WhirledView

The Koran Burning Episode: Negligence or Stupidity?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

In Afghanistan (and Pakistan) even locals can lose their lives for mishandling a Koran, which mostly they don’t do, although accusations of Koran abuse occur with some regularity.  The best way to carry out a land grab is to accuse a landowner of mishandling a Koran.  If you are lucky, the accused will get lynched and you can snatch the land with little futher ado.  If you aren’t lucky, the accused will end up with a long prison sentence, but the land might still end up as yours.

An American contact was annoyed with me recently.  I’d declared that anyone and everyone serving in the U.S. Army (or with any of the allied forces) should know that Afghans are pretty touchy about how Korans are treated.  Ordinary American soldiers aren’t going to know that, he said.  Even if they’re told, it won’t make any impression.  They won’t remember.

I don’t think American troops are stupid.  I don’t believe that they are incapable of learning respect for local custom.  It’s far more likely that their commanders and their commanders’ commanders haven’t done a very good job of providing the cultural sensitization that (we’re told) is routine.  Maybe sensitizing is on the syllabus, so to speak, but carried out so badly, so offhandedly, with so little sense of urgency, that anyone in the audience would fall asleep. Or maybe it’s done in an off-putting preachy way. Sermons do get boring.  How clearly are the troops taught that Koran handling is a life and death matter?  Your buddy could die.  Your vehicle could get blown up.  Etc

Like many observers, I was pretty outraged by this unnecessarily provocative act, but it may be that I’m even more puzzled by it.  Nowhere in my reading have I found any reference to clear cut, codified procedures for handling Korans, step by step procedures to be followed without fail.

Tables Turned: Elephants and People

By Patricia L. Sharpe

People in the know whom I met this month found no fault with the article that appeared in Vanity Fair shortly before I left for Tanzania.  Now that the Chinese, who built massive showpieces during the Cold War, are once again engaging with Africa, elephant poaching has increased exponentially, it says and they say.  This time around, the technology of ivory snatching is more impressive than ever.  Can you say helicopter? 

DNA tests on intercepted shipments of smuggled ivory suggest that most of the contraband is coming from the Selous Game Preserve, which straddles the Rufiji River in Southern Tanzania.  Hunting is not permitted in the northern portion where my grandson and I just spent four days (in addition to the time we enjoyed in other game-viewing areas).  It is allowed in the Southern portion, in which I frequently camped with friends (yes—they killed game, for the pot, under license), when I worked in Dar-es-Salaam in the ‘80s. 

Tanzania’s current hunting regulations are stringent and bring in scads of money for the Tanzanian treasury.  All in all, it comes to some $250,000 to mount an elephant hunting expedition, I'm told. That provides for one elephant to be bagged in two weeks or less.  Although the likelihood of bringing down a male elephant beyond breeding age with two perfect tusks on foot with approved weapons in that period of time is pretty low, local experts say that Russian oligarchs and Texans don’t seem to mind. Legal elephant hunting in Tanzania really is sport.

Hungary in World War II: Caught in the Cauldron - A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Deborah Cornelius’ book Hungary in World War II is as much about the aftermath that followed the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and the ensuing Treaty of Versailles as it is about the horrific years suffered by many Hungarians living in that new, smaller country during World War II itself. 

When I was on the US Delegation to the 1992 CSCE (now OSCE) Review Conference in Helsinki, Finland, I learned that a major concern for American foreign policy makers at the time was the possibility of irredentism rearing its ugly head after the Soviet Union’s break up, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet troop withdrawals from Central Europe.

This was one of the major reasons the US hoped the EU would open its doors to its Central European neighbors far sooner than it did.  It was also a major reason why NATO almost immediately established “Partners for Peace” – an associate kind of affiliation with NATO for former Warsaw Pact members.  The goal was to maintain stability in Central Europe and prevent it from turning into another Yugoslavia then being torn apart by civil war.

Fears of irredentism

The US fears of irredentism concerned Hungary in particular because of the relatively large number of ethnic Hungarians living in traditionally Hungarian lands outside the country’s borders and the population’s earlier desire to regain those lost territories that had once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These sought-after contiguous lands had been awarded to less than friendly neighbors in the questionable European post-World War I settlement that destroyed that empire for good and set the stage for World War II. (Photo right: Treaty of Paris -US State Department)

It was also one reason ultra-right and even less politically conservative Hungarians were so susceptible to the rhetoric of Hitler’s Reich.  Their goal was to regain even part of the lost lands – which, in the end, happened for a short time as a result of their siding with the Germans.   This dangerous irredentist quest also helped to destabilize and weaken the country politically as happened not only during the interwar years but throughout the ensuing war. Then when the Soviets reached Hungarian soil on their drive across Europe near the end of the war, their treatment of the Hungarians was exactly how an occupation force should not have behaved.  Stalin treated the country as the overlord of conquered territory and Hungarians as subjugated people - allowing his soldiers to rape and pillage at will.

Percentage Agreements Ignored

And despite the secret percentage agreements between Stalin and Churchill forged on a scrap of paper at Yalta in 1945 which had supposedly divided influence over the country 50-50 between the Soviets and the West, possession became nine-tens of the law.  The West was preoccupied elsewhere, a possible Allied Balkan landing and drive up the peninsula never materialized and the Soviets had a free hand.  

Edmund Hull’s High-Value Target: Countering Al Qaeda in Yemen – Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

About four months ago, anti-regime demonstrations erupted in Sana, Yemen’s capital.  The demonstrators were part of a non-violent civil society movement encouraged by previous demonstrations in Tunis and Cairo which had dramatically and in short order deposed long time corrupt, unpopular dictators.  

In contrast to the hasty and largely nonviolent departures of Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, Yemen’s 30 year veteran President Ali Abdullah Saleh chose a different path.    

Saleh fought back with threats, lies, deception, communications disruptions, intimidation, mass arrests, and ultimately fire-power, troops, and security forces to squelch the popular movement that arose to protest his continued authoritarian rule.  Since then anti-government protests spurred by rampant government corruption in this very tribal, bifurcated and poor country flared up like wild fires after a lightening storm in provincial cities and the capital.

After Saleh used force against the protestors, his chief rivals from the Ahmar clan began to use violence against him. On June 4, he was severely wounded by a rocket attack while praying in the government compound’s mosque and evacuated to Saudi Arabia for treatment.  Six of his closest advisors – also wounded in the attack – went with him.  Chances are good that none will return to Yemen – the Saudis, the GCC (the Gulf Cooperation Council) and the US have wanted him gone for weeks and will certainly help see that it happens.  

A Broken Capital

The situation is politically confused. The capital is reportedly short of water, electricity, gas and cash and the government’s control over the countryside is tenuous.    

Peaceful protestors were ultimately found on both sides of the intra-tribal clan warfare. Now that Saleh has departed the question is whether the Yemeni, the US and the international community – including the Saudis - can prevent complete anarchy from breaking out or the devolution of a country into its several previous parts.  Yemen, after all, was not always a single entity.   

The US initially refrained from publicly condemning Saleh because of his help over the years in fighting Al Qaeda. The administration abandoned this position when Saleh’s forces started to kill peaceful demonstrators in the streets.    

Yemen in the news

Unlike many countries where western media coverage ranges from poor to nonexistent, reports of the continued clashes in Yemen make the front page of The New York Times, and US television news.  

The June 3 edition of FP highlighted “To Save Yemen,” an article by Edmund Hull, US Ambassador to Yemen from 2001-4 and author of the book High-Value Target, released in April by Potomac.  

This small, readable work – part memoir, part contextual analysis, and part prescription for US policy makers, couldn’t have come out at a more propitious time. Hull’s wise and experienced counsel should be taken seriously by those today faced with the rapidly moving situation.  For a nuanced presentation of the historically complex and tense situation in this small country of major importance to the US in its fight against Al Qaeda, neither Hull nor High-Value Target should not be ignored.   

War Horse: A Critique of a critique

By Patricia H. Kushlis

 I saw War Horse at the New London Theatre in London’s West End last August on the advice of a friend. I found it riveting – all two and one-half hours of it. This play about a young man and his horse had been filling houses since it opened at the National Theatre of Great Britain in 2007.   

Yet as I read the articles (the first a story about the story’s story by Sarah Lyall and the second Ben Brantley’s official Times critique) in The New York Times when the play opened at Lincoln Center two weeks ago, I wondered if the reviewers – especially Brantley - and I had seen the same show.  

Was this, I wondered, a World War I story about Billy and Joey, a British boy and his horse that appealed to the home crowd but hadn’t traveled well across the Atlantic?

A tepid review - why?

Did Brantley somehow object to the fact that it was based on a children’s book and despite the fact that he liked the puppets as puppets, the star performers were see-through life-sized bamboo-framed skeleton puppets created by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa which took on lifelike characteristics and emotions as they interacted with the human characters and each other to tell this heart-wrenching tale?   Was the story perhaps too trite?  The human characters too one dimensional – as he suggests.

Did War Horse lack emotional subtlety or elicit too much raw emotion? Or did Brantley have a strange kind of horse phobia perhaps as a result of attempting to ride dyspeptic and uncooperative nags as a child at summer camp?  Or maybe he just didn’t relate to simple villagers who lived hard-scrabble but straightforward lives nearly a century ago. 

Or did he recoil from the fact that the old-school German officer who rescued Joey from the bone pile was not portrayed as the enemy-incarnate but as a human being with a fondness for animals? 

Too old fashioned or too long ago?

Was the play’s plot too old fashioned or World War I too long ago to be of more than passing interest?  Or was the war too young to rate as the worthy subject for an updated equivalent to Ben Hur?

Let’s face it, World War I was not a nice war (if there are nice wars): it was fought at great cost and suffering and in the end settled nothing.  Instead it set the stage for a much worse war to come. 

Wasn’t the cavalier way so many horses were treated – of the 1-2 million British horses that had been sent to the front lines only about 65,000 had returned according to Lyall from an interview with the book’s author Michael Morpurgo – just as much a symbol of the immense carnage of human innocents that transpired through stalemated trench warfare in that horrible war – and others – sent to do someone else’s bidding in a war that needn’t have been fought?        

Too many performances over too few days?

Or was Brantley simply suffering from an overload of too many performances and reviews in too few days?  In all fairness, Brantley’s review was not the only less than stellar one War Horse has received. In an earlier critique, Guardian critic Michael Billington registered some similar objections to Brantley’s when he reviewed the play in London.

Regardless, Billington’s controversial review seemed to have had no effect on the London box office.    Word had gotten around otherwise – including via a rave review in The London Times.  Hopefully, that also will be the same for the Lincoln Center production.  Despite the minority of naysayers, most people who have seen War Horse have given it a thumb’s up including at least one other blogger who concentrates on the New York theater scene.

But don’t just take my, Brantley, Billington or anyone else’s word: go see War Horse for yourself.  

Note:  War Horse is playing at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center.

 

Gaddafi’s Mercenaries - Useless, dangerous or crucial?

 By Patricia H. Kushlis

The late veteran Middle East correspondent John K. Cooley began the second edition of his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism with Machiavelli’s admonition to rulers about the inadvisability of relying on mercenaries to fight their battles for them.   Here are the first two sentences from the longer quote:  “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous . . . for mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy. . .”

If Cooley were alive today (he died in 2008), I wonder what he would have said about the Arab revolts raging in the Middle East and how he would have assessed  Gaddafi’s apparent heavy reliance upon sub-Saharan African and other mercenaries to suppress his own people.

Cooley’s book Libyan Sandstorm (1983) is a classic – a review by Michael Yapp published in The London Times was republished in February – just as the latest revolt in Libyan began. 

I don’t profess to be a North African or a Libyan expert – but I know Europe and the eastern Mediterranean rather well. I also knew John Cooley and had the utmost respect for his painstakingly well researched reports and analysis based upon that research.

I also have that sinking feeling that too many of today's instant North Africa “experts” interviewed in the media thus far know even less about Libya than I do.  That's scary. Moreover, the reverence being paid – or at least lip-service given – to the supposed invincibility of Gaddafi’s hired gun slingers makes me wonder just how familiar many of today's pundits are with Machiavelli’s centuries old warning.     Or maybe they are but have discounted its relevance because Gaddafi’s ties to African mercenaries have been long and deep and he had previously used them to squash a revolt in 1996.    

Gaddafi's sub-Saharan mercenary army

Various reports tell us that Gaddafi’s mercenary troops primarily come from Chad. Mali, Niger, Zimbabwe, Liberia and likely Sudan are also on the list.  Reports also tell us that he pays each mercenary between 300 and 2,000 US dollars per day to do his bidding.  (Please note:  foreign guest workers in Libya and Gaddafi's mercenary troops are not the same.)

In an excellent Christian Science Monitor blog post on February 28, Alex Thurston argues that some of Gaddafi’s mercenaries are more loyal and better trained than others and those that comprise his elite mercenary troops are linked to him through long-standing financial and political ties. 

According to Thurston, “Qaddafi’s sustained and deep involvement in African politics, especially the affairs of neighboring countries like Sudan, Chad, and Niger, have included “funding and training many fighting groups and rebel organizations in West Africa and other places.”

Thurston quotes Peter Bouckaert [of Human Rights Watch] who described the fighters from Chad as men “who were not mercenaries specifically recruited to defend Gadhafi but members of (a Chadian) rebel movement Gadhafi has been funding and training for many years who would lose that support if he fell.” 

Harder "to get your own people to shoot your own people"

Thurston quotes Reed Brody also from Human Rights Watch, who argues - in opposition to Machiavelli - that Gaddafi’s mercenaries are important because “it’s hard to get your own people to shoot your own people” whereas, by implication, soldiers from somewhere else organized into well trained units and paid well for their efforts have no qualms about undertaking such odious assignments on behalf of their foreign paymaster.

Some of Gaddafi’s other mercenaries, however, are not as loyal or as well trained as the rebel group from Chad.  Their ranks include men brought to Libya under false pretenses in an apparent last minute recruitment drive with no training or experience as fighters. Upon arrival they were blackmailed into joining Gaddafi loyalists and sent to the provinces to fight against the Libyan rebels. In a March 26 Christian Science Monitor article based on interviews in rebel-held Benghazi, reporter Dan Murphy observed that:

“Though there’s been much discussion of Qaddafi’s use of “foreign mercenaries” in the conflict, a lot of the fighters he’s using appear to be poor and unemployed migrants who found themselves in Libya when the uprising began.”

One described himself to Murphy as a doorman with no prior weapons experience. 

Now maybe mercenaries like the former doorman who the Libyan rebel forces captured and made available to foreign journalists are simply a few untrained, unfortunates who should never have been recruited for battle in the first place and landed unwittingly at the wrong place at the wrong time while the crack Chadian mercenary troops are kept elsewhere – perhaps closer to Tripoli - there to defend the Gaddafi family perhaps even from its heretofore loyalist supporters if and when that time comes.

 But this makes me wonder  how significant Gaddafi’s sub-Saharan mercenary army will prove to be if and when he needs to defend himself and his praetorian guard - perhaps even or especially from those from within the inner circle who have seen the desert sun, counted the rays and decided the time has come to abandon the embattled Gaddafi ship of state.

 

 

America the Imperial: PD’s Dim Vision at the Kolkata Book Fair

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I was truly tempted to open this blog piece with epithets.  Instead, I'll  introduce the shock more gently because, maybe, this thing I'd run up against wasn't intended to be brash and overbearing.  Maybe it was just  another example of cluelessness masquerading as public diplomacy. In Kolkata this time.

Imagine you joined me in my taxi, heading for what was once the outskirts of a megalopolis but is now thoroughly incorporated.  I was off to the annual Kolkata Book Fair, trying to reach there by two pm, when it opens each day, to avoid the crowds.  This was a totally futile ambition.  Already, miles away, the stop-start of a major traffic jam had begun, which gave me plenty of time to scan the horizon, where you would also have seen an enormous white dome lording it over the city.  A gigantic mosque, minus minarets?  A Vatican-sized cathedral?  Neither, as I knew from previous visits  and re-confirmed, when I reached the predictable sprawl of non-descript temporary structures that house the Kolkata Book Fair.  It was the American Exhibit.

So there it stood, a replica of the American Capitol!  A clever idea, perhaps, but ludicrously, embarassingly,   out of scale.  It loomed like the Second Coming of the Moghuls.  Or maybe the Second Coming of the English, who built their neo-Moghul monuments to power in New Delhi.  No wonder the curious were queuing to enter. 

Being these days an ordinary tourist, I joined the line and ended up in a dimly-lit (the better to view computer screens, I suppose) cavern that dwarfed people and everything else, especially the bank of computers plopped on a long counter.  Very few of my queue mates touched a keyboard as they filed by. It's 2011. Computers aren’t  exactly novel, even in India, and these weren’t set up to entice interaction from the uninitiated or the jaded.  In fact, the only thing that mildly curious visitors were invited to contemplate, re computers, was the popularity of social networking.  Now Facebook may be a global phenomenon.  Millions belong.  But it's hardly a gateway to worthwhile knowledge of the U.S.

I wasn't surprised,though.  I'd been told that the American public diplomats currently posted to Kolkata aren’t interested in purveying literature or lecturers or any kind of boring intellectuality.  Just fun stuff for cool Under Thirties.  This cohort, I might uncoolly remind them, doesn’t include today’s decision-makers, and it probably doesn't include tomorrow's either! Anyway superficiality is the order of the day, it seems.  Although India has great writers and world class universities along with a vibrant print and electronic press employing courageous editors and many fine investigative reporters, the recently hired top local for the PD section in Kolkata used to  head.... a fashion magazine!  A mere clone of an international brand at that.  What's the motto for India’s glitz-and-glamor industry?  If you’ve got it, strut it! flaunt it! knock 'em dead!  Ergo: the vulgar Capitol look-alike.

I continued shuffling along with the queue.  People in front of me.  People in back of me.    I was looking for something that would have told the uninformed something about the significance of the hulking white shrine that had sucked them in. Nothing came to eye. Maybe I just missed it. In fact, maybe I missed a lot.  There was no coherence, no order, no clear sequence of focal points in the dusky half light. Pretty soon, approaching the exit, we passed a big flat TV screen that  signaled the end of hope for engagement. All it offered was a list of what you’d get for your money should  you join the American Center (at cut rates) during the Book Fair.  Not many visitors gave it a glance  as we turned toward a sliver of daylight.  It was well above eye level. 

Now what if that last chance screen had beckoned with attention-compelling videos? The library info (animated, maybe?) could have appeared at frequent brief intervals between artfully-chosen clips.  People would have stopped.  They'd  have craned their necks up, watching for awhile  They'd have seen THE MESSAGE several times over.  Producing such a piece  isn't technically difficult.  As for expense, negligible.  Especially compared to the cost of erecting an overbearing faux Capitol.   

Instead: another muffed opportunity. My companions kept moving-moving-moving toward the exit.

Get ‘em in.  Get ‘em out.  Was that the plan? Certainly no one was gathering around any of the bookcases lurking in the shadows like ghosts of yesterday’s world.  Books!  Real books!  But displayed so negligently and creating one inescapable impression: the American Center doesn’t think that books matter anymore.  So why stop?  Keep moving!

Actually, there was a spot in this vast unpleasant space where, undoubtedly, it was hoped that visitors would pause:  the counter with staffers to sell memberships.  Unfortunately poor lighting obscured its purpose.  And shouldn’t the point of sale come after the pitch, not the minute you enter? (Some new members were probably roped in (there were PRIZES as inducement), but imagine how many more if only the exhibit had had some oompf and integrity to it!)

Yes, there were PRIZES for new members, a loud unpleasant voice told us, repeatedly, over a PA system.   I’m not sure whether every newbie was to get a prize or whether a drawing was involved, so I suspect that at least some of the others passing through were equally befuddled.  What I did catch was this: we’d come to a Book Fair, but the prize wasn’t a book.  It was a tee shirt. 

Once upon a time there was an exhibits division within U.S.I.A.  It was abolished years ago, during one of many cost-cutting exercises.  But frankly it doesn’t take much money or A.I.A. architects to create an appropriate presence at a book fair whose infrastructure is traditionally as modest at that at the Kolkata Book Fair.  Look carefully at the pix that accompany this piece.  These unimpressive, even crude structures were crammed with people quite contentedly seeking and buying books.  Within an hour the crush would be almost unbearable.

If there’s anything worse than a pretentious exterior, it’s a pretentious shell with nothing much inside.  The American presence at this year’s Kolkata Book Fair managed to offend on both counts. That makes it a prodigious accomplishment of some sort. 

Meanwhile, let's concede, for the sake of argument, that history is on the side of the electronic media, which I and many other compulsive readers also appreciate. This exhibit made it clear that American public diplomacy lacks the skills or (more likely, since geeks can be hired) the imagination to make effective use of the enormous electronic  resources already at its disposal.  The impossible lighting, which could have been used as an aid to focus and sequencing. That wallflower-like bank of computers! The stupid static screen by the exit.  The grating voice from the depths. My thirteen year old grandson does better than this. 

As I filed out of that dark and unprofitable cavern, I had a vision of the real Capitol, in Washington D.C., and what’s usually going on when crowds of people file through without stopping.  They’re passing a bier, paying last respects.   So, American public diplomacy, rest in peace.

 

 

The Big Jingle-Jangle over Ankle Cuffs: How an Incompetent Public Affairs Officer Can Make an Awkward Situation Unbelievably Worse

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

There are lots of things I don’t know for sure about this case, given my imperfect access to information as a denizen of a very comfortable, but much less than five star hotel in Kolkata, meaning no reliable 24/7 wi-fi or landline internet connection.  No sooner do I get to googling than my access to a mysterious nearby wi-fi source dissolves into thin air. The life of a web pirate is very uncertain.   

So, I don’t know if the Tri-Valley University is a genuine educational institution on any level.  Or whether it’s just a façade for squeezing money out of dupes and/or opportunists. Even assuming the worst about Tri-Valley, which seems almost unavoidable, I can’t help thinking (though I certainly don’t know) that some of those young Indians caught up in the scheme were naïve dreamers, that is, trusting upwardly mobile kids from unsophisticated families.  I hope that the authorities will sort the naïve from the conniving as soon as possible.  The latter deserve quick (but humane - always humane) repatriation. The former deserve gentler treatment.  Help in finding a legal academic home wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Two things I do know, however.  The rough-and-ready cuff- ‘em-all approach to the Indian students caught in this awkward situation has been greeted very unhappily in India.   And the flippancy” (this is the term that appears in the Indian press) of a U.S. consulate’s clueless Public Affairs Officer has made an already bad business ever so much worse.

Ankle cuffs are involuntarily-worn radio location devices.  To the unhardened, they feel like humiliation and punishment without trial, like a scarlet G for guilt, as if the wearer has perpetrated visa fraud when no such offense  may have been intended.  (With many of these students, it would seem, genuine ignorance is a defensible defense.)  This mass cuffing by myopic enforcers was clearly applied without thought for its potential damage to the U.S. image in New Delhi, whose friendship Washington has been cultivating rather assiduously in recent years.  Nor did the cuffers reckon with the totally unsurprising howls of indignation from non-official Indians, even those with no personal connection to the victims of the indignity.

In short, the damage to the U.S. image has been as bad as a competent public affairs officer would have been predicted.  Here are excerpts from some recent letters to the editor in Kolkata dailies:

It is shocking and shameful that Indian students…were forced to wear radio collars like criminals….this is definitely a violation of human rights.  It also exposes the hypocrisy of the U.S….The recent incident is an insult to India’s national dignity….India should protest strongly….Otherwise we will once again be seen as a weak and docile nation.

The sufferings of the students…are distressing.  The U.S., which claims to be a guardian of human rights, forced the students to wear tags like animals.  The students are the victims of an immigration fraud.  The U.S. has reportedly tagged the students to monitor their movements instead of going after the sham university that conned them.

Meanwhile, after the U.S. Consulate in Hyderabad (and presumably other U.S. consulates in other cities) had “issued a press release stating that the students can apply for fresh visas and that they would be treated fairly,” the soothing effect of those bland words was ruined, on TV no less, by the Hyderabad Public Affairs Officer’s insoucient description of the delicious “choice” that was offered to the students: sitting around prison in an orange jumpsuit or walking around with a tattle-tale cuff chaffing an ankle.  Here are the words that have been seen as particularly offensive – and ludicrous – by Indians:

Let me tell you that there are a lot of celebrities in drunk driving cases.  Do you think they sit in prison. No. No. No. This is very modern and trendy, just like the stars in Hollywood.

According to the Times of India, this “statement has only added insult to injury for the families off the students." Indeed!  What caring parent thinks a drug-addled scofflaw like Lindsey Lohan might be anything like a role model for his/her bright, well brought up daughter – or son, for that matter?  How could the PAO be so callous?

It gets worse.  According to the rather stodgy Economic Times, this spokesperson (who shall remain nameless here, although her name and face are notoriously familiar throughout India by now) also compared the radio cuffs to the anklets worn by her servants, which puts this pathetic representative of the U.S.  squarely in sync with a couple of centuries worth of cloistered expats whose only real contact with the country has been through their servants.  Had the PAO been sufficiently immersed in Indian culture, the image that came to her mind might have been the ankle bells worn by kathak dancers, male and female.  Or any other classical dancers in India.  Now that’s class!  

Note to State Department personnel officers: PAOs should know the country to which they are posted.  They should also have a sophisticated knowledge of U.S. culture. Then they can put the two together in an appropriate way when the unexpected happens.  And deadly boilerplate statements from Washington are no substitute for quick-thinking, well-informed, sensitive, intelligent officers.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., here’s what the immigration thugs were doing, or so the Times of India tells me:  in order to outfit her with an ankle cuff, said a female student, “they came to my house at 1 am [my itals.] and strapped the bracelet and did not even explain what it was about. It was quite intimidating.”  Shades of a police state!  Evidently she was able to make this statement on an American TV station.  Kudos to that station.