Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

Defying simplification

Thursday, May 7, 2009

JOURNALISM DOESN'T do complexity very well. Like all truisms, that's generally … well … true.

The expanded Afghanistan war policy that the Obamites are now attempting presents journalism with just such complexity - even as they try to get back to basics in countering violent jihadism, a return so necessary after the Bush gang's grotesque diversion into Iraq.

 

This week Washington has been awash with Afghanistan's complexities - and those of Pakistan too - since Barack Obama is rightly bracketing the two countries together ... a strategy that’s entailed having both countries' leaders, Presidents Hamid Karzai (left) and Asif Ali  Zardari (right) visit simultaneously for a combined White House summit.

 

It's telling that these days video-conferencing should have become a calibration of foreign policy. Karzai, so much a creature of the Bush Administration, seemingly cannot quite get used to no longer having his twice-weekly electronic face-to-face meetings by satellite with "my good friend George"; instead Obama has called him (by old-fashioned phone) only a couple of times since being inaugurated, and this week doled out individual face-time to him in only half-hour slices, giving him exactly equal time with Zardari.

 

Well-intentioned US media outlets are stepping up to include and analyse Pakistan as fully part of the new mix. But Pakistan is a heady mix in itself ... with the Taliban fighting just scores of miles from the nation's capital ... the assassinated Benazir Bhutto's widower nominally in charge but so evidently despised throughout the country ... a highly equipped but too often highly unreliable military ... and somewhere of course a nuclear button with who knows whose finger within reach of it.

 

The Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS (but less often these days with Lehrer, as the newscaster/novelist is so frequently substituted for by Gwen Ifill or Ray Suarez) made a brave effort this week - but couldn't help presenting collages of jumbled and widely varying opinions (plus governmental spin of course) … from Obama's pugnacious regional envoy Richard Holbrooke … the Washington Post’s woman on the ground in Islamabad, Pamela Constable … and Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington.

 

Over in Lahore, the usually incisive New York Times writer Sabrina Tavernese had one of those occasionally heart-sinking commissions for a reporter - to produce a 1400-word piece of color plus background-analysis. And she disappointingly fell into one of the oldest of parachutists’ traps. It happens typically when a correspondent is newly-landed on fresh ground and grabs quickly at salient images to yoke them into service as summings-up of an entire country, even (or perhaps especially) one as perplexing as Pakistan.

 

Tavernese cited her departure from a briefing with the nationally admired commentator Mobarak Haidar who was predicting that all  the “achievements for the past 500 years are at risk” of being overturned by the medievalist Taliban’s advance, only to find herself suddenly surrounded outside by joyous wedding-party revelers, complete with bagpipe players and cascading rose-petals.

 

In the style of such “think-pieces” Tavernese asked rhetorically: “So which is the real Pakistan? Collapsing state or crazy party? The answer is both, which is why this country of 170 million people is so hard to figure out.” And she went on to emphasize, treading dangerously towards the fatuous, that we should especially distinguish the 13th Century lifestyle of rural Pakistanis from the urban centers where “the British-accented, Princeton-educated elite sip cold drinks in clipped gardens”.

   

   

 

IT’S NOWHERE NEAR AS SIMPLE as that, as the hardworking reporter herself would readily acknowledge, I am sure.

 

I’m prompted to remember a close college friend, whom here I will call merely by his initials, Z.J. … the son of a Pakistani merchant who immigrated to England … certainly British-accented by the age of 18 when we met for our Oxford education … and certainly accustomed to elite drinking (to drinking of all kinds, for that matter) and many forms of smoking, too. He was also an enthusiast for the novels of George Eliot, and went crazy for the supergroup of the time, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce in Cream.

 

I go online now and read with some amazement and admiration his later work, reviewing in the prominent literary journal Notes and Queries a leading critic’s new book on W B Yeats. At one point he perspicuously and a bit impishly contrasts the Irish poet with that great laureate of the rustic, William Wordsworth: “Yeats, despite some rumblings about temptations of the spade, had no use for the details of nature”.

 

But Z. J. developed over the years not into some elbow-patched academic, or a hip metropolitan literary figure. He chose instead the path of zealous, uncompromising Islamic fundamentalism.

 

Z. J. is of course not alone. And the rise of sophisticated, educated individuals just like him, driven by an intense anti-modern, anti-Western fervor, is hardly accounted for in the kind of journalism on offer in another of this week’s “backgrounders” in the Times, which expounded on how it is madrasa schools in Pakistan’s poor villages that are, to quote the headline, “Fueling Militancy”.

 

  

   

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.  

   

    

 

PAKISTAN’S MILTARY ALSO HAD A POWERFUL impact on me in my young adulthood. It comprised the aggressors in the first war I ever covered, the war that led to the creation of Bangladesh.

 

The officers were - guess what? - British-accented, and fond of cold drinks (notably Scotch with ice). They briefed me courteously and even languidly about “putting down” a rebellion of Bengali “miscreants” (one of the choicest authoritarian euphemisms that I have collected over time) while their soldiers strafed and burned Bengali homes, raping and killing civilians - possibly over a million - all across what was then East Pakistan.

 

Away from military controls and censorship, I managed to follow those troops for several weeks, observing the results of their genocidal sweep through the countryside. Those atrocities still live in my mind at a deeper level than any striking vocabulary.

 

Those armed “guardians” of Pakistan were impelled by the conviction that their Eastern fellow-Muslims, who in fact only wanted a measure of self-rule, were traitors under the control of the over-arching enemy next door, India.

 

That blindered predisposition to see India as always the biggest threat remains a critical dimension to the disturbing unreliability of Pakistan’s armed forces. 
 

 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -