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Benghazi and State: Where do the bucks stop?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Whether Hillary’s reaction to the Accountability Review Board’s Benghazi Report upon reading it was to faint, hit her head, and suffer a rare blood clot following a concussion or whether the two sad events simply coincided and collided like asteroids in the night sky is a question we may never have answered.

The 39 page unclassified portion of the ARB report that was released to the public on December 20, 2012 was most notable for what it didn’t reveal as for what it did.  Maybe some of my unanswered questions are contained in the classified sections – but that I won’t know for years.  Unless, of course, the contents dribble out piecemeal between now and then. That’s possible. State usually leaks far less than the Pentagon or the Hill so first train your ear trumpets in those directions before leaning too hard towards Foggy Bottom.         

The report corroborates that multiple mistakes were made – not just that tragic night – but in the months before. They go deep into the heart of the system’s weaknesses.  Leadership – or actually lack thereof – is a problem the report alludes to with capital Ls although names of officials above the Assistant Secretary, or bureaucratic Firewall, as Diplopundit put it, are missing. This might be adequate for a networked organization but the State Department is institutionalized hierarchy personified and the report tells us that news of the attack was being called in as it happened to State’s 24/7 Diplomatic Security Center and relayed to the NSC and elsewhere.  At least that piece of the building apparently works as it should.

A follow up – even more scathing - 29 page report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that appeared on December 30, 2012 tells us that the attack was reported real time to State and the information transmitted quickly to the Department of Defense. The bipartisan Senate report also highlighted ten major failings needing correction – within State, within Defense, throughout the Intelligence Community and across bureaucratic lines.  Not all of these failures are contained in the ARB findings.

Here are a few of the most striking - listed in no particular order:

• the Pentagon’s failure to provide its relatively new Africa Command with the requisite resources to conduct embassy rescue operations in its theater of operation despite the fact that the Command had specific responsibility for doing so;

• the administration’s muddled messaging during the first days after the tragedy despite the fact it was patently clear to the intelligence community from the beginning that a terrorist attack had occurred;

• Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy’s testimony in which he told the Senate Hearing that the security situation in Benghazi had been a “flashing red light” well before September 11.  This despite the fact that State had refused to provide the security needed. Yet, if it was unable to protect do so, State could have closed the Temporary Facility.  What is perhaps most troubling about Kennedy’s testimony is that he must have had a major say in the decisions – Eric Boswell, head of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and Charlene Lamb, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security worked for him – and as I pointed out earlier, the State Department personifies the traditional hierarchical bureaucracy. The buck would not have stopped with either Boswell or Lamb who Peter Van Buren argues was Cheryl Mills' (Hillary's chief of staff) choice not that of the Foreign Service.  What is not said in either the ARB or the Senate report is where the funding and personnel decisions for the Benghazi facility - whatever its name - were made, how and who made them.              

Back to 2008

Before Hillary Clinton set foot in the department, she knew that it suffered from severe financial and administrative stress.  She smartly established a Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources bringing in Jack Lew - Obama's current Chief of Staff and now nominee to become the next Treasury Secretary - to fill the new position.  Lew lasted at State about a year, spent his time addressing budgetary deficiencies and much to his credit, got Congress to approve major funding increases for the beleagured department before he moved on and over to the White House.

Hillary didn’t, however, tackle other flashing yellow light administrative shortcomings – leaving management of the department and the embassies to Patrick F. Kennedy who had been brought back to State by mentor and then Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte in 2007. But before that Kennedy had been Chief of Staff at the US Transition Unit in Baghdad in 2004 where he worked for Negroponte and had held the same position in the CPA (2003) - a period of chaos in Iraq when millions upon millions of dollars disappeared.

Why Hillary kept Kennedy in the position after her arrival in 2009 is a mystery.  Anyone who was responsible for coordinating the reorganization of the foreign affairs agencies under Madeleine Albright - a real hash job whose Sandy-like after-effects reverberate today - or forbidding American Embassy officers from  attending Obama's speech in Berlin July 24, 2008 on the grounds it was partisan politics despite the fact that Americans have the freedom to assemble under the US Constitution shrieks foremost, in my view, of a serious lack of judgment. 

Deja Vu All Over Again

Then there's that thorny not-so-little issue of State's mismanagement of diplomatic security  in Africa August 7, 1998 when Al Qaeda blew up the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing over 220 people including 12 Americans and injuring over 4,000.

