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Hillary in Pakistan: Assessing That “Charm Offensive”

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Who came up with the idea of calling Hillary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan a “charm offensive”?  First of all, the term is sexist.  Imagine sending Richard Holbrooke on a charm offensive!  Secondly, the concept is insulting to Pakistan.  As if that proud and prickly country would take kindly to the publically-declared notion that it could be seduced into dancing for America.  Finally, and most important, anyone who is in the least aware of the complexities of the relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan would know that what’s needed in this relationship is insight, persistence and constancy, not a three days’ flirtation which would be only too reminiscent of the on-and-off romance that the U.S. has been so angrily and so often accused of.  This week included.

So Washington is shocked that Hillary didn’t sweep particulars under a lovely Baloch or Kashmiri carpet?  I am going to take issue and suggest that she did exactly what was needed.  She let some fresh air into the discussion.  She got serious.  Most likely we shouldn't assume that her comments about someone surely knowing the whereabouts of al Qaeda or about trust needing to be a two-way street or about Pakistan’s needing to take responsibility for education were bloopers, blunders, or obnoxiously preachy.  I think they were carefully embedded in the innocuous stuff.   Lawyers know how to do this.

I have read every interview text on the Department of State website, particularly the questions with which Secstate Clinton was peppered by journalists, students and tribal leaders.  (Whoever was responsible for the recordings that yielded so many “inaudibles”  should be fired!).  These were good discussions, and I find it regrettable that the American press so frequently framed the story so as to deserve a headline like this: “Clinton Suffers Barbs and Returns Jabs on Pakistan Trip.”  Here is more of such misrepresentation:

She submitted [itals mine] to four round-table interviews...in which Pakistan’s leading journalists took their best shots at her, and she even counterpunched once or twice.  By the time she left...she appeared to have fought Pakistan’s fourth estate to a draw.

What’s offensive about such a description?  It’s inaccurate.  It’s inappropriate.  What was going on was more like the first phase of a negotiation.  Everything gets laid on the table.  The fears.  The resentments.  The angers.  The misunderstandings.  The disappointments.  Unless you get through that stage, you can never progress to anything like productive cooperation. 

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

Ode to PB&J for Labor Day

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Well, not an ode exactly, since I’m not dishing out poetry.  But this is, for sure, a tribute to the Great American Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.  Ta da!

Tomorrow is Labor Day, the official finale of the summer out-of-doors season.  It’s traditional to go for a picnic that allows us to lament the passing of time while appearing to have a sunny, full-of-smiles good time.  Depending on where you live, I bet you are planning a trip to the mountains or the beach or a lake or a park.  No?  Well, a lot of us are.  So we will compete with other picnickers for the least splintery table with the most shade, over which we’ll fling something or another to serve as a tablecloth.  Or maybe we’ll settle onto some remoter patch of sand or grass or any other surface that’s fairly level and can be sat on, comfortably, sort of, all things natural considered.

Some of us are going to unpack a vast array of gustatory delights from hampers and coolers.   I will not.  I get restless, impatient, antsy, just sitting around, so I like to hike or walk or trudge or plod, depending on the terrain, my mood and that old fitness thing.  Eventually hikers get hungry.  They need food, which gravity will have lured to the bottom of the day pack, under the rain gear and wallet and first aid requisites and tissues for you know what—and so the rooting around begins.

The Gorp Gobble

A car picnic quite naturally invites excess.  But I’m absolutely astounded by what my fellow trekkers/hikers load themselves down with in the way of food on the trail.  First of all, they gobble gorp or bite off chaws of energy bars with every other step, lest they be unable to perform as relentlessly as some fuzzy, pink, long-eared, drum-beating, Madison Ave. creature that keeps going and going and going. Picture it.  These extremely well-nourished Americans are traversing a mere ten miles (or much less) of far from life-threatening terrain and they’re afraid they’ll collapse.  Happily they aren’t faced with a real world death march.  Corregidor?  The Navaho or the Cherokee Long Marches during our Manifest Destiny phase? 

But hey!  Any excuse to satisfy the munchies.  As with energy bars: high profit, industrial-chemical-estate-launched assaults on taste buds and intelligence. Or gorp—love the word, not so the mix.  Nuts: mmm-mmm good and good for you.  Raisins: nutritious and tolerable, eating-wise, to my mind.  Chocolate chips: more! more!  But when micro-bits of one tasty tidbit sluff off onto the others?  Not entirely serendipitous. 

Le Picnique

So what do these people who are hardly under-nourished pull out of their day packs when we settle ourselves on some pelvis-cradling rocks for lunch?  This: gourmet take-out with snap-top plastic containers.  Curried chicken salad.  Tabbouli with hummus and pita.  Salade niçoise or russe —or equally complicated delicacies from home and not mere leftovers either.  All in containers that’ll have to be schlepped out—along with the requisite dirty spoons and knives, whether plastic or civilized. 

Now I like an elegant picnic once in a while, but on the trail give me good old PB&J.  First of all, the makings are always available so I don’t have to think ahead, make lists, shop.  Second, I’m always amazed, once I’ve taken that first bite, to discover once again that the Great American Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich is worth bragging about.  Third, it’s indestructible on a hot day.  Fourth, it’s easy to handle.  Just wrap it in waxed paper, pop it into a baggie and throw it into the pack.  Fifth, there's almost nothing to pack out.  Finally, it’s real food.  It gives me protein, non-artery-clogging oils, salt to replace what I’m sweating out.  What's more, I’m supplied with plenty of energy and I’m stuffed enough to keep the afternoon hungries away.  

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.

On Parenting Teens

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A few days ago the local daily front paged a midnight horror: an accident involving five teens in a car hit by an apparently drunk driver speeding down the wrong lane.   Four of the teens were dead.  One was in the hospital in critical condition.  The driver was just sixteen.  Three passengers were sixteen; one was fifteen.  The kids were heading for a party in a community about eight miles east of Santa Fe.  By the time they’d be driving home it would be, say, 2 am?

As some associates and I discussed this tragedy,  I began to have a sinking feeling.  “Is there a parenting issue here?” I wondered out loud.  Immediately I was assailed.  How callous of me to blame the victims.

Not at all  The probably (since proved)  drunk driver had indubitably caused the accident as such.  But, I found myself thinking, maybe those kids shouldn't have been on the road in the first place.  Did the accident have contributing factors relating to driver inexperience, teenage distractability  and (especially) parental dereliction of duty?   In short: were there lessons to be learned for the benefit of other kids?

A subsequent news article observed that, if the drivers saw one another at 50 yards apart at a speed of 50 mph (the legal limit on the fatal road), the girl who was driving had one second to react.  She also needed to know that the best tactic for such circumstances is to veer right, onto the shoulder or into a bush, because the other driver usually veers toward his proper lane—if and when he realizes what’s happening. 

But the teen driver was only sixteen, which means her driving experience, especially her night driving experience, was extremely limited.  Worse, as it turned out in subsequent news stories, she had only a provisional license.  In New Mexico that means no driving between midnight and five in the morning and no driving (without an adult present) more than one passenger under the age of 18 at any time of day or night.   Why, then, did her parents give her to keys to the car? 

No teen driver ever admits to insufficient experience.  Every teen promises to be careful.  But developmental physiologists have now determined that the brain is not fully mature until around 20 years of age.  Judgment is the skill that’s last to develop.  Even without that relevant bit of into, who among us expects a 16 year old driving a car full of friends to a party in the middle of the night to have her eyes on the road and her mind on the driving task every second of every mile?  

So what on earth can the five sets of parents in this case have been thinking about?  A bunch of giddy girls out partying—in a car illegally driven by a 16 year old chum—at midnight and later?  Given the circumstances, I needn’t  speculate about the likelihood of drinks and dope at a late-starting party and how that would affect home driving ability, but surely it should have had a bearing on the parents’ decision-making processes.

No!  I don’t blame the victims.  I mourn them.  I blame the parents.  Those girls should have been coming home at midnight, not heading out to a(nother) party.  Clearly it was time when parents should have set limits—even if they'd had to endure indignant daughters saying, “Everyone does it!” or  “I hate you! I hate you!”

Getting It Wrong

by Cheryl Rofer

Here's a crabby post to start your Monday morning wrong. If you are having a bad Monday, don't click on the links. They'll make it worse.

But I found these three articles so egregiously wrong, I wanted to say something about them. Unfortunately (or maybe happily), I don't have time to work through them in detail. Maybe Tuesday will be better.

It's Not the Religion, Fareed!
I like much of what Fareed writes, but here he's reeeaaaaccchhhing for a way to distinguish the people in Iran's streets today from the people in Estonia's streets in 1989. And the other countries that emerged from Communist rule in 1989-1991. He looks around, and finds...religion! The parallels of those countries to Iran fail for a number of reasons. It was an external power, Russian Communism, that held sway in a colonial fashion. Those countries had reasonably well-developed political movements with clear paths of the insurgents to power. Religion was used in Poland as a lever, but it was much weaker in other places. That's why I've gone back to the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an analogy. It's not perfect, but it's much closer than the revolutions of 1989-1991.

Because They're Illegal, That's Why!
Jackson Diehl insists this morning that President Obama go back to business as usual with Israel.

Pressuring Israel made sense, at first. The administration correctly understood that Netanyahu, a right-winger who took office with the clear intention of indefinitely postponing any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, needed to feel some public heat from Washington to change his position -- and that the show of muscle would add credibility to the administration's demands that Arab leaders offer their own gestures.

The gesture has been made, time to return to hypocrisy.

Diehl ignores the UN resolutions and international law on the settlements to argue that they are a trivial bit of fluff that don't matter, and anyway if Israel makes any concessions, the Palestinians won't. And Obama will have to back down and lose face. But perhaps not. A competing newspaper reports this morning that Israel may put some sort of freeze in place; not exactly what the administration is asking for, but more than Israel would have done without the pressure. And we'll see where it goes from here.

Ross Douthat's Reckless Romance
This one is just plain sexism. But what can we expect from the New York Times's pet conservative man? Douthat finds the last week to have been a good one for reckless romance.

The nation’s most famous reality-television father, Jon Gosselin of “Jon and Kate Plus Eight,” threw over his marriage for a fling with a 23-year-old schoolteacher. Not one but two prominent conservative politicians torpedoed their careers with public confessions of adultery — with Mark Sanford’s Argentine disappearing act eclipsing John Ensign’s accusation of extortion against his lover’s spouse.

Um, Ross, those are all guys breaking up their marriages. Romance has some mutuality to it, and I can't see any of the women involved in those scenarios feeling particularly good just now. But reckless romance rules in Ross's fantasyland. Oh well, he's the guy who thought that cartoon character had to be male. I saw her as female, myself. Who else would have to correct all the guys who are getting it wrong on the internet? (That last one is safe to click.)

Angels and Devils in the Streets

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

It all seemed so natural, the presence of women, lots of women, among the protesters thronging the streets of Tehran and elsewhere.  I noticed and yet I didn’t notice.  After all, in most countries, females are slightly more than half of the population.

The I saw the photos of the crowds last Friday when the Supreme Leader was to address the nation after prayers.  Men. Men. Men.  Not a woman in sight.

The Basij swinging heavy chains and brandishing batons and driving motorcycles into crowds of unprotected people are men, too.  The election has been rigged to favor the candidate who would happily take women out of the universities and lock them securely in their homes, just as the Taliban do, never mind the theological differences between Shi’a and Wahabis.

But of course the streets this past week were also seething with men, old, middle-aged and young.  Especially the young.  So time is against the present regime.  Each sequence of protests against rigged elections is stronger than the one before.  The trend is clear.  This explosion of outrage may be sputtering out, but the anger and the commitment to change will smolder, always ready to flare up again.

I wonder what Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei says to Allah, these days, when the ritual part of prayer is over, when he speaks to his god without a script.  How does he explain that his stewardship of the Islamic Republic has degenerated to the point that he can only rule through demonic gangs of sadists in masks?    

In fact he has now threatened a “decisive confrontation,” a “revolutionary” one, at that.  Yet Al Jezeera reports that the streets have not emptied out. One hopes the fearsome-looking thugs will be greeted by thousands of pictures of the Angel of the Streets, Neda Agha Soltan, a beautiful  26-year old student who was shot by a sniper in Teheran on Saturday.  The irony, of course, is that Neda wasn’t demonstrating.  She was just on her way home from a music lesson.

But what difference does that make?  Women shouldn’t be gadding about—even with their fiancés—and what’s this about music?  Not exactly Islamic, according to the more puritanical sorts.  So demonstrating or not, she had obviously been corrupted by foreign ideas. 

So good riddance to bad rubbish. After all, she was only a woman.

Except now she’s a martyr.  And the regime is so terrified over her death that they wouldn’t let her family give her a proper Muslim burial.

Which, once again, provokes the question: who’s the good Muslim?

Dalit-ful: Caste (and Color) Politics in India and the U.S.

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Social barriers to ladder-climbing keep falling. The U.S. has its first African-American president.  India has its first woman presiding over the Lok Sabha or lower house of parliament—and, two for the price of one, she happens to be a dalit, too. 

Dalit is the term currently in use for the lowest of the low, castewise, in India, those once called untouchables and then, more euphemistically, by Mahatma Gandhi, Harijans or the “children of god.”  

Not that Meira Kumar is a nobody, so to speak.  She is an ex-diplomat five times elected to the Lok Sabha—and this also: her father was Jagjivan Ram.  He rose to be Deputy Prime Minister in the days of Jawaharlal Nehru.  He also helped to lead the pro-democracy movement during the dark days of Indira Gandhi’s autocratic “emergency,” serving ultimately as a constantly re-elected  Member of the Lok Sabha from the state of Bihar for fifty years.   So dynastic politics is alive and well in India as well as the United States.  Think Gandhi.  Think Kennedy.  Think Gore.

But the selection of Meira Kumar actually had nothing to do with idealism—help women! help dalits!—or even with nepotism—remember Daddy!  During the recent election, there was a possibility that Congress would win so few votes that Congress would have to cede the prime ministership to the leader of an allied party in order to form a governing coalition able to keep the B.J.P. from regaining governing status.  The politician who aspired to be that non-Congress Prime Minister is Mayawati, also a dalit.  She’s the flamboyant leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.  As it turned out, Congress picked up more than a few votes.  To control the Lok Sabha a coalition was indeed still a necessity, but Congress had enough seats to be invited by the President to form the government.  So Man Mohan Singh is prime minister again, and Meira Kumar is speaker of the House, to use the equivalent American title.  Although Kumar is from Bihar, her elevation will surely detach some dalit support from Mayawati's B.S.P. to Congress in U.P.

The Asian Age ran an op ed piece that explored many of these themes.  It also emphasized a fact which has strong echoes in the United States.  Many dalits, writes Antara Dev Sen, have risen to the top, which speaks very well for India today.  But most dalits, she emphasizes, still do dirty jobs, and (my addition)  they aren’t the most desired in the marriage market.

The same is true in the United States.  Individual African-Americans have now reached the top in nearly every profession,  but the percentage of African-American languishing in America’s jails is also shockingly high.  Other also demographics show most African-Americans lagging badly.

Conclusion: neither India nor America has a right to the moral high ground on the basis of a few extraordinary success stories.  The real test is whether most dalits or most African-Americans enjoy the respect and economic potential comparable caste Hindus or white Americans take for granted.     

A Double Standard

by Cheryl Rofer

I’ve been going back and forth on whether to write this post. Just close all the tabs, I almost thought. It’s been said before. Tedious. And far from a pleasant subject.

But I think it hasn’t been said well, or exhaustively. And maybe it’s one of those things that needs to be repeated because it’s true, and a lot of other stuff on the subject that isn’t true is repeated. So here goes.

The murder of Dr. George Tiller is not the first murder of a doctor who is willing to provide services that are necessary for women’s health. These murders are encouraged by a willingness on the part of the so-called pro-life community to equate the death of a fetus with the death of an adult human being, or even to privilege the fetus over the adult. Some in that community take this to mean that it is acceptable, therefore, to murder doctors who perform pregnancy-terminating procedures. They are further encouraged by media reporting that seems to find such speech acceptable.

Delusion in Pakistan

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I expected to write something “serious” about the Pakistan situation today, but instead I’m packing to leave town tomorrow for a funeral back East.  So here are a few more or less connected thoughts, without links, which I don’t have time to establish at the moment.

Like many other Pakistan observers, I’ve been astonished that the reaction on the part of the Pakistan elite and the educated middle classes has been so tepid, so blasé, so deer-in-the-headlights, as the Taliban and various kindred spirits have moved out of the mountains, murdering policeman as well as uncooperative tribal and village elders,  taking over Swat and neighboring territory, planting bombs in the settled areas and breaking promise after promise to the army and the government in Islamabad.  I found myself wondering how any intelligent Pakistani could imagine that a Taliban promise is anything more than tactical.  And how could anyone doubt that the Taliban goal is to control Pakistan as their Afghan brothers controlled Afghanistan before 9/11 invited the wrath of Washington?

There has been much analysis of the demographics and the double-talk of the Pakistani Army and its elite intelligence unit the I.S.I.  I might add a bit here, but I don’t have time.  I’d like to deal with other segments of society, who for so long persisted in seeing the call for action against the Taliban as “fighting America’s war,” which was not a popular idea.  After all, if the Taliban are rascals, they are, from the Pakistani point of view, “our rascals.” 

Such condescending indulgence might be innocuous , if the Taliban were satisfied to be a sect, living to themselves, allowing others to do the same.  Parallel play.  But Islamists are universalists and absolutists: what they do others must be forced to do. 

And surely Pakistanis knew this, I thought.  Couldn’t they remember what happened in Kabul when the Taliban took over Afghanistan?  Especially what happened to Afghan women?  Ah, but there is no love lost between Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Arguably, educated Pakistanis couldn’t imagine themselves succumbing and suffering a similar fate. So there has been, perhaps, a fatal lack of empathy, even when the Taliban began messing around with the tribals on the Pakistan side of the Durand Line.  Why no empathy?  Well, Lahore does not identify with Waziristan.