Favourite places in England: Number 2. Topsham, Devon

I read today this excellent article in the Atlantic, on the subject of the war in... Vietnam.   It's an old article, written in 1968, and yet it somehow has a contemporary relevance.

Its observations on crypto-racism, 'effectiveness' and can-do men are all intriguing -- but readers of Woodward's latest book may perhaps be struck most of all by the following paragraphs:

Throughout the conflict as well, there has been a steady give-in to pressures for a military solution and only minimal and sporadic efforts at a diplomatic and political solution. In part this resulted from the confusion (earlier cited) among the civilians— confusion regarding objectives and strategy. And in part this resulted from the self-enlarging nature of military investment. Once air strikes and particularly ground forces were introduced, our investment itself had transformed the original stakes. More air power was needed to protect the ground forces; and then more ground forces to protect the ground forces. And needless to say, the military mind develops its own momentum in the absence of clear guidelines from the civilians. Once asked to save South Vietnam, rather than to "advise" it, the American military could not but press for escalation...

in the summer of 1964 the President instructed his chief advisers to prepare for him as wide a range of Vietnam options as possible for postelection consideration and decision. He explicitly asked that all options be laid out. What happened next was, in effect, Lyndon Johnson's slow-motion Bay of Pigs. For the advisers so effectively converged on one single option — juxtaposed against two other, phony options (in effect, blowing up the world, or scuttle-and-run) — that the President was confronted with unanimity for bombing the North from all his trusted counselors. Had he been more confident in foreign affairs, had he been deeply informed on Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and had he raised some hard questions that unanimity had submerged, this President could have used the largest electoral mandate in history to de-escalate in Vietnam, in the clear expectation that at the worst a neutralist government would come to power in Saigon and politely invite us out. Today, many lives and dollars later, such an alternative has become an elusive and infinitely more expensive possibility.

Elizabeth Rubin on Afghan women

I don't normally use this blog to highlight articles I've read -- there are lots of dedicated sites for that kind of thing -- but this article on Afghan women struck me as beyond the ordinary and worth recommending.

Despite its brilliance as a portrait, maybe one point that it doesn't stress enough is the difference between places like Kabul, where acting (and beauty salons) are possible, and places elsewhere -- especially in southern and eastern Afghanistan -- where they remain unthinkable.  

A settlement with the Taliban -- something much in the air at the moment -- would not necessarily have much effect in Kabul.  It will matter more in the Pashtun-majority rural areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan.

At a dinner with Washington luminaries after a recent Brookings panel on reconciliation, I was challenged about its possible impact on women.  I am not convinced that there ever will be a settlement, but neither am I convinced that it needs to be a disaster for women -- if it can put an end to war, and usher in a period of prolonged peace and development.  War, after all, has always been the catalyst for some of the most conservative and repressive movements in religion, whether Savonarola or Ibn Taymiyya.  Some of the extreme conservatism of Afghanistan today must be due to thirty years of almost unremitting conflict.

Wikileaks: what we learn about Iraq

A harrowing summary of Wikileaks' 400,000 military documents, which give a detailed picture of the horrors of war, can be heard on the BBC here.  The reporter heard on the excerpt is from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism rather than from the BBC itself.

Some of the cruelty and suffering that is described there will be sadly familiar to anyone who has followed Iraqi affairs since 2003.

The estimate of civilian casualties may even be an underestimate.  There is often much confusion about estimates of civilian casualties.  In the case of Wikileaks, the number we are hearing (two thirds of 109,000 deaths; or, as we hear, maybe 80 per cent of 150,000 deaths) is the number of civilians killed by anyone, i.e. it includes those killed by Iraqi militias or terrorists as well as U.S. forces.

A separate survey by the Lancet attempted to find another, unknown figure: the total number who died as a result of the war, including those who died of heart attacks and car accidents that increased as a result of post-war chaos.  Its estimate of 655,000 excess deaths was far higher than anything emerging from Wikileaks, but that is partly because it was attempting to estimate a totally different figure.  In fairness, some well thought-out criticism of the Lancet's survey can be found here.  But the number it was attempting to find will now certainly be well higher than 150,000.

Security Council retreat in Istanbul: meeting notes

I see that the International Peace Institute has published notes of the retreat in June in Istanbul, at which I presented a paper on the United Nations role in Afghanistan.  For those that are interested, the link is here.

A Tourist in Afghanistan – By Nick Horne | Foreign Policy

A Tourist in Afghanistan – By Nick Horne | Foreign Policy

This is a piece about the trek that Linda Norgrove, Nick Horne, one other person and I went on last year -- up and down the Wakhan corridor. It was posted on Foreign Policy some time ago now, but for me it's a nicer way to remember Linda than all the headlines. It's also the time that a lot of my pictures were taken that are shown on this blog.

Linda Norgrove

I heard the news this morning about a friend of mine, Linda Norgrove, who was killed yesterday in Afghanistan.  

I knew Linda from a two-week walking trip last year in the Wakhan corridor, where this picture was taken.  She seemed to me the ideal of a development worker: someone who listened to Afghans, spent time with them, was kind, courageous, patient and dedicated.  

So in its own small way, this post honours her, as many of her friends have done in private or public.

Favourite places in England

I know (from looking at stats on the website) that most people reading this will likely be living in the USA, and would perhaps rather be told what a wonderful time I had in Acadia National Park this year. Another time! This series (every good blog needs a series) is going to be about different parts of England that are especially memorable for me, thinking of them at three thousand miles' distance.

Reading Alastair Lyons' The House of Wisdom which is all about how Arabs preserved scientific knowledge in those centuries, around a thousand years ago, when Europeans had forgotten all that the Greeks had once learned -- I read that Pope Sylvester II was accused of having learned 'Saracen magic' because he had learned in Cordoba how to use the astrolabe.

The idea of Arabic being somehow a magical language survived until quite recent times.  In Dartmoor, in south-west England, a legend was still being told in the nineteenth century of how a ghostly apparition of a horse was only dispelled by clergymen trying first Latin, then Greek, then Hebrew -- all unsuccessfully -- and then using an incantation in Arabic which put an end to the haunting.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that Dartmoor, pictured below, is one of the best bits of England -- whose grim past, when the Devil was said to lead a nightly hunt of hounds, corpses had to be carried for miles for burial, judges came so rarely that suspects were hanged before trial, and the Parliament of the Moor sat on great rock thrones on a hill at its centre, is now turned into comfortably implausible legends.  It's all B&Bs and expensive cottages now; few are the people like our friend, who grew up there and took her pony on the train to school.

The United Nations in Afghanistan

The attached paper was delivered at a conference in June sponsored by the Government of Turkey and organized by the International Peace Institute.  I attach it as a resource for anyone who wants to think about the UN's role in Afghanistan in the coming year. It is a draft; comments welcome via e-mail.

Faces of Afghanistan

Panjshir, Afghanistan, late 2009

Boston Palestine Film Festival: Targeted Citizen

Here is the second film from the Boston Palestine Film Festival yesterday.  I can't exactly say that I enjoyed it, though it's very well put-together: it's a sad and troubling film about Arab citizens of Israel - or Palestinian Israelis, as they are also known.  It seemed to me worth posting for people to see it in full, particularly in the light of the 'loyalty oath' issue which has rightly appalled Julian Kossoff in the Telegraph here.

Targeted Citizen - English from Adalah on Vimeo.

Jews from Baghdad

The documentary film 'Forget Baghdad' was shown at the Boston Palestine FIlm Festival last night.  It was made in 2002, and it focusses on the experiences of four Jewish Iraqi Communists who emigrated to Israel, as well as interviewing an Israeli-born academic (Ella Shohat) who came of an Iraqi family.  Some of her views are given in an article here.

Given that the film has been around for a while, I won't give a full account of it -- it can be bought here -- but there were a few parts that stood out.  One was the story of how Communist protesters in Baghdad (a number of them Jewish, including two of the interviewees) took part in a march to the British Embassy in Baghdad.  One of the marchers was killed, while others fled and took refuge in the nearest homes -- which happened to be the red-light district.  Prostitutes hid them.  Meantime the Communist leader hid from the police in Jewish houses.  All these people were of different religions.

Although now Israelis, some of the four belonged in Iraq to anti-Zionist movements and in general their relationship with Israel is characterised by ambivalence (one of them calls it 'arm-wrestling').  The implication in the film is that this has more to do with their Iraqi origin than their Communist politics, which several of them seem to have abandoned by the time they are interviewed.  The film gives quite a lot of detail on the painful time that Iraqi Jews had when arriving in Israel, and since; Golda Meir asked 'can we raise these immigrants to an appropriate level of civilisation?'  Their Arab identity was constantly problematic for them -- Ella Sahohat describes that she was called a 'stinky Iraqi' at school.  Samir Naqqash (on whom see more below) would regularly be searched at checkpoints on suspicion of being Arab.  

Yet, as the interviewees describe, Iraqi immigrants to Israel were often highly educated, though sometimes in unconventional ways: after all, as described in the film, a cobbler in Baghdad might turn out to be an expert on Marx. (A recent book, which also touches on the unhappy experiences of Iraqi immigrants to Israel at that time, is My Father's Paradise by Ariel Sabar).

Their relationship with Iraq is also ambivalent and is perhaps the most moving thread in this film.  One man tells how he felt when seeing the US bomb Iraq during the First Gulf War, even as Iraqi Scud missiles were landing in his own neighbourhood of Ramat Gan.  He says 'I saw this bridge crumble and fall into the Tigris.  That bridge was where I had my first kiss, I used to swim underneath it; I felt as if I were a bedouin watching my favourite horse die'. 

One of the men describes a recurring dream: he is sitting in Abu Nuwas street in Baghdad, "more beautiful for me than any other street in the world... I learned billiards in its cafes, we used to talk philosophy.  In the dream I enjoy the smell of mazgouf again, I look over the Tigris and drink tea; and then in my dream I pull out money from my pocket and I find it's Israeli money and I am afraid; the police start to chase after me.  I think that in my heart I am afraid of my first homeland, Iraq," he says ruefully.

One of those interviewed, Samir Naqqash, wrote all his life in Arabic and as a consequence faced the double disadvantage of being incomprehensible to many Israelis while being banned, as an Israeli, from having his books published in much of the Arab world.  So while desribed by Neguib Mahfouz as one of the greatest living artists writing in Arabic today', he had few readers.  Naqqash died since the recording of the film.  A review of his work can be found here. His obituary is here. Some of his work can be bought here.

Finally, the documentary refers throughout to an Egyptian film of 1949 in which a man steals the affections of three different girls (Muslim, Christian and Jewish respectively) by pretending to belong to the same religion as each of them in turn.  Here's the poster and a link to an excerpt from that film (the teacup dance! it's a bit stereotypical):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYoLSzkfSd4

Adonis, reprised

I published another piece on the poet Adonis on the Guardian's website today: see the link here.

I suggest that he is a craftsman who is weaving Europe and the Arab world together, to the mutual benefit of both.

And, that the West should not just reach out to clergy and politicians, but other kinds of opinion-formers.

Firedint

I've been thinking about what to call this blog, given that there are so many millions of titles already taken, and because it's hard to predict what I might want to write about in years to come.  So I chose this name from a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins about man:

How fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!

It sounds a bit gloomy, put like that, but as a way of expressing what a blog is about, 'mark on mind' seems pretty good.  And since his poem is all about the distancing of people from the world, then maybe this helps to sum up the odd cyber-world that a blogger lives in?

I hope to have a couple of posts tomorrow, one on Afghanistan and a sequel on Adonis.

Meantime I have been catching up on Jon Stewart back episodes, especially his interview with Tony Blair. I think I'll reserve judgment on that particular interview, but Stewart generally is hugely impressive.

Ghosts and the English Reformation

This interview struck me today as particularly interesting:

According to English poet Peter Ackroyd, the United Kingdom is the source of seventy per cent of the world's ghost stories.

He attributes this to the Reformation. As he points out, many ghost sightings are of monks and nuns.  So, perhaps ghosts filled the spiritual space left by the rituals and customs of the Catholic Church, after the monasteries had been destroyed and the Latin Mass had been abandoned.

Pashtuns in the Afghan army

Various press reports (see here for example) have picked up on low recruitment rates of southern Pashtuns into the Afghan army.

Specifically the quote given in the cited article is that 66 Pashtuns were among the 3708 recruits last month.

There's a big and significant difference between saying 'Pashtuns' and 'southern Pashtuns' in a report like this, which sadly the article skates over.  For as long as the Afghan armed forces have Pashtuns from the east and north, it can at least be an ethnically balanced force with plenty of people who can speak Pashto-- not exactly the same kind of Pashto that is spoken in the south, but mutually understandable.

The article says the Afghan armed forces have 43 per cent Pashtuns in their ranks.  That's a very healthy ratio.

The only problem is that elsewhere it's suggested that this statistic is a target -- a quota for officers -- rather than a fact.  It's not clear whether this target is near to being reached, or nowhere near.  My own understanding was that there was no analysis of what proportion of the army and police are Pashtun because until recently, recruits were not asked their ethnicity.

The issue is very problematic because it means that if the US army ever transfers territory to Afghan forces in southern Afghanistan, those forces may be overwhelmingly non-Pashtun -- meaning that they may not speak the local language and may have little understanding of the local culture, such are the differences between the people in different areas of the country.  It's not so bad if they are Pashtuns from other parts of Afghanistan.  Governor Mangal of Helmand in southern Afghanistan is from eastern Afghanistan, for example.

I'll be trying to find out if there really is a statistic for different ethnic groups in the armed forces, or just a target.

Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto, grand-daughter of Pakistan's murdered President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and niece of Benazir, spoke at Harvard last week.  A review of her book, published earlier this year, can be found here.  So, although I read it over the weekend, I'll not say much about it.  It's very well-written, deeply personal and made me look for my history books.  The tragedy of Fatima Bhutto's family, as she describes it, reminded me very much of the story of Germanicus and Agrippina.

In her talk, Fatima Bhutto quoted quite a bit from the book -- adding a few other points: 5000 websites were banned this year in Pakistan; the quote from Bob Woodward's book that President Zardari had told the CIA 'collateral damage does not worry me'; the Sindh parliament marking Michael Jackson's death with a moment of silence, while saying nothing about victims of drone attacks; international aid to Pakistan's earthquake victims being (she said) $3 per person in comparison with $450 donated for each Haitian victim.  

The book and the talk were highly critical of Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari's governments, and not soft on General Musharraf either: corrupt military governments or corrupt autocratic civilian governments were, she said, the same as each other.  Bhutto's government had recognized the Taliban and failed to repeal the hudood ordinances.  Pakistan had missed the Millennium Goal for eradicating polio because it couldn't refrigerate the vaccines -- despite being a nuclear-armed state.  20 families controlled Pakistan's wealth in 1948 and now it was 27 families: that's progress, she asked?

U.S. policy towards India and specifically the nuclear deal had ruined the Pak-India gas pipeline concept.  Some aid workers (she said, replying to a question) did act like agents of imperialism, but not all.... 

Extremely engaging and likeable as a speaker, she was less convincing when pushed to defend specific policies (say, nationalisation).  She was asked more than once whether she wanted to enter politics, and as you can see from the above it was an intensely political speech.  She seemed entirely genuine when she said no, and that she opposed the dynastic principle.  But I did leave wondering whether, despite her intentions, she would be able to resist.

Vote Adonis

The Syrian poet Adonis is, once more, a top candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.  

He writes powerful and very complex poetry, with many references to Sufism and Greek mythology.  A review by Robert Irwin is here.  Here's a link to a biography and some of his translated poems of which this is one example:

Orphans

A lover rolling in the darkness of Hell 

like a stone, I am. 

But I shine.

I have a date with the priestesses

in the bed of the ancient god.

My words are tempests that rattle life,

and sparks are my songs.

I am a language for a god to come,

I am the sorcerer of dust.

Other poems reached via that link include one dedicated to al-Hallaj, the great Sufi mystic.  Adonis uses a great deal of religious imagery, drawn from Sufism but perhaps also influenced by the Alawite esoteric tradition.  

Here is a recording of him reading his poems aloud, in the original Arabic (an English translation follows some time later):

And here is a fascinating interview that he gave to an Arabic television channel, criticising contemporary interpretations of Islam and the lack of tolerance in modern-day Arab society (the interview itself is of course evidence that this tolerance is not quite dead.)  'Muslims are destroying Islam; the unbelievers are doing more for religion than the believers.'  He is a firm opponent of Western intervention in the Middle East, including attempts to install democratic regimes: 'if the Arabs are incapable of creating democracies for themselves, then it will not happen through foreign intervention.'  The whole interview is suffused with honesty and wisdom.