenchanted – but not here in Berlin, and certainly not in Switzerland.

Seth G. Jones, the author of “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan,” is a civilian adviser to the American military.

One of the brains behind President Obama’s Afghanistan policy Seth G. Jones, of RAND & McCrystal has a particularly unhinged op-ed in today’s NYT: Take the War to Pakistan.

The United States and Pakistan must target Taliban leaders in Baluchistan. There are several ways to do it, and none requires military forces.

The first is to conduct raids to capture Taliban leaders in Baluchistan. Most Taliban are in or near Baluchi cities like Quetta. These should be police and intelligence operations, much like American-Pakistani efforts to capture Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other Qaeda operatives after 9/11. The second is to hit Taliban leaders with drone strikes, as the United States and Pakistan have done so effectively in the tribal areas.

The moral bankruptcy apparent in the contrast between two sentences (“none requires military forces”) and (“to hit the Taliban with drone strikes”) is breath-taking. “Baluchi cities” like Quetta only have a million or so people, after all. Our precision strikes are surely only to singe a few curled mustaches. Right, Jones? But, yeah, I know. Crying about civilian casualties from non-military force is a luxury that only the un-informed and un-educated can afford. There are hard choices to make for real wars to end. And harder sells to make, as Nathan Hodge demonstrates in regards to Jones’ colleagues, the Kagans. In any case, Seth G. Jones is so much “civilian” cover for a war that has already spilled into Baluchistan. And WITH ONLY 20 CASUALTIES! Hallelujah.

Since Jones has never shown a predilection to history (or even an understanding of what “past” means. You can see some frank assessments of his earlier works, here and here), so here be a crude lesson about what the U.S. is getting into in Baluchistan: an existing war since 2004.

Seth G. Jones comes from the University of Chicago’s political science program and is an advisee of John Mearsheimer. His dissertation, The rise of Europe: Security cooperation and the balance of power, deals with the EU and intra-country security apparatus. He has no access to any relevant language, or historical archive. All of which, of course, makes him the perfect man to construct and explain this. [pdf]

I am too tired even to complain.

In The Review, I have a review of Christopher Sanford’s Imran Khan in which I briefly consider the man. Below is what didn’t make it into the review – for fairly obvious reasons – but, I thought I’d spin it here. No pun.

Much has been written on Imran Khan’s transcendence from the game of cricket but little justice has been done to his game itself. Sandford, as well, finds it hard to capture any sense of the player even as he pays exquisitely detailed attention to life and politics on and off the field. Before we turn to all those enticing issues away from the game, let us linger, for a moment, on the game itself. Imran Khan was one of the smartest cricketers. His greatest strength as fast bowler was that he was a true batsman. He knew how to think as a batsman which meant he made sure that the batsman played every ball he hurled at them. Consider that in his entire ODI career he bowled 216 overs with only 18 maidens. Now most would read this as sign that he was easy to score against, but his economy rate of 3.7 runs conceded per over belies that supposition. Simply put, he bowled at the batsman. This quality, above all, not only contributed to him being one of the highest wicket takers during his career, but it ensured that his co-bowlers consistently picked up a higher percentage of wickets.

As a batsman, he had a high arch to his bat and a tendency to commit to the front foot often and early. He wasn’t too orthodox in his shot selection yet had an enviably straight bat. He was also one of the best players of the short ball (a much needed skill since his own tendency to bowl short balls guaranteed reprisals). His hooks and pulls were always a joy to watch and he rarely succumbed to the third-man trap.

In the field, he wasn’t the swiftest nor the surest. As a true embodiment of “gentleman’s game”, he rarely flung himself at the speeding ball. Still, he had safe hands and rarely dropped a catch. But from his long-off perch, he managed the entire field as a seasoned sea-captain coordinates the crew – constantly shifting the field, swapping players, speaking with the bowler. His fields were always dynamic organisms, drawing in and out in sync with every ball that sped towards the bat.

This last was his particular strength as a captain. Unlike other team sports, the cricket captain has to act both as the heart and the mind for the team. When on field – which was the only place some of us could witness him in action – Imran Khan was a hybrid conductor and a puppeteer. He orchestrated every movement of the other ten men on the field. He was quick with a scold as with a pat, and always in complete control. Not for nothing that Imran Khan, as the captain, was often called ‘the dictator’.

The safe havens must be eliminated. The corruption must be stopped. The infrastructures must be built. The people must be free. The allies must stand together. The nuclear arms must remain safe. The bombing must be stopped. The safe haven must be eliminated.

30,000 plus a exit date of June 2011. It’s a safe bet that we will need some more troops. It’s a safe bet that things will calm down before they become restive, once again. It’s a safe bet that we will re-evaluate before we re-deploy.

A certain generation of Americans is heavily invested in the “Vietnam analogy” because that generation watches all of the cable shows. Is Afghanistan like or unlike Vietnam. Afghanistan is like Afghanistan. It’s majority population has been born and raised in the noise of bomb blasts and the heavy weight of an automatic weapon nearby – highly transient and shell-shocked. They say more Afghans are needed to fight for the future of Afghanistan. I’d say find more Afghans who are done fighting.

He said, “Since 9/11, al Qaeda’s safe havens have been the source of attacks against London and Amman and Bali.” See, again. There is no Islamabad. No Peshawar. No Lahore. No Lahore. No Lahore. Nor, even Mumbai (though, the Indian PM did get that nice dinner). No matter how much thoughtful and thorough review happens, some things are never questioned, nor changed.

