I really am. Just not at this blog. Here’s what I’ve been up to.
1. Trying to keep up with the latest wave of attacks in Pakistan:
These questions remind us that the Pakistani Taliban does not have its eye on a concrete goal or purpose. Structurally, that makes them a weaker adversary than the Afghan Taliban, who are united behind the goal of an Islamist state in Kabul. But strategically, this paradoxical mix of interests makes the TTP harder to fight. In Afghanistan, the U.S. and its allies have at least been able to define victory as reclaiming Kabul and making it impossible for the Taliban to regain, even if the strategy for doing so leaves much to be desired. If victory is conclusively denying the enemy his goal, what constitutes a Pakistani victory over the TTP?
2. Getting my head around the major security threat to India.
The biggest threat to India’s security thus lies not with those left out, economically, from its growth, but with those disconnected, politically, from its democracy. Most of the people–officials, journalists, professionals, and academics–I’ve spoken to believe the unevenness that matters is not monetary, but geographic: between the central government and various provinces interested in running their own affairs.
These range from the Telangana separatists who wish to split off into their own province to the Maoists who who wish to rule several existing provinces according to cowboy populism, to the North-eastern provinces that demand to leave India altogether. Though these movements recruit followers from the economically down-and-out, their central demand is a political one. It’s the political nature of the movements that makes even their economic claims lethal.
I really meant to write a New Year’s post. But to be honest, the New Year somewhat passed me by: even though my computer and two phones remind me of the date, moving as I am every few days, and in such warm weather, it’s been hard to keep track of the passage of wintertime.
I’ve also kept quiet because I have little to add to the mountain of essays on what the aughts were really about. Terrorism,Technology, Climate, and Globalization were certainly the major themes of the decade, but trying to suss out which of these stories matters most strikes me as a futile exercise. Ask me again in 2050. As for my take on 2009, it’s been more or less dominated by the Obama presidency, and we all know how I feel about that.
Looking forwards, I’m predicting more of the same: individualists will continue to triumph politically, while governance, the work of institutions suffers. As states cede power, ‘non-state actors’ will gain. But the real power in the emerging era will belong to the few institutions–nations and companies–who can, through aggregation, reap success from the failures of others and who may even encourage those failures as a means to the end. It’s not a trend I welcome, but it’s one I recognize.
Personally, the aughts were a swell decade for me. I grew out of my awkward stage. I got out of my awkward high school. I spent five years getting my intellectual ass-kicked by people who wound up my best friends. I worked at three great magazines in what might be the final apotheosis of the newsmagazine economy. And I got this great boondoggle of a trip to South Asia. If 2010 brings more of the same to my own life, that’s fine by me.
Latest Pulitzer blog post on the bubbling cauldron of political corruption in Pakistan: When a society’s primary loyalties are local and clannish, rather than national, robbing the nation to serve the clan is normal, even honorable.The takeaway from the public outrage over corruption today is that local ties are giving way to a national consciousness, the kind of consciousness than can and will be offended by the theft or manipulation of its resources.
I’ve got a short item in this week’s Newsweek on control of Afghan water: What alarms Pakistan most is the possibility that India will gain control over the water from two Afghan rivers that flow into the volatile Pakistan border regions, where water shortages could inflame local insurgencies. Indian investment in Afghanistan has doubled since 2006, to $1.2 billion, and up to 35 percent of that is going into canals for local irrigation, as well as hydroelectric dams that will supply power to Iran and Turkmenistan, India’s gateways to Central Asia and the Gulf.
I’ve been exploring the Google-NYTimes–WaPo venture Living Stories, a site that aggregates coverage of particular events in real-time. As one reader put it, this seems like something news organizations should have done long ago.
As a consumer of news, I consider this a potential tool, but it needs to have a much wider array of news sources to be truly useful: my challenge as a reader today isn’t keeping up with the New York Times’ coverage of Pakistan; it’s keeping up simultaneously with the Times and the Post and the Journal and the BBC and the Guardian and about as many local outfits.
Because even though ad revenue from Living Stories is to go to the news organizations, Google is still powering the site and organizing the ads—they still have access to all the user data involved and that benefits them elsewhere. The more that all news organizations’ content merges on sites like these, the more centralized and more powerful Google’s data cache can become.
Moreover, Living Stories, or indeed any subject-based aggregation strategy, doesn’t solve the critical problem facing journalism today: if given a choice to consume content by subject, it’s likely that readers will choose to keep up with regular developments in national politics, hyperlocal affairs, sports and culture. Foreign affairs, state-level politics, and economics are less likely to receive sustained attention—everyone is interested when there’s a major intelligence breakthrough, a corrupt governor or a case of corporate fraud, but no one wants to the read the months of daily stories that lead to big scoops in these areas. And there’s no way to know, in advance, which companies or which states or which countries will produce that scoop—you have to pay, blindly, for daily reporting on all of it. Who is going to do that now?
I don’t think Living Stories does much to help us there. Like many Google products—Gmail, Reader—I like this one, but it’s unclear to me if its good or bad for the news organizations involved.
Also today, from Islamabad, I opine on the role of the middle class in Pakistan’s political future:
Capitalism is the best insurer of political stability, Nasr posits, but not all capitalisms are equal. To promote peace, growth must do more than simply reduce absolute poverty by expanding the proverbial economic pie. It must also curb inequality by expanding the middle class, and tie their success explicitly to the stability of the state.
Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint
The Muslim world’s middle classes are the ultimate stakeholders in the war on terrorism. While demanding liberal pro-growth policies that raise the incomes of those at the bottom, middle-class business leaders remain dependent on the state for core services such as education and healthcare which both facilitate their own entrepreneurship and benefit the poor.
Unlike upper-crust investors, they can’t pack up their assets and their families and leave when political turmoil hits. Because they have real wealth to lose if the state falls apart, middle classes remain engaged in the democratic process and protect democratic institutions from violence and corruption. By strengthening the state, and enriching their societies, they undermine the sales pitch of militant leaders who prey on inequalities and power vacuums to recruit followers. Even in economically troubled, war-torn Pakistan, a small middle class is beginning to play this very role.[Read the rest.]
It’s been a big week here in Islamabad. First off, there have two more bomb attacks, one at the naval compound down the street from where I am staying and one out in Pindi, the next town over. Secondly, Barack Obama finally announced his plans for the war in Afghanistan: 30,000 more troops now; phased withdrawal started in 18 months. Thirdly, Prime Minister Yousuf Reza Gilani completed a tour of Germany and Britain.
The three incidents shared space on the front pages of the Islamabad dailies and in the national mind. After all, while Americans heard the speech live on Tuesday night (7 am here), most Pakistanis watched it on replay later on Wednesday, and many Pakistanis did not begin responding to the policy until Thursday. Conventional wisdom did not form till the weekend, by which time the capital was also dealing with the bomb blasts and with the developing story in London, where, in a Thursday morning press conference, the PM pushed back against British intelligence reports that some 60% of global terrorist plots emerge from Pakistan.
To most people here, the West is a fair weather friend. While waging a war in Afghanistan that sends militants over the border into the Pakistani frontier, the West complains that Pakistan harbors too many terrorists. While insisting that Pakistan both aid that war effort and crackdown on its consequences, America announces that when Afghanistan—and just Afghanistan—is secure, it will pack up its bags and leave. This imbalance certainly anger those who have a knee jerk opposition to the United States or paranoia about American-Indian conspiracies. But the most passionate criticism of this policy has come from elite liberals who have supported and defended the Afghan war and feel, to put it simply, betrayed.