A Glimpse of What Could Be Lost in Timbuktu

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Timbuktu, for most Westerners, is simply another word for the end of the world.  Today, in fact, it’s a somewhat decayed real city on the southern edge of the Sahara desert.

Once upon a time, however, Timbuktu was a vital commercial and cultural crossroads for innumerable African civilizations.  For this reason, non-Muslim historians as well as Muslims who treasure all aspects of their richly complex past are alarmed by the destruction that’s been taking place in Timbuktu and other ancient cities like Gao since Salafists wrested control of the rebellion in Northern Mali from Tuareg insurgents.

Most reportage from the area has emphasized the spoiling, wholly or in part, of shrines and mosques accused of encouraging idol-worship.  But the threat goes beyond the usual crude iconoclasm of al Qaeda-related sects.  According to photographer Alexandra Huddleston, “not only are thousands of ancient manuscripts and holy sites under threat, but also an ancient scholarly culture.”  She has documented this culture in the past, and now she has created a video that shows us what we are in danger of losing.

Go to this site for Alexandra's heart-rending introduction to Timbuktu and the culture it fostered over the centuries.  Go to this site and weep.  And protest.  If you want to know more,  follow the links that Alexandra has provided. 

And here are some pieces I've written on developments in Northern Mali:  Iconoclasts in Timbuktu and Malaise in Mali: Is a Sudan-like Solution Possible? 

Iconoclasts in Timbuktu

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Not so long ago Buddhists and art lovers of the world were aghast when the Afghan Taliban destroyed the famous Buddhist statues in Bamiyan. I thought of this tragedy when I learned that  Salafist gangs known as the Ansar Dine (Defenders of Islam) connected with Al Qaeda in Northen Mali are destroying Sufi shrines and have smashed in the main door of the world-famous 15th mosque in Timbuktu. You might say that this strain of Islam produces equal opportunity iconoclasts.

The Golden Calf Precedent

The prohibition of idol worship has a long history among the so-called Abrahamic religions.  One has only to read what the Christians call the Old Testament and the Jews call Torah to find the story of how the Israelites went astray and began worshiping a golden calf and how the idol was destroyed and the wrong-doers castigated when Abraham found out. Is this so different from what’s happening in Mali today? 

Protestant extremists during the Reformation were equally stringent about rejecting what they called saint worship among Catholics.  They destroyed monasteries and cleansed their own places of worship of all imagery.  The grounds were the same as those cited by today’s Salafists: the Catholics/Sufis were inserting saints between believers and God.  As a result, the Puritan churches in Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, were beautiful, but austere in the extreme. There is a strong strain of equally stringent Calvinistic puritanism in some branches of contemporary  Presbyterianism.  Christmas trees and Santa Claus are rejected as unwelcome pagan traditions. No organs or pianos either.  Only the human voice during worship. 

Missionaries Singing the Same Song

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Christian and Muslim missionaries made identical demands of the Batak tribes of North Sumatra: smash your idols; destroy your ritual objects; eradicate your pagan past.  Most converts, some out of fear, some out of zeal, acquiesced in the wholesale destruction of their material culture.

Some people, fortunately, resisted.  They hid their religio/cultural treasures away, some for centuries, some for decades, and many, though made of wood, survived into the 1980s when I was sent by  USIA to be Branch Public Affairs Officer in Medan, Indonesia. My philosophy being that you can’t influence people unless you understand them, I tried to find out as much as I could about the Batak culture that was so haughtily despised by the Javanese I’d known in Jakarta. And so I met people who, though Muslim or Christian by confession, were proud of their Batak roots.  They proudly showed me their treasures, especially a physician who had been a life-long collector of these materials.  This doctor’s home was like a museum, and together we conceived the idea of an exhibit at the American Center.  It would combine his collection with contributions which I subsequently sought from every corner of the Batak world.

The exhibit, the first of its kind, was a smashing success. The governor of West Sumatra, not only a general but himself a Batak, opened it, and it was reviewed enthusiastically by the premier national news magazine, thus putting the American Center in a very favorable light in the cultural capital of the country.  As far as I’m concerned, it was the best thing I did during my two years in Medan. (And for you bean counters, note that it cost us less than $500, including gas for those collecting trips, refreshments for the reception, a little staff overtime and a slightly higher electricity bill.)

The Power of Icons

Interestingly enough, the Doctor’s wife did not share her husband’s enthusiasm for the objects in his collection.  (She collected antique Chinese pottery and porcelain.) Some of the figures had stains which were, she was sure, evidence of having been anointed with sacred oils and powders.  That being the case, they might still have power, and so they frightened her. 

Perhaps my Batak friends should once again think of hiding their treasures.  Indonesian Islam is now finding room for proponants of violent intolerance of the sort we used to think was incompatible with Indonesia's supposedly well-ingrained syncretism.

Meanwhile, I think of the Doctor’s highly-educated wife when I consider the vehemence of Wahabis, who eradicated most (or all) evidence of pre-Muslim culture in Saudi Arabia.  I thought of her when the Ansar Dine, the Wahabi-related Salafists,  pushing their Tuareg nationalist allies aside,  set about smashing the frighteningly-powerful mausoleums that are precious to the local people who consider themselves to be perfectly good Muslims.  The so-called “saint-worshippers” had to flee, of course. The alternative would be life under an alien Taliban-like regime.

No to Imported Islam

On July 5, non-Salafist  Muslims converged on Mali’s capital Bamako to protest the defamations in Timbuktu.  Thousands of ordinary people gathered and many religious leaders spoke out strongly against the shrine-smashing. This is the sort of thing that was said:   “All of us are joining hands to protest against the profanation of the mausoleums of Timbuktu.”  “Those who carried out these acts...have no notion of Islam.” “No to imported Islam [which is to say, from Wahabi Arabia], yes to the Islam of our [African] parents.”  The sense of possible loss in Bamako was strong. “Timbuktu was founded on a pure Islam, respectful of men, of all men.” 

The non-Muslim world is strongly sympathetic to proponents of tolerant Islam and to the need for the protection of world heritage sites derived from all religious and spiritual  traditions.    Consider the following statement by Francesco Bandarin, UNESCO'S Assistant Director-General for Culture, when he asked if the destruction of shrines and artifacts in Timbuktu can be seen as an “act of war”:

It is, and it has been declared so by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. In effect there is an article called Article 8 of the Rome Treaty, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court. It talks specifically about destruction of heritage. So we are in a zone of international criminal law which is clearly determined; they are violating this law and they are subject to prosecution. Mali is a signatory of this treaty, they will be prosecuted.

Unfortunately such sentiments will have no impact on those who have now wrested control of Timbuktu.  As a media man for the Ansar Dine put it, “There is no world heritage.  It doesn’t exist. The infidels must not get involved in our business.”

Wars of Religion

And so, pious statements from a powerless UNESCO notwithstanding,  the iconoclasm will continue, until tolerant Islam is able or willing to protect itself from well-armed zealous puritans.  The West had its brutal wars of religion, of which remnants survive even in the U.S. today.  Islam is now caught up  in a perhaps more complex network of wars of religion into which the West, especially the U.S.,  has allowed itself to become entangled (though most Americans don't see it that way).  The  perfectly predictable sort of blowback is what we call Islamic terrorist extremism.  Perhaps the ultimate trajectory for Islam will resemble that of Christianity.  Sects will discover it's better to agree to disagree and work by persuasion alone.  In the meantime, the single-minded  iconoclasts, though apparently in the minority, seem to have the zeal that will always intimidate the lukewarm.  To say nothing of the weapons, of course.

Malaise in Mali: Is a Sudan-like Solution Desirable or Inevitable?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

So the Tuareg have occupied Timbuktu! Given the frequency of rebellion over the past century, I’m not surprised.  With a military coup diverting the attention of threatened civilian authorities as well as the politically ambitious army itself, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad swooped down on the prize they have long coveted. 

The New Ingredient

But something new has been added to the equation. Islam in Mali has always been described as regionally acculturated, moderate and tolerant. Tolerant of different Muslim sects. Tolerant of non-Muslim minorities.  Today’s game-changing addition is militant salafist Islam of the sort that’s sympathetic to if not synonymous with al Qaeda. What had always been a fierce campaign for ethnic autonomy or a separate state dubbed Azawad seems to have been overwhelmed by or manipulated by Islamic extremists.  Timbuku, former center of great learning and site of one of the most renouned libraries in the world, is being transformed into a theocratic nightmare à la Kabul under the Taliban.

How should the U.S. respond?  Before the Islamist complication, the alternatives were hard enough to weigh. A Sudan-like solution?  Or continued integration at all costs? Now all prospects seem uglier. Support the coup—or not?  Support bifurcation—or not—with or without Islamist influence?  Take on the Islamists?  Ignore them?   

The Wealth that Built a Library

The north-of-the-Niger territory claimed by the MNLA supports only about 10% of Mali’s population, but occupies more than half of Mali’s territory.  Picture a mere sprinkling of humans in very harsh terrain. Although most Malians are Muslim, life-styles North and South couldn’t be more different.  The Tuarag are at home in the desert.  They were notorious for camel-mounted caravan raiding back in the days when cross-Saharan trade featured great trains of dromedaries laden with gold to be bartered for life-sustaining salt.  These days drought has forced many Tuareg into a more sedentary life in the sahel on the margins of the desert. Further South, however, settled agriculture has always been the norm, along with migratory animal herding in the transition lands. Such differences notwithstanding, as powerful kingdom succeeded powerful kingdom over the centuries, the  wealth in the area that's Mali today was more than enough to support the fabled city of Timbuktu, with its well-stocked markets and vast intellectual and cultural resources.

Including the library, the source of my own fascination.  Over the years I’d managed to visit Nalanda, the site of the famous Buddhist university and library which had given intellectual backbone to the spread of the dharma for more than a millenium.  I’d also gone to Alexandria, primarily to imagine the city in its classical prime before its great library was destroyed.  Timbuktu was next on my list.  Getting there was my primary personal goal when I was posted to neighboring Sierra Leone. I brought a Jeep to Freetown, because I planned to drive to Timbuktu. What a terrific vacation that would make!

Driving to Timbuktu

Unfortunately, although the Tuaregs had reputedly entered into one of their more quiescent phases, the civil war in Sierra Leone went from bad to worse. I didn’t dare to drive through it.  I’d have to fly to Bamako, where I could engage a Landrover with an experienced and reliable driver.  In this, I followed recommendations from still unmet colleagues at U.S.I..S. Bamako. (Thanks again, friends!)  If anything happened to me, the driver would have to answer to his pals and my colleagues in the capital.  It was a very Malian arrangement—and there were several more pluses. The driver was fluent in French, which gave us a shared language.  He also spoke several local languages. 

And so, Landrover stocked with a zillion gallons of water, in case we lost our way in the desert, we crossed the Niger River and drove roughly east north east toward Timbuktu.  It would take us two days to cover the 440 miles.  After about 50 miles, pavement gave way to sandy ruts, sometimes deep and easy to follow, sometimes not, especially after dark.  Even the driver was relieved when we finally rolled into the town that was our overnight destination.  After that the complications began.  The simple guest house we’d been counting on no longer existed.  Most people we spoke to suggested that we sleep in the Landrover, preferably close to a police post.  And then, happily, we met a bunch of boys playing fussball outside a bar.  They directed us to a U.N. compound from which a French team was trying to oversee refugee resettlement during the current shaky truce in the unending war between the MNLA and the government in Bamako.

Hand Over the Landrover

Contrary to the reassuring reports that had reached Sierra Leone, the Tuareg were far from pacified.  That morning a band of them had barged into the U.N. compound and stolen a Landrover at gunpoint.  For that reason, perhaps, even  though our arrival was as unexpected as that of the raiders, the French observers were happy to shelter me and my Malian driver.  They fed us well, à la français, then offered me a choice: sleep on a cot in the kitchen or sleep on the same cot under the stars.  The choice was easy. The stars were so thick I hated to shut my eyes. 

I might have chosen differently if our hosts had informed us immediately about the morning’s raid.  “We didn’t want to worry you,” they explained at breakfast.  Over croissants, of course.

How could we not worry?   It would take us most of a day to slew through ever more treacherous sand to reach Timbuktu, which created anxiety enough, and now I was obsessed with the fear that, at any minute, a troupe of blue-turbaned Tuareg would pour over a dune’s crest to steal our precious Landrover.  Maybe we’d be kidnaped and held for ransom, too. This had happened to many travelers over the years.  But not to us. We reached Timbuktu well before dark.  There was room at a comfortable little hotel.  There was cold beer.  There was delicious food.

Timbuktu in the ‘90s

And so I got to meet with deeply learned scholars, who were delighted to tell tales of the good old days when Timbuku was a center of global trade.  Although most of the contents of the famous library had been carried away by invading Moroccans many centuries ago, local archives contained fascinating collections of old manuscripts and letters which were being collated and catalogued and, in some cases, translated from the original Arabic by Western-funded scholars.

Yes, there was beer, which my driver greatly appreciated.  Better yet, for me, there were women in public, few of them paying much attention to whether their hair was covered or not.  And everywhere, since this was a city that prized education, there were French speakers.  As I wandered around, people were openly curious about me but always polite, and courtesy often led to interesting conversations in French. Meanwhile, real estate was booming.  Timbuktu, as a U.N. heritage city,  was being rediscovered and refurbished. Seeing the elegant old stone houses that had already been reclaimed from near ruin, I found it possible to imagine what an imposing city this now provincial outpost had been in its heyday.

Back then, in the mid ‘90s, the worst threat that hovered over Timbuku was the desert. Dunes were encroaching.  The city was in danger of being buried in sand.  The new threat is human.  Now that Islamists are making the rules, bars are closed, music is banned and women are terrorized if they’re caught in the streets.  The politics are murky.  I don’t know the personalities or the intricacies of who has promised what to whom, but the dramatic external transformation proves that the Al Queda faction is dominant for now.

What To Do Now?

The Timbuktu I visited was gracious, gentle, in love with music and books and the great accomplishments of Muslim civilization. If such a city could be the capital of a new Muslim majority land, how promising it would be!  Given my own positive experiences and the fact of wide divergence betwen cultures, North and South, I found myself back then inclined not to dismiss the idea of endowing a nation of Azawad with sovereignty.

The bifurcation of Sudan hasn’t been easy, and harmony between the divorced will be a long time in coming.  Oil remains a divisive issue.  The new border is bitterly (and cruelly) disputed.  Within South Sudan itself there are serious tribal divisions.  Nevertheless, aside from certain Islamists and the power elite in Khartum, few would argue that the split as such was a bad idea.

Today everything in Mali has changed.  Chaos in Bamako created opportunity for the MNLA, who have fought so long for a homeland.  But here comes the irony. The average Tuareg is more conservative than the average denizan of Bamako, but I’m not so sure that most insurgents are getting the society they fought for.  Meanwhile, back in Washington, the developments in Northern Mali are probably causing more consternation than the coup in Bamako. What to do?  What to do?  In fact, whether or not we’re happy about Islamists in power above the Niger, there’s not much we can or should do, so long as their focus is purely internal.  Should they decide to ape their counterparts in Yemen, however, they should have one worry on their minds.  Drones.

Love Song to Ferry Rides

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

In Dar-es-Salaam or New York City, a ride on a ferry is an interlude of grace, assuming you dare to decommission your cell phone.  You have put yourself in the hands of the captain, the vessel, the currents, the weather.  For five minutes, a half hour, or more, you are not in charge, you are not responsible, you are free. And so you stand there, feeling the throb of the engines through the soles of your feet—or maybe you just give yourself to the the rocking of the boat, as a one-car ferry is pulled along by human muscle power.  Sometimes this primitive kind of ferry is suspended precariously from a cable strung across a river.  I crossed the Zanskar River in Ladakh that way.  The horse power waited on the other side—real horses loaded with trekking gear.

I remember my thrice weekly rides on the ferry when I was teaching English composition at the St. John’s campus on Staten Island.  Those crossings, after I’d wheeled my bike aboard, were always sweetened by the fact that I wasn’t pedaling, but the return trips were especially delicious.   I’d managed to survive two  more sessions with students who had no interest in logic, syntax or the classics of Western civilization. Yes, I was grateful for that job, which allowed me to live in the Village, but in love with it I was not.  Meanwhile, the vision of lower Manhattan, hazy in the distance or loomingly close up, never failed to enchant me.  Sixty compositions to read and grade? In sight of  the magic kingdom, forgotten.

Weekends, when I was working in Medan, Indonesia’s third largest city, I explored Sumatra, whose coastal roads were constantly interrupted by hair-raising river crossings.  These ferries, usually, were modest raft-like vessels, and they looked all too sinkable, either by too-heavy loads—e.g., lorries themselves overloaded, or, more likely, by unbalanced vehicle-placement.  Capsizing fantasies weren’t the worst of it.  Driving on and off was nightmarish: picture two planks, each about a foot wide, neither securely fastened to anything at either end.  Add to that the fact that rivers flow, which means the ferry itself wasn’t exactly stationary.  Crawling inch by inch
along those planks in low gear, I kept my car windows open, my theory being that I could wiggle free if I ended up under water. Still, there’s something to be said for such experiences.  Prayer-saying terror turned into chest-swelling pride as my rear tires bumped off the planks and I drove away from the ferry slip.  Slip—what a wonderful word for ruts leading to water’s edge.  

The old ferry across the mighty Rufiji River in southern Tanzania is no longer in operation.  It has been replaced by a bridge, which is not surprising.  Traffic on the main road down the Eastern coast of
Africa has increased considerably.  This is a good thing, by and large, for economic development. 

Back when I was driving frequently to the Selous Game Reserve with Tanzanian friends, a fairly large, conventional-looking ferry shuttled back and forth across the Rufiji River. This ferry was a vital link on a major road. so a back- up vessel was always moored just up river, ready to go into service at any time.  Unless it too was under repair.  Both vessels were shamefully rusty on the outside.  No one assumed that engine room preventive maintenance was any more assiduous. 

Thus, at the Rufiji crossing, a mere hour’s wait was cause for celebration, and we usually had an ocean of time for people-watching—or amateur anthropology. A flat-chested old woman in a threadbare tee shirt with a kanga wrapped around her bony hips sells bananas from a basket she balances on her head.  What’s her story?  How about the boy with a basket strapped to the back of his bicycle?  It’s full of chickens.  Live chickens, squawking.  We never bothered to pack a lunch when we were driving to the Selous.  We could count on venders at the ferry landing to supply us with boiled or grilled corn on the cob, mangos, slices of fresh coconut, sesame brittle and sweet hot tea.  Kababs, too. Sometimes.

My latest ferry ride, this past August, was also in Tanzania.  We—that’s my grandson and I, crossed the harbor from the center of Dar-es-Salaam to the coastal road that would take us to an ocean-side resort, where the sand was fine and white, the slope of the beach was gradual, the undertow was minimal and the waves were splendid for body surfing, just as I remembered from the days when I and embassy colleagues would drive out of the city for an afternoon at the beach.  This ferry line was also on a commuter route.  Delays of two, even three hours were not impossible mornings and evenings, I was told.  How Dar had changed!  When I was posted there,  the whole city didn’t hold enough cars to make a respectable traffic jam. 

Fortunately, my grandson and I reached the ferry slip at midday.  The ferry had just departed, and there were just a dozen vehicles ahead of us, including some large buses, but the incoming ferry was already on its way.  Squinting across the harbor, I saw several dhows and some little fishing boats, too. Some things hadn’t changed. 

I was glad for that wait, about 45 minutes, because it gave my grandson a glimpse of Tanzania outside the safari circuit.  Human life.  Not just the lions and elephants that can't help but fascinate a fourteen-year-old.  He was too young for long lectures on sociology and politics, but sitting there in the van, waiting for the ferry, he saw Dar-es-Salaam on the move.  Men in business suits, uniforms, sarongs.  Young girls in jeans and short skirts.  Matrons in the modes of the day.  Women exhibiting various stages of Muslim modesty. Kids being whiney or charming. In short, a mishmash.  An African version of a cosmopolitan city.     

All the photos here were taken from the van as we waited in the middle of four lanes of vehicles for the ferry.  The ferry ride, as usual, was pure pleasure.

Elephant Mysteries: On Safari in Tanzania III

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I promised to write about elephants, but there's a problem. Although I’m fond of elephants, I’m not so good at hyper hype, and elephants are definitely not beautiful.  Viewing an elephant from the side, what I see is  a billboard body with marble-sized eyes.  Elephant tusks are weapons, as are the huge canines of a lion, but for some reason tusks lack the power to horrify at sight.  Maybe that's because elephants, being vegetarians, never hunt humans.  No thrill of fear.  As for that trunk, it’s a sensitive, useful appendage with an earthworm's visual charm.

So, how can I do justice to these strange yet captivating creatures, which I hoped my grandson would also fall in love with?  Let’s begin with big.  Elephants are bulky, baggy and more stately than sprightly as they file through the landscape.  Oftentimes they thread along through thickets, in which case it's very hard to see them at first.  Their unshapely legs

turn into tree trunks, their bodies into shadowy blobs. In tall grass, their steel gray backs hump up like boulders. 

Then those big ears waggle.  Or that funny trunk does a little waving or curling.   Ah ha!  An elephant!  Motion is the giveaway, though they aren’t exactly hiding.  As adults, they have nothing to fear.  Nada.  So maybe, lost in greenery, they’re just following the food trail.

Elephants aren’t discriminating diners. They specialize in the tornado effect: small trees and branches snapped, leaves ripped off.  Thanks to a very inefficient digestive system, elephants have to stuff in bushel after bushel after bushel, which means they also excrete a lot. This is not entirely bad.  Elephant-processed seeds germinate very nicely, thank you.  What’s more, elephant dung is so full of undigested twigs and cellulose that sunlight passing through a few drops of morning dew may set it aflame.  The resulting fires help to maintain the savanna's fertility. 

Who Knows What’s Best for Libya?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

What’s wrong with these opening lines from an article entitled “Libyan Nation Building After Qaddafi?  It’s dated 8/23/11 and it appeared in Foreign Affairs.

With the fall of the Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in sight, the United States and its allies face the familiar challenges of post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction.  As in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and its allies have prevailed militarily and Western governments must now assume some role in helping establish a new order.

What’s wrong?  Let me help. 

•    Who “faces those challenges”?  Who needs to “stabilize and reconstruct” Libya?  Not “the U.S. and its allies.”  Libya and the Libyans.

•    Who “prevailed militarily”?  The Libyan rebels prevailed—with the very considerable help of the “U.S. and its allies,” no doubt.  But the Libyan rebels on the ground did the daring and dying.   

•    Whose proper “role” is it to establish “a new order”?  Not “Western governments’.”  The Libyan people’s.  Western governments may be of some assistance,  but what outsiders “must” do is wait to be invited and listen carefully to what’s wanted. 

Misplaced focus is what’s wrong with the opening paragraph.  The writers of the article assign the most important post-revolutionary tasks in Libya to non-Libyans, never representing Libyans  as actors or responsible parties.  A similar assumption that the locals are insignificant bit players in their own national lives all too often disfigures and compromises U.S. foreign assistance efforts.  It guarantees we won’t get our money’s worth, even in the absence of massive corruption.

Now, how about the article’s conclusion:

For its part, the United States and the international community must apply the lessons of past reconstruction efforts tempering its expectations for rapid progress and responding to local needs while avoiding the impulse for unwanted intervention.   Libya’s limited size, favorable location, relative wealth and homogeneous population should help ease a transition to peace and democracy, but absence of both government institutions and an established civil society suggest that the road may nevertheless be long and rocky.

Once again, the writers put the emphasis on the “U.S. and the international community.”   As for the locals, they have only “needs,” not requirements, not specifications, not visions, not goals.  The beneficiaries of post-revolutionary assistance are seen as little more than stunned victims of an earthquake or a tsunami, not as the proud authors of a political change.

No Sable, No Sweat: On Safari in Tanzania II

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Find Part I, Another Day, Another Lion: On Safari in Tanzania, here.

Having pretty much lioned out, I suggested that we spend our last morning in Ruaha National Park searching for sable.  No other antelope has an all black coat (sable females don't either) and I’d never seen one.  My grandson was game, so to speak, and our companionable driver/guide was  willing, although he had a warning.   He’d encountered sable two weeks before, in the vicinity of a natural spring some  distance from the camp.  But sable are elusive.  Did we want to spend a morning on a highly possible wild goose chase? “Egyptian geese?” I quipped, glancing at my grandson, who rolled his eyes. We’d seen them, vast flocks of them,  in the Selous.

And so we drove and drove, in hopes of glimpsing the fabled sable, on bush roads largely  indistinguishable from the dust-raisers we’d haunted for the past week.  The impala count, as usual, was stratospheric. Although acacia trees continued to push out new green leaves, the savanna wears mostly brown during the rainless months. New Mexicans know that brown is beautiful, but what mattered that morning is this: bare branches don’t frustrate viewing as much as luxuriant foliage does.  I had high hopes for that sable.

Meanwhile, there were many good encounters.  Dikdiks and duikers, the midgets of the antelope family, froze long enough to be seen clearly, then skittered away from roadside where they’d been grazing.  My grandson was entranced.  “They’re  cute,” he said   “I want one.”    "You don’t,” I said.  “I do,” he said.  We left it there.