“Public opinion has turned”, he said. Right. It was public opinion that kept us back from 2001-2008. We had a name for that public opinion, didn’t we? Our moderately enlightened public opinion. “In the past, we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly. Those days are over.” Ah, past. Let us not tarry there. Let us move on quickly and forcefully. But where? To fund and finance the capacity of Pakistanis to carry out bigger and more effective wars? How exactly is that a break from the past? Maybe the difference is that we are now going to drop night-vision goggles instead of a pellet full of dollars from the C-9 or C-7 or whatever big-planes-are-called? Yes, that is indeed new. Because night-vision goggles can give you sight in the darkness. Essential.

We will support democracy. We supported the “flawed” election of Karzai. That, unfortunately, is not “the past”. We supported Pervez Musharraf. He doesn’t want to be “the past”. And neither does “President Zardari” – who was bequeathed both a political party and a nation by a woman who last won an election in 1993 but was still the only possible future Pakistan was deemed to have. Sadly, she is also “the past”.

Should I have been heartened, at least, by his “concerns about our approach.” Yes, there are some concerns. In Islamabad. In Kabul. Maybe even is Khost and Karachi. Or in Kandahar and Lahore. We weren’t told but maybe those concerns were heard in the “review process”. I am sure that the easy traffic of weapons and people across borders, the legitimate demands of dis-enfranchised in Swat or Baluchistan, the fear of every-day life in Lahore or Karachi were all heard and discussed. Could it be that this “let’s send some more troops and help train some other more troops” strategy was developed with the political and civil leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan at the table with the Iranian, Indian, and Chinese officials to address inter and intra-regional tactics? Maybe hidden in the fine print are new means of communication, new definitions of strategic aims and missions and a much more harmonized action plan? It certainly never was in “the past”.

We have to “go forward”, “go forward”, while “going forward”, “going forward” and then “move forward” while “moving forward”. And Afghanistan? It has “moved backwards”. Movement is key in a stateless country where the only anchored reference remains Alexander the Great. We will move forward. If it comes that these (safe?) havens also move, we will already be ahead of them. Or behind.

Here we go ’round the mulberry bush.

[Photo Credit: Daily Waqt, Issue 69, vol. 287, Tuesday, Dec 1, 2009 & "Obama Announces Troop Increase for Afghanistan", Doug Mills/The New York Times]

Why is the knowledge of history always the first casualty?

Richard J. H. Gottheil. “The Origin and History of the Minaret”. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Mar., 1910): 152-4.

It is a well-known fact that the early Christian basilica had no towers attached or superposed. The same is true of the earliest Byzantine churches in Italy – the classic home of the campanile. Even to this day there are none attached to the cathedral of Parenzo (535-543), of Prado (571-586) or to that of San Lorenzo at Milan (6th century), which are among the earliest examples of church architecture in the West. … The oldest campaniles are supposed to date from the beginnings of the ninth century – those of Santa Maria della Cella at Viterbo and Sant Ambrogio at Milan: though that of Sant Apollionare in Classe is held by some to be of the eighth century. The campanile of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo is however reliably dated between 850 and 878.

It is therefore a pertinent question – whence did this addition to church architecture come? The writer of the article “Kirchenbau” in the Protestantische Real-Encyclopädie is of opinion that it was an original conception both in Italy and in the Frankish Empire, and that it had no connection whatsoever with the East. I understand this to be be also the meaning of Adolf Fäh’s words: Ein neues Element bilden die meist kreisrunden Türme”. But one might well ask in return – if they were not necessary as belfries, what purpose did they serve? In Ravenna they could hardly be needed as towers of defence, since the whole city was enclosed by a wall. Nor could they be used as light-houses; for that purpose they were too far distant from the shore. It is certainly peculiar that the rise of the campanile or church tower synchronizes with the coming of the Arabs into the Mediterranean. The first Arab raid upon Sicily is said to have taken place in the year 701; and though Sicily and certain parts of Southern Italy did not come under their direct rule until the Aghlabites were strong in Africa during the ninth century, Arab influence permeated the Eastern Mediterranean long before that. I do not know what authority there is for the statement that the columns for the basilicas at Ravenna were made in Istria by oriental workmen; but Ravenna was a great centre from which Oriental influences passed on into Europe – not only in art, but also in decoration, in mosaics, and in miniatur-painting as well. The basilica of St. Mark at Venice, supposed to contain the remains of the saint brought thither in 828 from Alexandria, is adorned with columns garnered in the East; and the campanile has an “ascent by a continuous inclined plane built between an inner and outer wall and turning with a platform at each angle of the tower” which reminds one at once of the ascent in the Pharos at Alexandria. Like the minaret, the campanile could be either round or square. Most of the early examples are round; but square ones are not wanting, e.g., at San Giovanni Evangelista, San Francesco and San Michele in Affricisco in Ravenna. And like the minaret, the campanile was at first not an integral part of the church building. It was generally placed near to it, sometimes even leaning upon it; until in the church spire it became almost a necessary part of every Christian place of worship.

It seems to me, therefore, that a possible explanation of the sudden appearance of the campanile in Italy during the eighth and ninth centuries, would be that they are due to Mohammedan influence. Whether this influence came from Egypt, or from Syria and Mesopotamia, or even from the Maghreb, is a point upon which I should not like to insist. But this much does seem to follow from a study of history of the monuments, that the old idea of the Ziggurat or tower in some way connected with worship at a shrine has filtered down to us through the Mohammedan minaret and finds its expression to day in our church steeple.

I wonder what the world would be saying if this game had the bearded fella sporting peyots along with that sporty ’stache. But since Muslims are the new (old) Jews, this sort of pure islamophobia will skip by without comment from the cognoscenti.

Lest you think this is more generalized immigration phobia and not religiously aligned hysteria, I present to you, Nassim Ben Khalifa, the Swiss soccer hero. A team with the two main strikers claiming the faith of minarets but which won them a world cup and the swiss hearts. As the Le Temp puts it, these Muslims are integrating quite nicely: