WhirledView

Made (and Unmade) in Pakistan—and Elsewhere

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I’ve just seen a very engaging documentary about energetic, enterprising young professionals in Lahore, Pakistan, and for over an hour I felt I was happily back in a milieu it’s been my pleasure and  privilege to be part of.  The film is called Made in Pakistan.  It’s a wonderful reminder that most people in most countries, Pakistan included, are focused on living dynamic, responsible, constructive, even creative lives.   So here they are, two women, two men: Waleed, a young lawyer passionately devoted to the rule of law; Rabia, a young writer and mother struggling to put a savvy  new magazine into the black; Tara, a fashionista and event planner whose go-go-go business is expanding into an all-Pakistan operation; Mohsin, a young politician running the family-business which  happens to center on elections.

Law, politics, journalism, fashion—these are four essential professions that, believe it or not, thrive in urban Pakistan, and Made in Pakistan shows us how four very appealing practitioners manage lives as fascinating and complex as those of their counterparts in New York or London.  Producer Ayesha Khan wants us to understand this, not from grim statistics but by sharing moments with people whose unscripted authenticity is insidiously appealing.  She wanted us to see that there is more to Pakistan than narrow religiosity and violence.  And she has succeeded.

So check it out, when you can.  Made in Pakistan was one of the favorites at the just closed Santa Fe Film Festival.  You’ll see why.

First They Razed the Minarets—

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

 Can you believe it? A bunch of foreign fanatics wants to desecrate our traditional skyline with toothpick towers they call minarets from which they’ll yodel I don't know how many times a day, and we’re supposed to sit by, mum as mice, while Switzerland becomes Switzerlost.  Minarets!  Impaling clouds!  Making a Swiss cheese of the heavens.  No way! No new minarets! As for those built already, down with every one of them!   If these terrorists-in-the-making don’t like it, well! we’ll sic the Swiss Guard on them.  A good Swiss pike can repel any raghead—and aren’t those puffy pants cute?

Wouldn't you know it!  The United Nations is in a snit, as if we were discriminating, not merely asserting our right to be Swiss.  So we’ll have to level the playing ground, it seems.  All steeples and bell towers will also have to go, which may be just as well.  Their upkeep, so to speak, is murder.  What’s sauce for the Muslim goose is sauce for the Christian gander, it seems.  Of course, the carillons and bell ringing are done for, too, which may not be so bad.  We’ll be able to sleep in on Sundays.  Anyhow no one needs bells or calls to prayer, for that matter, in the modern world.  We have watches.  Swiss watches.

Speaking of watches, the clock towers are doomed.  The economic levelers say it’s not fair to put timepieces on a pedestal if you can’t erect Swiss Army knife towers and that won’t do, according to the environmentalists.  A tall, sleek, gleaming blade, evidently, would have a genocidal impact on migrating geese and ganders.  Ditto the scissors and the corkscrew.  I’m tempted to use the tweezers to tweak certain noses, but there we are.

Ah, skyscrapers!  With all other towers razed, they make a grand silhouette against the sky.  But the Jungians are whining about the baleful psychological impact of all those Freudian phallic symbols.  Either we en-womb Basel, Geneva, Zürich and every cow-ridden village geodesically or they’ll be googling explosive formulas from Islamist websites.  Once upon a time—sigh!—we’d have dome-sticated fast.  But the U.S. has declared war on tax evaders, kleptocracy is under attack and the banks can’t mint money in the good old Swiss way. So ker-boom!  It’s cheaper to destroy than to build.

Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: How the West Won

By Yale Richmond, Guest Contributor

Yale Richmond, a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer and author of 11 books on intercultural communication, worked on U.S.-Soviet cultural and other exchanges for more than 20 years.  He delivered the following speech at the Aleksanteri Institute’s 9^th Annual Conference “Cold War Interactions Reconsidered” 29-31 October 2009, University of Helsinki, Finland.

This is the first of a two part series.  The second part will appear on Thursday, December 10.

I want to thank the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki for this opportunity to speak to you. It is an honor to be asked to address such a well-informed audience.                              

First a disclaimer. Although I worked for the US Government for more than 35 years, and many of those years on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I do not speak for the State Department today. The views I present here today are my own.

There are many theories of why communism collapsed and the Cold War ended, as you will likely be hearing in this conference.   

There are a few grains of truth in some of those explanations, and more than a few in others, but I will provide today many grains of another explanation—that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism were consequences of Soviet contacts and cultural exchanges with the West, and with the United States in particular, over the years that followed the death of Stalin in 1953.

