My thanks to the organizers of Yearly Kos, to all of you in attendance and to Professor Juan Cole for inviting me to this esteemed table.
I offer my brief comments today, then, as a student of history and as a neophyte to such a public forum. What I have to say may be familiar, and even obvious, to all of you but I believe familliar things are often the first to be forgotten. Still I hope that Professors Mearsheimer and Cole will provide the corrective which my presentation will undoubtedly require.
I had a rather different presentation planned for today focusing on our need to support full and immediate democracy in Pakistan because it was the most effective strategy in our fight against extremism. However, three days ago Senator Barack Obama gave a speech, The War We Need to Win, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In this speech he argued, among more laudable things, for a military deployment to Pakistan. It is that particular part of the speech that demanded a response today. However, I must insist that while my comments emerge from my engagement with Senator Obama’s speech, they are not restricted to him but apply to the entirety of public and political discourse about Muslim terrorism and our national response. I offer you these thoughts in hopes that they will provoke in us some imaginings of better solutions to our global problems.
Senator Obama suggests a policy which has military deployment as well as conditional aid to Pakistan based on their actions in the war on terrorism. His proposal comes at a time when Pakistan has dominated the news in two areas: the fight with militancy inside their capital city, and a growing movement for democracy. On July 3rd we saw the Pakistani army end a deadly stand-off with militants inside Islamabad’s central mosque, the Lal Masjid. On July 20th we saw one of the most pivotal decisions in the history of Pakistan’s civil and political society come from their Supreme Court - the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry after massive public protests in his support across the country. On July 28th we saw a direct result of those protests and the Supreme Court decision, when the ruling dictat and President, Pervez Musharraf went to meet the exiled leader Benazir Bhutto and discuss some version of government sharing. With these turbulent and historic events, Pakistan needs to hear from our Presidential candidates that they support the imminent return of democracy and and not a strategy that will surely de-stabilize Pakistan and, in-directly, keep the military dictator in power.
For seven years, a nervous world has hoped that a change in the White House will mean a positive change in our world - where we won’t be just a hammer, pounding on the nail of global terrorism, where our actions will have positive and fruitful reactions of solidarity and togetherness - not more bombs. Here and abroad, people hope that a new Democratic administration will put to rest the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war, global mistrust and go-it-aloneness.
I know all of us, here today, and working into the future will do our best to bring that world around.
Yet here we stand, at this moment, convinced that we know and understand that the primary offensive weapon we have against our enemies is a military one. On the one hand, we have Tancredo’s suggestion to nuke Mecca and Medina and on the other hand, instead of rationality, our candidates are putting out their own “get tough” vibes.
The Wilson Center address was something I did not foresee coming from Senator Obama. It has many wonderful things in it - practical and ideal that I would support. Yet, it also left me disconcerted. Since we are all family here, I will skip over the good bits and go straight to the ones that gave me pause. I want to understand how he missed making the support of immediate democracy in Pakistan the real and primary strategy against extremism - rather than a also-mentioned? I want to know how he reached the conclusion that even just in the history of the last six years, Pakistan has maintained a “soft focus” in our war?
The reason I believe is that these are the only positions imaginable, given that there exists a basic and unquestioned template regarding our understanding of our global struggle against extremists. This template derives from a fundamental charaterization of East/Islam and West/Modernity as diametric and in constant clash; it forecloses any possible trust we may extend towards our allies in the East or any great understanding towards our adversaries in the East.
Before we get to that template and assumptions, allow me to address first, Pakistan.
Senator Obama declares that Al Qaeda has a sanctuary in Pakistan. “Sanctuary”, at least to me, implies “official” state protection. If one understands that the complex history of federal and state relations in Pakistan - especially in the tribal areas - such a statement would have to be severely qualified - a qualification essentially missing from his statement. Similarly, when Senator Obama contends that Al Qaeda is training new recruits in Pakistan and that Pakistan has not acted against them in a substantial manner, one would have to point towards the intense military conflict currently going on in Waziristan between Pakistani troops and tribal forces.
Based on his interpretations of facts, Senator Obama’s solution is to deploy troops to the “the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.
The only way I know of deploying troops to a sovereign nation which is unlikely to accommodate such a request - is by invading said nation.
The facts, however uncharitably we may want to interpret them, remain thus: Pakistan is actually fighting a determined and pitched battle inside its borders for just the purposes outlined by Senator Obama. Pakistan has deployed 100,000 troops across its northwestern borders, and suffered thousands of casualties, both military and civilian. Just since the July 3rd Lal Masjid stand-off, there have been a dozen suicide bombings across Pakistan, killing over 200 civilians. Pakistan has killed or captured the majority of key operators of Al Qaeda. Pakistan has, in addition, permitted US military strikes on its sovereign territory in our global war against Al Qaeda: such as the November 10, 2006 missile strike that aimed to kill Zawahiri at a madrasa - and hit mostly children. And even as they have seen their cities and deserts flooded with the detritus from the forgotten war of Afghanistan, the Pakistani Press and people have publicly demonstrated - many hundreds of time - their hate of extremism and extremists and their enthusiasm for democracy and a just life. The case in point being, what I term, the Penguin Revolution, that swept Pakistan in the last three months - though making little dent in our media coverage here.
Despite these facts, and despite clear desire of the Pakistani public’s support for immediate democracy we face a White House intent on propping up an unpopular military dictator in the misguided hope that only an authoritarian regime can join them in this war. And now we have a potential strategy that could radicalize 200 million more Muslims.
These remain the only available options for Pakistan because we fundamentally distrust that public. We doubt their sacrifice and effort in this war and we question if they will prove resilient to the call of militant Islam from outside their border or inside their country. Hence, we need to act alone and in our interest - however short-sighted that may prove to be.
Four years after our indefensible invasion of Iraq and nearly six years after the attack on us, we are still unable to comprehend our enemy whom we chase from cave to cave - from Afghanistan to Iraq and now back to Pakistan? We still fail to recognize the connection between a society denied its basic freedom to choose by regimes we help keep in power - whether in Eygpt, in Saudi Arabia or in Pakistan and the appeal of militancy and extremism to those population.
Why this fundamental myopia?
There is a clearly stated understanding of extremism in Senator Obama’s speech - that poverty, chaos, conflict, disjunctive communities, and the presence of charismatic ‘whisperers’ lie at the root of people who vaporize themselves for their cause, and societies that crumple to the onslaught of hatred. This particular template can be judiciously assigned to the eminent historian, close advisor to the White House, and pater familia of the neo-cons, Bernard Lewis [the late Edward Said, author of Orientalism, a book from which this presentation, and much of post-colonial thought emerged referred to Lewis as a Scholar Combatant].
In his 1990 article, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, Lewis built upon Crusader history to create a template for what he termed was a “clash of civilizations”. If that seems prescient to you, I hasten to add that this imminent clash has been a part of European discourse about our Muslim Other since the medieval ages.
Briefly, to characterize a caricature, Lewis’s narrative is centered around a mythic Old Man of the Mountain [based on the historical Hasan al-Sabah in Syria] who takes poor, sexually frustrated Muslims and spirits them away to his secret lair where they are kept on a steady diet of hashish, women and dogma. He provides their families support, even as he whispers into their ears dreams of martyrdom and a paradise filled with virgins. Eventually, he sends them on suicidal missions against Christendom.
You can note the similarities to Senator Obama’s speech, yourself.
After September 2001, this template emerged as the definitive answer to the twin mindbenders: “Who are they? and Why do they hate us?” Despite being completely ahistorical, it cleverly explained the basic truths of a civilizational clash, and also negated any culpability in our history, our narratives or our foreign policy. It also ensured that our enemy remain irrational, homogenous and anachronistic to us - outside of Modernity and Enlightenment. And since the Taliban exist and Usama bin Laden exists, it can only be argued, by extension, that Islam itself is un-modern and un-Enlightened. We relegate this enemy to “cave-dotted mountains” even as he appears in the heart of our cosmopolitan world. We insist that his rationale remains false and spurious - even as he uses our own actions to recruit: Abu Gharib is not an actual war crime but something extremists “say about us”; America did not invade Iraq, just what extremists “say about us”, etc. Instead of honestly and fearlessly addressing our own mis-steps we call it their lies. And so, off we must go to those “cave-dotted” mountains to crush and annihilate those extremists at their hiding grounds.
There is no doubt that there are very real enemies intent on carrying out their own civilizational mission. But instead of focusing on the historical, cultural and religious or political specificities of these enemies, our public discourse remains intent on reproducing Lewis’ template - so that a bomber born and bred in London is reduced to the ethnicity of his forefathers and two weeks of exposure to the Eastern virus of extremism. This template keeps alive our prejudices and assumptions about Islam and the monolithic Other. The fact that President Bush did not know of the presence of Shi’a and Sunni in Iraq (or in general) is not simply a comment on him being dull. He is a sharp man with many advisors who know and can comprehend “difference”.
The thought that there may be differences and details and histories simply shouldn’t have occurred to him - his solution, the big hammer on the obvious nail, needs no such distinctions.
It is no surprise that this clash of civilizations operates not on differences but on ‘sameness’ - whether in Us or Them. When Bush stated, “You are with us or against us,” he was not being brash, he was being honest.
And so coming from this template, we have no choice but to predict or foresee a “clash”. There is no alternative provided to us in this war of ideologies. I need to say that there is a similar homogenized Occidentalism in the discourse of Islamist militants. They too cannot differentiate between actors near or far, nor can the understand any history besides the one they have constructed. In their discourse, centuries of corruption and servitude of Islam needs the cleansing power of their militant actions - be the victims Sunni, Shi’a or Christian.
All this is no great insight. I merely want to stress that we cannot explain how we are able to repeatedly and systematically generate a particular template of the world and a particular response unless we examine the ways in which we construct our knowledge of this world.
Our terrorists, even when they are born in Bradford or housed in Hamburg remain in the wild frontiers of our imagination. When terrorism happens in the domestic context, at Virginia Tech for example, we seek pathologies and sickness and material differences. When the same act is repeated in a crowded Baghdad market or a fruit stand in Islamabad, we summarily assign blame to an ever-lengthening chain of transmission that inevitably goes back to the whisperer in caves afar. We obliterate the particularities of our terrorists.
And, hence, the solution remains: strike first, ask later - if you ever get around to asking at all.
When Senator Obama seems uninformed about the facts of Pakistan or completely neglects Iran, India or China, in a strategy on South Asia and insists that military solutions take precedence, he is merely re-affirming this dominant discourse in American political thought. Our subsequent actions leave us with nothing more than empty platitudes of God-given freedoms.
We are, in fact, reluctant to know, to understand, to investigate, to learn, to differentiate. We insist on our global, flat, binary world no matter how many facts continue to pile up proving us wrong. We distrust those “masses” populating the streets of Pakistan. And hence, we have no choice BUT to ignore the real “birth-pangs of democracy” happening - we can only insist on “democratization” since we remain convinced that the only conclusion to an election in Pakistan will be power for the extremists. We refuse to acknowledge that the majority has proven time and again its commitment to a safe, secure and free existence for all.
The pictures you see here are not the masks of rage you are accustomed to see - these are lawyers, civil servants, public officials, the great backbone - the middle class - of any country.
And they are fighting in the street for justice and democracy. These are the forces we should be supporting. These are the people who we need to be on our side. These are the people whom we should stand by.
You may call it ‘paradoxical’ but the only solution against extremists is democracy - not the support of dictatorships.
But we cannot even discuss that solution until we decide to get local, to pay attention to localized facts, histories, realities, languages, religions, ethnicities and cultures, and unless we do that we will remain in Bernard Lewis’ deeply flawed template.
Senator Obama should take the right war to the right battlefield. That now-hopelessly caricatured war for their hearts and minds. He can fight on the right battlefields by cultivating a democratic ally in Pakistan - something that recent events clearly show, is much more of a reality than the mythic Old Man of the Mountain.
I hope that I have given you something to think about and I look forward to our discussions
Thank you.
discussions