WhirledView

The Dangerous Business of Female Education

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I mentioned the International Islamic University in Islamabad yesterday.  That’s where the latest suicide bombings in Pakistan took place.  Six not five persons were killed.  Three were girls and not by coincidence.  This was not one of those "senseless" incidents.  Here's an interesting Pakistani take on the bombings.

The best way to get an idea of the ambiance at the IIU is to take a look at the university’s website.  Women attend, but it's not really a co-educational institution.  It’s a highly segregated place.  Do a little browsing on the site, and soon you will realize that you are being bombarded with references to “the female wing”  of the IIU.  Naturally there are no references to the “male wing.”  If you find this as irritating as I do, think of similar practices in our own society. For instance, it is quite “normal” for  female high school athletes to be called by the hideous term of, say, the “Elkettes,” while the real teams, the male teams, are always the “Elks,” the nickname that would  apply to the school taken as a whole.

In pictures of classes and activities at IIU, you will note that most of the female students are very heavily veiled, even with no male present (unless the eye of the camera counts).  Only at the highest administrative level is an occasional female faculty member or dean represented with face fully revealed, often in the context of receiving foreign visitors, eg. pandering to the outside world.  

Otherwise the IIU world is male male male.  Male students.  Male teachers.  Male administrators.  Not so different from the way it used to be, not so many decades ago, in  many contexts in the West, for that matter.  Only recently have female faces turned up regularly in leadership roles or even as a good percentage of street crowds.  Re this, I’m going to see that both my sons get copies of the new book by Gail Collins: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.  Being a woman was pretty horrible when I was a kid—and lots of us vowed we’d change things or die trying.  Fortunately, the latter wasn’t needed in our case, but Pakistani girls who want an education and a professional life may be targeted by those who fear social change.    And their schools certainly aren't safe, not even the schools for primary students.

All the above notwithstanding, there is much to be said for the IIU as a way to provide a higher education for girls who would never otherwise be able to obtain a college degree.  As the website photos prove,  there's nothing like equality between the sexes here and the curriculum certainly does not offer anything close to a liberal education, but IIU does signify a step in the right direction.   Above all, the young women who graduate will be able to read the Koran for themselves and do some thinking of their own, which is unlikely to please the village mullahs who accustomed to quoting convenient

The Field: Where Foreign Policy Succeeds or Fails

Public Diplomacy Today

Part 4

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

Foreign policy needs and goals are defined in Washington, but foreign policy succeeds or fails in the field.  Attention is sought.  Criticism is met.  Competing influences are neutralized or co-opted. Friends are made. Alliances are built.  Goals are achieved—or not.   It helps hugely when policy is intrinsically attractive.  Being militarily strong helps, too, up to a point. Overwhelming strength is often resented.  It becomes, paradoxically, a disadvantage to be adroitly overcome, since no other country wants to appear to have been coerced.  But raw power flaunted or sheathed, even the U.S. can’t go it alone in today’s world.  Public diplomacy’s role is to move governments by inspiring their citizens to see American goals as good for them, too.

The Trifecta:  Information, Culture, Education

Public Diplomacy in the field, at post, works both directly and indirectly.  It aims simultaneously for immediate and longer term impact, the two time lines corresponding roughly to the two branches of traditional PD work: information and culture.  Sometimes the information function is confused with the manipulations better known today as propaganda, although PD’s need for reliability and credibility makes it more akin to journalism.  Cultural programs are often dismissed as frills, expensive indulgences whose impact is difficult to measure, which is true, but only because conventional polling is at its weakest when assessing qualitative phenomena and complex interactions. Straddling the two, though not customarily administered as such, are the educational programs which involve knowledgeable Americans interacting with foreign audiences, short trips to the U.S. for promising mid-career foreign citizens, youth exchanges, academic exchanges like the Fulbright program and even, until recently, university linkages. 

Informational, educational, cultural—these are the co-equal mutually-supportive elements of an effective PD program.  Properly orchestrated, they enhance the overall American image, making the U.S. better understood and more attractive as an ally.  They create lasting links between individuals and institutions, which keeps doors open and ensures a hearing when tough or sensitive issues need support.   They provide, via all media platforms, relevant, accurate and timely information to foreign publics whose mobilization is critical if American foreign policy goals are to be met.

Planning for Success

Because every country is different—even Canada and the United States differ in ways that would call for modulated communications strategies—a Washington-dictated, one-way, one-size-fits-all approach to public diplomacy, however tempting it might seem to bean counters, doesn’t work. Therefore, once Washington establishes policy priorities, experienced, skilled, perceptive  and imaginative field officers must be trusted to devise ways to sell it. 

In the past, USIA posts were required to submit an annual country plan assessing the state of the bilateral relationship, describing (in cooperation with the entire mission) how the post proposed to nourish the relationship while promoting, according to carefully specified strategies, Washington’s policy priorities and, last but not least, requesting the financial, human and material resources to do so.  Expectations for evaluation and feedback were built in.   Naturally big posts in big countries enjoyed more staff and bigger budgets.  But all posts in all countries were guaranteed sufficient resources—Public Affairs Officer plus American and/or locally-hired personnel; a vast range of highly-responsive, Washington-based backup services; firewalled budgetary authority; the wherewithal to run a full service American Center; an appropriate inventory of up-to-date equipment; and, last but not least, PD-controlled vehicles—to offer a high-quality, well-balanced, year-round program that could and would put America in the best possible light.  

The State Department has a habit of bemoaning the lack of administrative skills among its high level officers—and yet, at every post, there was, for decades, a whole cadre of field-tested managers who were also Foreign Service Officers: the public diplomacy people.  Even fairly junior officers had managerial responsibilities, and anyone who wanted to be a Public Affairs Officer had to be an adroit CEO, a dollar-squeezing CFO, a supervisor with a knack for delegating, a program coordinator, a cultural impresario, a human resources geni, a master of media, a public relations whiz, a social psychologist, a linguist, a self-confident performer—and make it all look smooth and easy to the public, which is why, perhaps, the typical State Department officer found it so difficult to appreciate what those public diplomacy colleagues were doing.  Even today there are calls for outside hires to supply the State Department with managerial talent.  Meanwhile, the superb managers that State acquired when it absorbed USIA, were ignored or devalued.  Many, therefore, retired prematurely.  Although a very few prospered and even became Ambassadors, Deputy Chiefs of Mission or Consul Generals, most public diplomacy operational skills are in a state of disuse bordering on atrophy and will soon be lost, except as recorded in the memoirs of better times. Talk about squandering capital!

Global Intentions Local Results – Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The subtitle of William P. Kiehl’s comparative study about the international activities of three Pennsylvania colleges is entitled How Colleges Can Create International Communities. Whether this subtitle should have ended with a question mark and been rephrased to read “How Can Colleges Create International Communities – Or Can They and Should They?” is a question worth asking. Each of the three private colleges in question approaches the problem of internationalization differently.

These colleges range from Dickinson College (Carlisle) with its decades old international orientation which attracts a nationwide student body to Elizabethtown and Gettysburg Colleges both of which have been – and remain - more inwardly focused. This, despite their recent attempts to jump – albeit half-heartedly - on the “internationalization” bandwagon in the aftermath of 9/11. Gettysburg College has been the more successful of the two – but both have far to go before they even reach – in my view - the 50 yard line.

In all fairness, Dickinson’s student body is far more diverse geographically. Students are attracted to the college because of its long term focus on international affairs as opposed to either of the two other colleges included in Kiehl’s study. In contrast, Elizabethtown in particular but also Gettysburg College has mostly appealed to students locally.

Town vs. Gown: Parallel not Mutually Supportive Universes

Hilary in India

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

It was a master stroke: arranging for Hillary Clinton to stay at the Taj Mahal Hotel during her visit to Mumbai.  Think of it!  The U.S. Secretary of State dares to sleep on the spot where terrorists murdered so many people toward the end of last year. And the arrangements held, despite the hotel bombings in Jakarta a couple of days ago.  The Taj gesture sends a message to terrorists that U.S envoys aren’t going to skulk around in dreary safe havens.  It also signals to the government of India: we trust you to take care of our Secretary of State.