When cultural exchange with the Soviets is mentioned, most people think of Soviet dancers, symphony orchestras, ice shows, and circuses that came to the West and filled our halls with admiring spectators. But cultural exchange consisted of much more--exhibitions, motion pictures, and most important, exchanges of people.

The Iron Curtain was almost impenetrable. Information about the West was closely controlled. There was no free press and no internet. Foreign travel for Russians was very limited, and few visitors came to the Soviet Union. Moreover, most of Soviet territory was closed to travel by foreigners, except for a few large cities. Most Russians thought they were better off than people in the capitalist West.

However, over a 30-year period (1958-1988), more than 50,000 Soviet citizens came to the United States under various exchanges of the US-Soviet Cultural Agreement, and tens of thousands more came to countries in Western Europe. And those are conservative estimates. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party leaders, musicians and athletes, and they were all cleared by the KGB for foreign travel. But they came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Those exchanges changed the Soviet Union and prepared the way for Gorbachev’s glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War.

I will speak here about United States exchanges with the Soviet Union because we had the largest exchanges with the Soviets, but much of what I say can also apply to exchanges other countries had with the Soviet Union.

What were our objectives?

A System in Need of a Large Broom: Buyer Beware

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Every so often, I write a post on the internal workings or non-workings of the State Department. I haven’t done so for awhile – but I guess it’s that time again – especially since the Department is set to expand the number of Foreign Service Officers by 1,000 over the coming year. Let’s face it, State, the executive branch’s oldest department, has often attracted top talent – but its personnel system and the way it treats too many of its officers has been its weakest link. It remains so.

This, in a nut shell, means State continues to fail to make use of the talent it has so assiduously recruited nearly as well as it could. Or should. A Human Resources Bureau that has been allowed to run amok with little or no outside oversight over the past decade remains a major obstacle. This is most visible at the senior levels where financial and assignments stakes are highest, but the problems have also trickled down the ranks in deleterious and mysterious ways.

Here are a few of the most recent examples:

The bonus pay fiasco

Over the past several years, lists of senior officers eligible for bonus pay were secretly winnowed in size by employees in Human Resources. When a group of eligible FSOs stumbled upon this, the Director General  wrote them a letter giving an explanation that was either deliberately false or the product of gross incompetence by HR staff. As a consequence, the Department has been ordered by the Foreign Service Grievance Board to reconvene several years of those boards to rectify what are at best irregularities -- if not cronyism or worse.

The Obligation to Protect: Is There One?

Patricia Lee Sharpe

An important new doctrine in international law is incubating: the obligation to protect.  I want to approach it by indirection, by looking at the evolution of family law in recent times.  

Most everyone agrees that the “family,” must be respected and protected.  There has been a longstanding, almost universal disinclination to interfere when families are troubled. Up to a point, this delicacy is beneficial.  Family cohesion is important economically, sociologically and psychologically.  But families can also be toxic.

The Sacred Threshold

Not so long ago police in the United States would not intervene in a “domestic dispute.”  A woman could be black and blue and bleeding, but the cops would respect the threshold.  Even today,  when a badly battered female complainant reverses her testimony, the case is generally closed.  “I fell,” the woman says.  It’s clearly a lie, but that’s that.  

For that matter, within living memory, certain American “Christians” have said that a husband may discipline a stubborn unruly wife by beating her.  As for marital rape, the term raised hoots of laughter when first introduced a couple of decades ago.  Marriage, by definition, meant enforceable conjugal rights for husbands. Wives lacked the right to say, “No.”

Laws and Mores Change

But laws and mores have changed.  When men get violent, a more supportive climate of opinion makes it easier for women register a complaint of rape or battery, and makes it harder for the police to look the other way.  What’s more, honor killing, that apex of domestic horror, is no longer sanctioned in the West, although it happens.  Unfortunately it is still widely countenanced in the Muslim world.  In Pakistan, for example, honor killing is usually not registered as a crime by the police.  Even there, however, honor killing is less predictably brushed aside as a “family matter.”

Children, too, are no longer the unconditional property of parents in many parts of the world.  When children are abused or endangered, the state can step in.  And yet the notion of the the sacredness of the family palisade is so strongly ingrained that many children still die, in the U.S., at least, not only because some case workers are negligent, but from misplaced delicacy in administering the law. 

Impermeable No More

Nevertheless, the long centuries of malign neglect, brutalization and murder within the inviolable bounds of the family are drawing to an end.   As the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said recently,  while promoting his own initiative to eliminate violence against women:  “Our goal is clear; to end these inexcusable crimes – whether it is the use of rape as a weapon of war, domestic violence, sex trafficking, so-called 'honour' crimes or female genital mutilation.”  

Increasingly, in short, if you don’t meet the obligation to protect your own, outsiders may and will.  

Happily, this doctrine is being broadened to challenge the sacredness of national boundaries.  A regime that neglects or brutalizes its people finds it increasingly difficult to enforce a claim of absolute sovereignty.  There is less and less tolerance for granting impunity to regimes that commit genocide and other crimes against humanity within their own borders.  In fact, a new movement is working hard to enshrine the Obligation to Protect in international law.

The Germ of the Doctrine

It’s hard not to believe that germ of this movement springs in some way from the shame and guilt over inaction during and after World War II.  For  many reasons, the Allies did not bestir themselves to stop or limit the Nazi’s slaughter of European Jews.  Foisting Israel on the Arabs of Palestine was, as much as anything, an attempt to assuage a whole civilization’s guilty conscience.  But the guilt festered nevertheless.  

The genocidal ethnic cleansing that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia reawakened that guilty conscience and, to different degrees, stirred the U.S. and Europe to limit the slaughter.  Some of those who were responsible for the mass killings have been tried in the International Criminal Court.  The age of impunity was over.

Then came the genocide in Rwanda, with U.N. troops standing by, watching the killing, obedient to a mandate not to interfere.  So tens of thousands of people died—but not to no purpose, in a way.  Rwanda seems to have been the last straw.  Not only are those responsible for egging on the killers also being tried in the ICC, the question of preventing or curtailing genocide is at last on the table for serious discussion.

The Sovereignty Stumbling Block

Aside from other considerations, in Bosnia and Rwanda—and Sri Lanka, and Myanmar and Zimbabwe and Darfur, a huge impediment to action has been sovereignty.  However horrible a regime’s policies toward a minority of its people, is it ever justifiable for foreign elements to cross the border and meddle in the internal affairs of that country?  Until recently, the answer to that question would have been a simple negative.  But the contrary momentum has been building up and the question has been reformulated: how can mass violations of human rights, anywhere, anytime, be tolerated?

The Responsibility to Protect ("RtoP" or "R2P") is a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

To put it another way, every country has an obligation to protect its citizens.  If a country neglects that obligation, then steps of some sort must be available to “help” that country fulfill its responsibilities to its people.

Globalizing Human Rights  

This may be seen by some as an ominous development for the nation state, which is already under siege from many forces more or less beyond its control.  Human-created global warming ignores national borders.  International trade minimizes the importance of national borders.  Modern communications media penetrate national efforts to censure troubling information. 

And now a new human rights doctrine suggests that national borders are not sacred when people are suffering.  It’s important to note that proposed interventions would not be unilateral or whimsical or even merely charitable.  They would have “international” stature and would only be triggered if the horrors and suffering rose to some agreed upon “threshold” indicating that the target country had massively failed to meet its “core protection responsibilities.”  

A good way to learn more about the R2P doctrine, its pros and cons and progress, including the fact that the United Nations General Assembly has now formally taken note of it (UNGA Resolution 308 (2009), is to visit the Responsibility to Protect website.

Singapore Then and Now

by Patricia H. Kushlis

Last summer the Santa Fe Opera staged the World Premiere of Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter,” a compelling short story set in Singapore. Or mostly set in Singapore because this tale of murder on a rubber plantation begins, well, on a rubber plantation somewhere in the then British colony of Malaysia before the action moves south to the city of Singapore at the base of the tri-ethnic Malaysian peninsula. I meant to write about the opera much earlier – not to critique it because I’m not a music critic – but simply as I saw it from an audience point of view as well as to put it in a Southeast Asian context since I spent portions of my Foreign Service career serving in the region. (Photo top left of Patricia Racette (Leslie Crosbie)and Robert Maddalena (Howard Joyce) in court in Singapore in "The Letter" at the Santa Fe Opera 2009. Photo by Ken Howard courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera.)

But then other things intervened – including a month long trip to East Asia. As it turned out my trip included two segments of several days each in Singapore – a predominately Chinese city which has – ever since I’ve known it beginning with my first visit in 1973 – been on Southeast Asia’s economic cutting edge. This is not to say, that Singapore is a model democracy.

A Model Democracy Singapore is not.

Nevertheless, I think the autocratic rule of the aging Lee Kuan Yew, incorrigible Minister Mentor since 1991, has moderated some under the prime ministership of his son Goh Chok Tong and for what it's worth, the city has a new parliament building. However, this city-state on the Singapore Straits has done a lot right over the years for the economic betterment of many of its peoples although the Gini coefficient of rich to poor is even larger than in the US and may be at an all time high. This is because of Singapore’s frenetic construction boom and the need to import unskilled labor to provide the needed brawn. Yet Singapore is light years away from the sleepy provincial colonial capital of the days when Maugham wiled away his time on the veranda of the venerable Raffles Hotel spinning his sultry, but far from sleepy, Southeast Asian tales.

Talking Turkey, Eating Turkey

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

And we hope that you will pardon us. 

Most of the year we are happy to be talking turkey.  But today we are eating turkey with friends and family—and tomorrow we are also giving ourselves a furlough, because that’s traditional, too, if you can manage it, as many of our web friends can. 

Yet, even as we enjoy our Thanksgiving Day feasting and good fellowship, we are very much aware that we are fortunate in ways that we have hardly earned, since we can’t chose where and when we are born.  There’s so much that needs to be done to make life better for more of the world’s people, which brings us back to why we write for WhirledView.  It’s only words and a few pictures that waft through the ether from us to you.  But words are what you need to write a poem or a prayer or a Constitution with.  Words.....well, we’ll be back in harness this weekend.      

Meanwhile, we wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving.

Indian Embassy Publishes Well-Vetted Text, not Juicy Transcript of PM Manmohan Singh’s CFR Address

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

What a powerful address! I thought. The whole agenda is here.  Boom!  Boom! Boom!  I was watching Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address to the Council on Foreign Relations via C-Span on Monday night. 

But the question-and-answer period was even more interesting. Perhaps that’s why it was missing from the version I printed out from the Indian Embassy’s website, although the U.S. State Department scrupulously includes such exchanges as well as any prepared presentation when American leaders speak to foreign audiences.  These missing passages were so arresting, in fact, that both American and Indian newspapers quoted them in subsequent new stories.

Fortunately the Council on Foreign Relations provides a full transcript of speaker’s interactions with its audiences on its website.  Here the salient passage:

HAASS: Last question about China. There has been a lot of talk in the literature about the comparison of the Indian and the Chinese approaches to development. A question I had is, why do you believe that India's is preferable, assuming you do, given that China has grown at a higher rate for more years?

SINGH: Well, there is no doubt that the Chinese growth performance is superior to Indian performance. But I've always believed that there are other values which are important than the growth of the gross domestic product. I think the respect for fundamental human rights, the respect for the rule of law, the respect for multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious rights, I think those have values also.

There are several dimensions of human freedom, which are not always (caught ?) by the numbers with regard to the gross domestic product. So I do believe that even though the Indian performance with regard to GDP might not be as good as the Chinese, certainly I would not like to choose the Chinese, but I would prefer to stick to the India part.

Also, I believe India may appear as indecisive democracy at times. And it does, because many democracies are short-term maximizers. They're not able to take a long-term view.

But I have also believed that once a democracy decides on the basis of a wide-ranging consensus, any reforms that are undertaken will be far more durable, will be far more effective than reforms introduced by the writ of a ruling group in a non-democratic setup.

HAASS: Ladies and gentlemen, you've just been treated to an economist saying there's more to life than GDP. (Laughter and applause.) This is an important moment. (Laughs.)

Based on his administration's record of retaining all too many Bush administration anti-terrorism measures, I’ve come to doubt the strength of President Obama’s commitment to civil liberties, but at least he was willing to sign on to some “shared values” in the Joint Statement issued by the two leaders, who  

noted that the shared values cherished by their peoples and espoused by their founders – democracy, pluralism, tolerance, openness, and respect for fundamental freedoms and human rights – are acquiring an increasingly greater prominence in building a more peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, secure and sustainable world. These values are exemplified by the vibrant linkages between their peoples, which are a unique asset for both countries, and are reflected in the role played by the Indian-American community.

Otherwise, during this five day state visit, it was Manmohun Singh who kept hammering away at the democratic principles that should make for a close and enduring relationship between the U.S. and India.  During the Welcome Ceremony, he said:

India and American are separated by distance, but bound together by the values of democracy, pluralism, rule of law and respect for fundamental human freedoms.

Toasting at the State Dinner, he said:

Mr. President, your journey to the White House has captured the imagination of millions and millions of people in India.  You are an inspiration to all those who cherish the values of democracy, diversity and equal opportunity.

No doubt these bits are digs at China as well as a way of reminding the American president that India really is a more compatible partner. Either way, keep it up, Mr. Prime Minister. American leaders these days tend to forget what America is/was/should be about.