Kudos to Organizers

So let me pause here to compliment whomever it was in the State Department (or in our mission in India) who dreamed up the Taj idea.  And let me also compliment the State security people (whom I often found to be stultifyingly obstructive when I was working abroad) for a stroke of imaginative support for diplomacy.  Naturally, I'm aware that security, American and India, was thick on the ground, but the gesture still counts, as does the length of the visit.  On such intangibles important international relationships are built.

Finally I compliment those who nixed any visit to Pakistan during this trip which takes Clinton next to the ASEAN meeting in Bangkok.  Lately we've been treated to the hypenenated expression Af-Pak.  In referring to a very hot war that seesaws across the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, that combo makes sense.  But India has long seethed over the Indo-Pak reflex in U.S. foreign policy.  There are many hard-nosed reasons why India deserves to be a singular locus of attention, and Hillary made those points clearlly, though she also rightly introduced the realities arising from border sharing: what happens in Pakistan affects India; an unstable Pakistan is not good for India.  Happily avoided was mindless equivalence, as if India and Pakistan were a South Asian Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

India and China: Many Minorities, Two Paths

PART ONE

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Both China and India have faced challenges from restive minorities with real grievances.  Their default solutions have been vastly different. 

From the moment India emerged from the blood-soaked partition that created Pakistan, doomsyers have been predicting that the country would fall apart. The wonderful word for the threat was “fissiperous tendencies.”  Right after independence India had 14 constituent states and a federal constitution with some impressive central powers.  Today, thanks largely to successful minority agitation, India has 28 states.  Although there are still some tiny minorities, especially in the Eastern border areas, with “freedom fighters” who mask extortion operations in demands for statehood with a capital S,  I haven’t heard the F-word in a long time. The Maoist insurgency with its heart in the mountainous areas that parallel the Bay of Bengal is, however, a serious concern.  New state-creation is not going to solve this one.  Kashmir is sui generis.

China’s word for the fear of falling apart is “splitism,” evidently, which I must take on faith, since I don’t read or speak Chinese.  For the longest time the focus of Chinese separatist worries has been on Tibet.  Now we learn that Muslim Turkic Uigher ethnics in the vast northwestern Xinjiang area are equally unhappy.  What's more, ethnic minorities most of us have never heard of are causing law and order problems for authorities  in other parts of the country.   So China isn't quite the tidy entity it would like to be and be seen as.  China’s solution to ethnic aspirations tends to combine isolation with repression along with a policy of flooding a discordant area with Han Chinese, the goal being cultural homogeneity.  One country.  One ethnicity—except when folk dancers are needed for some festival.  The problem is that most minorities don’t seem to be grateful for the opportunity to become 100% Han-like, especially since it isn't exactly voluntary. 

Pakistan: The Slippery Slope

by Patricia Lee Sharpe

The complete Islamisation of Pakistan, I wrote a little while ago, “may very well creep in by degree—and decree,” not necessarily suddenly, by Kalashnikov.  In fact, the process began decades ago, as Pervez Hoodbhy explains in an article which appeared in the January 2009 issue of the premier Pakistani newsmagazine Newsline.  Over the years, I too have watched the evolution of a certain sort of religio-cultural “cleansing.”  It’s been gradual but relentless—and should have been obvious to anyone who chose to pay attention.  You don’t have to be a C.I.A. operative to see things changing and figure out where the nudge is coming from. 

And yet, just a few weeks ago, the Jim Lehrer News Hour was presenting supposedly knowledgeable observers who were arguing that the Taliban problem (to use an admittedly simplistic collective label) was essentially a Pashtun problem, especially in the Afghanistan-bordering tribal areas.  According to this point of view, Talibanization is a self-limiting phenomenon like tribal culture itself.  Thus, they argued, panic-stricken doom-and-gloom responses to the recent events in Swat are ludicrous. After all, Swat is only a few valleys over from the F.A.T.A. area proper.  Punjab and Sindh, these ostrich-like experts argued, could never succumb to the Taliban and, since Punjab and Sindh are culturally immune, the million man Pakistani army is big enough to handle any threat.  There will be no messy civil war-like battles throughout the country.  Fighting will be limited to border skirmishes, ugly but containable, assuming the Army is finally taking the task seriously.

But, of course, Sindh and Punjab are not immune, as Hoodbhoy demonstrates, painting a picture that’s only slightly less bleak than that in “Pakistan on the Brink,” Ahmed Rashid’s contribution to the June 11 issue of The New York Review of Books.  As for me, I can attest to the growing influence of salafi Islam on Pakistan’s two most sophisticated, secular cities.  That’s Lahore in Punjab and Karachi in Sindh.  I’ll be describing below some of the out-in-the-open signs and symptoms that any alert and interested outsider could have picked up over the years.

The Vision Fades

It all began with the ham-eating, scotch-drinking lawyer Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who married a Parsi, not a Muslim, and was, when all is said and done, responsible for the partition of British India which gave rise to Pakistan.  He envisioned a Muslim-majority secular state with room for minorities to participate as equal citizens, but he died in 1948, a year after Pakistan was born. Gradually, thanks to greed and complacency among secularists and the Islamists’ dogged perseverance, Jinnah’s vision became irrelevant.  (More extreme simplification.  Sigh!)

Let’s fast forward to the mid-70s, when General Zia-ul-Haq staged a coup that eventually led to the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of the recently assassinated Benazir Bhutto.  Under Zia the on-again-off-again opportunistic nexus between military power seekers and Islamists became more like a bear hug.  Sharia-inspired Hudud Laws (sometimes fatal to women) and Blasphemy laws (murderous for Christians with prosperous farms) were put on the books.  No one since then has been able to annul these draconian laws, not even the avowed secularist and subsequent coupist General Pervez Mussharaf who vowed early on that he would do so.

Culture on the Defense

Back then, in the 70s,  I was teaching American literature at Punjab University in Lahore under a Fulbright grant (and my husband was doing research on politics and economics, which gave me access to all kinds of social science type data).  My female M.A. students* were very concerned during those days of legal transformation.  Their mothers and grandmothers had come out of purda to march in the streets and demonstrate against Great Britain, the colonial occupier.  These girls had no desire to go back to the bad old days of seclusion.  Even so, their male classmates thought it was funny to threaten them with the veil.  The girls were terrified.  They were genuinely fearful of losing the freedoms the older generation had won for them.  

Detroit on the Potomac

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In a provocative Op Ed in The New York Times on April 27, 2009, Mark Taylor, Columbia University religion department chair, likened American graduate school education to Detroit. In the piece, he argued that “most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market.”

All too true in far too many cases.

Or the product simply does not have the skills needed to fulfill the realities of the market. Nevertheless, the student is too often encouraged by the graduate department or by his or her own wishful thinking to think otherwise.

Unless, of course, the graduate student wants to become a university professor and continue the tradition of writing articles couched in obscure jargon for publication in obscure journals that few practitioners read because they are unreadable and irrelevant in the real world. This at least is what I’ve observed over the years in the fields of political science and international relations. It’s the rare professor who has spent his or her entire life in academia who is capable of bridging the gap between theory and practice. This role is increasingly left to think-tanks and their versions of highly politicized policy studies where those out of government seek refuge until they can return to government once more.

The same problem is emerging in the newly minted “field” of public diplomacy – a hybrid “discipline” that draws upon the social sciences, journalism, foreign language and cultural expertise. Public diplomacy is foremost a skill, like it or not, that is most effectively learned from practitioners and best acquired on the job.

Elbow grease - not theorizing - is the key

David Brooks pointed out in a recent New York Times column that much of what is called intelligence or genius is, in reality, grounded in the hard work of practice. For Jane Austen fans, remember when Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice observed that she would be far more proficient at the piano if she practiced more? More practice with an experienced teacher, I’m sure, would also make me a better oboist, skier, photographer and writer.

To cede public diplomacy training to the theoreticians is not only a disservice to students but a vacuous undertaking that does not serve the country well.

The dilemma

Seed Corn: Eaten

by Cheryl Rofer

There have been several articles lately noting various problems in the medical industry. I would suggest that the problems are a symptom of something that’s been going wrong more generally for thirty years or so.

America emerged prosperous and victorious from World War II partly because of a happy accident of geography and partly because of smart organization. It was the imagined challenge that Germany might acquire the atomic bomb that led to organizing scientific research in a way that hadn’t been done before. Vannevar Bush summed it up nicely in 1945.

Vannevar Bush’s model was widely emulated after the war by pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, national laboratories, the late lamented Bell Labs, and smaller companies. This resulted scientific advances in materials, electronics, and, yes, improved drugs and medical therapies. Another result was an intellectual excitement that permeated society with the sense that we could deal with problems and that we would succeed.

Those scientific advances persist, and we have done well in computer science and bioscience, but we have lost that society-wide intellectual excitement. I would argue that loss arises from another success of all that research, namely enormous profits. At some point, more or less the 1980s, those profits became more important than what produced them.

Tuesday Bits and Pieces

by Cheryl Rofer

They predicted a few showers for yesterday. The snow was pretty much continuous all day. As I post this, the clouds are dissolving into a light snow from an almost-blue sky.

Followup: I received an e-mail from Deborah Howell (or someone who answers the ombudsman e-mail at the Washington Post) saying she had read my blog post, and not much more.

Another Followup: The American Association of Petroleum Geologists held a symposium on the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia. (My most recent post here.) In an unusual move for a scientific meeting, the moderator asked for a vote of those attending as to whether the cause of the eruption was the nearby petroleum drilling or an earthquake. Of 74 scientists, 42 voted for the drilling, 3 for the earthquake, 13 for both factors, and the rest found the evidence inconclusive. The moderator reports here.

Chicago Boyz will be hosting a Clausewitz Roundtable in the new year. Contributors are listed here. I intend to read along and perhaps comment. The format will be commentary on one chapter of Clausewitz at a time. I would love to do the whole thing, but the way the fall has gone for me convinced me that I can’t commit to such a rigorous requirement. But it should be interesting.

Let’s hope that President Obama will put an end to the long-distance air strikes that cause so many civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This is appalling. Such practices may be accepted (or not disapproved of) by the medical research community, but they are unacceptable anywhere I’ve worked. I also find the broad-brush tarring of science, as a response to the article, appalling. My career was not in academia; I recognize that some professors take more credit than they may be due for their graduate students’ and postdocs’ work. But I don’t like the casual assumption that of course this is the way scientists do business, unlike the high-minded humanities people. Come to think of it, I recall a history-major friend in graduate school complaining about how his professors were stealing his work…

The same Science magazine (14 November) in which I found a report on the Lusi mud volcano also gave a link to the Linnean Society’s fish collection. I went to the site and found that they also have a herbarium and insect collection on line. The photos are wonderful, but they are arranged by scientific name. It would be lovely to be able to browse the photos, but a random set of clicks among the names brings up something worth seeing. And if you know what you’re looking for, so much the better. This one is Papilio agamemnon. You can get an enlargement at the site via a Flashplayer arrangement.

Science magazine now has a blog on science policy. I’m not crazy about blogs from people who already write to deadlines for a living. It seems like an extra burden on them, and I keep wondering why they would put anything good on the blog, when the motivation seems more to put it in their “official” writing. I don’t see anything striking here, but I’ll check it out for a while.

The News Hour has a web feature called "World View." Every time they mention it on the tv show, I think they're talking about us.

The Sins of the Fathers: Thoughts on the Fulbright Snafu in Gaza

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Here’s the gist of it: because Palestinians in Gaza chose Hamas, Gaza has been turned into a concentration camp, and even the children of those naughty voters must be punished, according to Israel and its primary financial and moral (ahem!) backers in the Bush administration. As a result, Palestinian students can’t count on exit visas to study abroad, even when they’re awarded the full scholarships they need to do so. Not even when those scholarships are sponsored by Israel’s official friends in the U.S.

So, Palestinian children are to be punished for the sins of their fathers even unto the umpteenth generation. This sort of thinking goes back to the Bible. It’s purpose, several millenia ago, was to account for the baffling cosmic injustice by which good people suffered very bad things. The explanation: God designed it that way. You’re in trouble because you had a bad daddy or mommy ad infinitum.

Well, that explanation may work, sort of, for some people, to account for the consequences of natural phenomena like tsunamis and earthquakes and tornadoes. Unavertable catastrophes kill a lot of innocent people and even some saints, no doubt. Such premature mortality doesn’t seem fair, but people often feel better if they can find a “good reason” for the horror.

Actually death by typhoon, etc., isn’t fair, because fairness has nothing to do with nature.

But the Israeli exit visa policy has nothing to do with god or nature. It’s a political decision, and it’s hubris or sacrilege for humans to think they may act like god. On the human level, meanwhile, the notion of punishing children for the sins of their fathers is not only unjust inhuman and unjust, it’s ludicrous. It assumes that a person’s future can be predicted at a very early age. It also assumes that children always or mostly turn out like their parents.

On what sage-worthy grounds might an Israeli security staffer deny an exit visa? The kid threw stones at Israeli soldiers when he/she was 12 or 14? He/she shouted anti-Israeli slogans or scribbled anti-Israeli graffiti? He/she has a father, mother, cousin, uncle who is/was a Hamas member or supporter?

In practice, no such factors reliably predict anyone's future philosophy or behavior. For example, when I entered college, I was a Christian, a Republican and an ardent Israel supporter. I am none of these now, and I have changed no more than many people do over a lifetime.

Sometimes children adopt the parental religious orientation or profession; sometimes they don’t. Some children get more liberal as a result of travel and education. Some get more conservative. Furthermore, we all know that siblings can be as different as night and day. Thus, there is no way to know how a young or inexperienced person will react when exposed to foreign countries and cultures.

To give the devil his due, it’s true that some foreign-educated engineers and doctors have become terrorists. Yet most turn out to be beneficial members of society. Is it reasonable to punish 1000 potential agents of good in order to avert the minuscule risk of one (or less) going amok? The Israeli policy of denying foreign education to Gazans is a crude and vicious business of punishing children for the supposed sins of their fathers, a policy of totally gratuitous cruelty.

It’s cruel in another way, too. It assumes that parents will do anything you want them to do if you make life hard for their children. It assumes, in this case, that Gazans, at a certain point of deprivation and humiliation, will hug their babies, fall on their knees and beg for forgiveness, after which they will humbly vote as Israelis want them to vote. By now, it should be clear that such self-negation will not happen. Not even the Bush administration is willing to let Gazans starve.

Fortunately, then, most of the trapped children will grow up, but there’s a consequence to consider. Although the principle of non-predictability applies across the board, I strongly suspect that a larger proportion of those who never experience a more benign environment will be angrier and more vindictive than those who left to study at Harvard or Michigan State or Bryn Mawr. Or Oxford. Or Heidelberg.

How could the U.S. have slavishly acquiesced in this policy of punishing youth for the sins of the grown ups? I don’t understand it, but I am deeply grateful to those who spilled the beans and hope (not very optimistically) they will not be punished for disclosing this injustice. There is nothing like public humiliation to cause policy change. The Palestinian Fulbrighters will travel.

I am no less happy to see that exit visas will also be issued to hundreds of Gazans who had been denied the opportunity to travel to other countries for education.

However, nothing can be taken for granted. Vigilance will be required, lest the prison gates be locked again, after this little brouhaha dies down. And should an administrative “bottleneck” occur again, I suggest that the proper U.S. response should not be to revoke Palestinian grants or to plead for reversal, but to immediately reassign all Israeli Fulbright grants to Muslim students elsewhere in the world.

Not all Fulbright awards go to young students, of course, but visas for older scholars are equally defensible. Surely no Israeli official in his or her right mind can believe that a Palestine without professionals and academics will be good for Israel’s future security. Unless, of course, Israel’s true goal really is the genocide, total expropriation or perpetual serfdom that some Israelis, at least, seem to envision for the Palestinians.