WhirledView

The Borderline Blues

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Walls are always porous in one way or another, yet people keep building them because boundaries are frightening places where various sorts of intellectual and physical miscegenation occur.

The space between armies or warring states is traditionally a no man’s land, a place that’s safe for no one.  As one set of laws and customs meets another, a gap occurs where no writ applies, especially if that boundary coincides with mountains or jungles or pirate-ridden oceans or vast deserts, all of which have always symbolized the unbounded—the savage, the fantastic, the unowned, the undisciplined.  Walled or not, legal or not, borders are essentially arbitrary.  They break down.  They become bones of contention.  They make news.

Borders have been much in the news this week.  The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago.  That erasure of ideological boundaries was celebrated this week.  Meanwhile, India and China were at odds over the Dali Lama’s visit to Tawang because the two countries cannot agree on where their Eastern boundary runs. Here at home, the U.S. Supreme Court has to decide whether there is an inviolable line to be drawn between adulthood and adolescence when it comes to punishment for violent crime.  Many of the issues in play during the current period of economic recovery have to do with the boundaries between government and private enterprise in our economic lives. The American doctrine of the separation of church and state is also a border issue—as is the application of Sharia Law.  

Dragons and Diplomacy

So far as China is concerned, the dragon has been breathing heavily, in hopes of controlling people and events far from its physical borders.   The Frankfurt Book Fair erupted in controversy when China attempted to dictate which writers of Chinese origin could be featured during the Fair.   Because of its intense concern about its internal boundaries, China breathes heavily on countries that allow Uighur nationalists to speak more freely outside China than they may within Chinese borders; ditto for Tibetans.    As I wrote last week, China’s baleful influence even reached into the White House, preventing President Obama from meeting with the  Dali Lama.  Sanctions and financial manipulations are other ways to achieve, more or less subtly or successfully, cross border influence.

Thus, there are so many ways in which countries attempt to control events beyond their  formal boundaries.  War is one.  The threat of war is almost as effective.  Diplomacy is another way to achieve influence across borders, as is its hand-maiden public diplomacy, which characteristically attempts to distinguish itself from propaganda. The latter is no small debate.  It concerns the borders to be respected when attempting to influence.  At one end of the spectrum is rational persuasion through information and facts; at the other end is emotional manipulation—or worse.  At what point does legitimate persuasion turn into fraud, deceit, duplicity, conning?  All of the latter are usually considered to be immoral and/or illegal, however effective they may be in achieving the manipulator’s ends.  And how about this one—when does psychological pressure or physical discomfort turn into torture?  In domestic politics, a related boundary question is this: when does an inspiring speech turn into demagoguery?  Indeed, much of the debate over health care reform has crossed the border from informed debate to scare-mongering.

Thoughts on South Africa, Zimbabwe, Israel and Palestine

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I was mostly on retreat last week, which is why I wasn’t posting, but only as a commuter, so I was able to sneak a look at two PBS programs that turned out to be entirely consistent with what I was doing during the daytime.  I saw the Masterpiece Contemporary presentation of Endgame, an utterly compelling docu-drama about the secret negotiations that preceded the  official negotiations for the end of apartheid in South Africa and a Bill Moyers interview with South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who led the UN commission of inquiry into human rights abuses by Israel and by Hamas last year.  These are the thoughts that emerged.   They begin with Zimbabwe.... 

Banes of Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe, I suspect, calculated that a power-sharing agreement with Morgan Tsvangirai would placate the West and bring in the big bucks he needs to provide food and rudimentary survival services to a population he has ravaged and terrorized.  Dutifully, his new prime minister set out on a begging trip, hoping to convince prospective donors that the shotgun marriage was cozy and legit.  When the would-be saviors, U.S. and European, saw through the ruse and refused to cough up enough to suit the white-baiting octogenarian president, Mugabe seems to have lost interest in the PR value of minimal cooperation with Tsvangirai, who is now more or less on strike.  So Mugabe has resumed his well-honed harangue: all of Zimbabwe’s current miseries can be traced to colonialism, even if Zimbabwe was in terrific economic shape when the British left in 1980.

Meanwhile, starving, sick, miserable and thoroughly desperate refugees finally began streaming into South Africa from neighboring Zimbabwe.  The result: murderous local mobs pushing back from South African townships whose residents have not prospered as they had hoped in the years since apartheid gave way to majority rule.  Their cry: how can we share when we have so little?  Although South African police managed to quell the worst of the violence, South Africa has continued its policy of not seriously pressuring Mugabe to reverse course or to resign, despite urging by the U.S. and others.  African nations, for obvious reasons, are very touchy about sovereignty. 

The good news is that South Africa itself has not been destabilized by spillover from disarray next door.  Nor has the post-Mandela leadership adopted the poisonous anti-White propaganda and policies of the Mugabe regime.  Whites continue to be a relatively prosperous minority in South Africa where they have a significant presence in urban and rural economies.  Whites also continue to be personally safe, as far as anyone is safe in South Africa’s crime-ridden cities.  This accord didn’t happen by chance.  Unlike Zimbabwe, where Mugabe is the black mirror image of the implacable white racist Ian Smith, South Africa has produced some remarkable leaders, men who saw that retribution, deserved or not, was no way to achieve stability and prosperity in a post-apartheid country.

South African Treasures

South Africa was blessed with Nelson Mandela, who became the reincarnated country’s first president, with Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu who served as conscience for the reborn country, and with a Boer realist  F.W. de Klerk who knew when the game of white monoply on power was over.  South Africa was also blessed with a nationalist party whose millitant wing  was willing to lay down arms without preconditions and let the party leaders join in the process of writing a new constitution.   Long jailed lawyer and African National Congress leader  Nelson Mandela would have as Vice Presidents ANC activist Tabo Mbeki, who would succeed Mandela as president, and—yes!—that very same F.W. de Klerk.  Finally, instead of setting up a war crimes court, the new government chose to conduct a truth and reconciliation process: tell the world exactly what you did, however horrible, and you’ll be free to build a new South Africa with us. 

Confessing is hard.  Letting go of vengeance is equally hard.  By and large, the process seems to have worked. The new South Africa was made possible by realism and idealism, by mediation, negotiation and diplomacy, plus a willingness to live and work together and a disposition to try and trust one another.  The economics, however, have been a little disappointing. South Africa may be the most prosperous sub-Saharan country, but not all share equally in that GNP.  Some Blacks have become very very rich.  Others are hardly better off than they were under the Boers, which makes for anger.

Alaskans: Beware of the Shell Game

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A letter to the NYT editor by the President of the Shell Oil Company complains that Shell's plans for Alaska are being “held up by unnecessary litigation and unreasonable federal permitting delays.”

Marvin Odum claims that Shell "is a leader in environmentally superior operations" and asserts that his company  has "prepared one of the most environmentally sensitive and responsible exploration plans ever for offshore Alaska."  Considering the highly insensitive operations of many oil companies, that's not saying much, but Shell's own record suggests that extreme caution is in order.

As one who worked in Nigeria, where Shell’s record is as deplorable as it gets, environmentally and from the point of view of human rights, I urge Alaskans and the federal regulators involved to be extremely careful about working with this company.  Get everything in writing, in detail.  Inspect operations rigorously.  Watch everything and everyone every minute.   Your land could be in danger.  Your water could be in danger.  Your wildlife could be in danger.  And anyone who protests a spill would do well to think twice.

Prominent Nigerian writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa led his Ogoni people in protest against Shell’s ruin of their Niger delta homeland.  Operations were sloppy, and there was at best laughable reparation made to people whose lives were being changed forever.  Instead of taking Shell to task, an oil-corrupted government in Lagos found a way to silence Saro-wiwa and fellow environmental leaders.  They were hanged in Port Harcourt on November 5, 1995.  Finally, in June of this year, and only because a high visibility trial was about to open, the Shell Oil company paid a settlement of $15.5 million to the heirs of those victims, claiming in the process that the company was shelling out purely from the goodness of its corporate heart.  This article gives an idea of the sorts of damning documents that would have got wide circulation had the case actually gone to trial.  Conviction was not unlikely.

As for Nigeria today, militant pirates spawned by oil companies’ corporate greed and negligence continue to plague remaining oil pumping operations in the Niger delta and vast areas of Ogoni land remain infertile due to seepage from supposedly capped oil wells.  

The solution to the “hypocrisy of relying on other countries’ resources” for fuel and energy isn’t to ravage Alaska  and keep on pumping the pet.  The solution is to promote major reductions in energy consumption and to replace as much petroleum-based energy as quickly as possible with clean and renewable energy. 

Meanwhile, should there be excruciatingly careful scrutiny of Shell's plans for Alaska?  Absolutely.

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

Obama's War: A Must See

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I've just watched the PBS Frontline production Obama's War.  Mostly I want to say: see it now if you didn't manage to catch it on Tuesday night.    See our troops telling villagers they have to answer questions honestly---and actually expecting a heart-to-heart to happen, if not now, then in time!  Hear someone say it will take 600,000 troops to win (whatever winning means)---without speculating on how many years would be involved, but suggesting that in time the Afghans could take over most of the job, evidently assuming that the Afghans would have the same goals as the U.S.  And so it goes!  Delusion after delusion, punctuated by the grave pronouncements of the so-called expert General McCrystal Ball or Bull, whom the Republicans imagine to be capable of dictating U.S. policy in South Asia!   But see it for yourself.   

If I Were a Pakistani Reading Kerry-Lugar, I’d Flip

By Patricial Lee Sharpe

The Pakistani military is balking at some provisions in the Kerry-Lugar Bill and not every influential civilian is jumping with joy at the prospect of $1.5 billion a year from the U.S.  Meanwhile, Asif Ali Zardari’s civilian government is trying to persuade the Obama administration to take no account of such foolish tantrums.

Given the unusually spirited objections to U.S. aid,  I decided to see what might be obnoxious about the text.  I decided to try to peruse S. 962 as a proud, well educated Pakistani citizen might read it.  All 33 pages.  Every clause.

Reading in my Pakistani persona, I found myself getting more and more angry.  I was in the mood to throw all 33 pages across the room—or maybe to rip them up and stomp on them.

For a cool billion and a half a year,  the United States of America proposes to intrude into the following areas/processes/concerns of the national life of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan: police; judiciary; political pluralism, equality and the rule of law; human and civil rights; media; transparency and accountability of ALL branches of government and judiciary; anti-corruption efforts at ALL levels of military and civilian administration; narcotics trade; legal and political reform of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas; rural development in general; natural resources management; energy and water investments and management, employment generation; roads, irrigation and other physical infrastructure; worker rights including the right to form labor unions [this from the union-busting U.S. culture!]; primary and secondary education and vocational training and higher education; food security and agriculture; public health; vocational training; micro-finance and income generation for women.

“Is nothing to be free of American meddling and dictation?” I find my Pakistani self raging. “It was fine, it was innocuous, back when the yahoos wanted to do a little project here, a little project there, a seminar, a conference, but scaled up like this!  They want to take over our whole life, beginning tomorrow!”

All projects will, of course, have to be approved by U.S. authorities, and before any money flows into these many channels of national life,  the U.S. government will require a description of the role to be played by Pakistani national, regional, and local officials and members of Pakistani civil society and local private sector, civic, religious and tribal leaders, all of whom may help to identify and implement programs and projects.

 “How sweet!” my Pakistani persona thinks.  “Local input.”

Our Real Problem in Pakistan: They Don’t Like Us

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The U.S. must develop a public diplomacy program to convince Pakistanis that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are Pakistan’s enemies as well as America’s, according to recent comments by Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Holbrooke actually said this after an eye-opening Pew poll revealed that support in Pakistan for Al Qaeda and the Taliban had dropped precipitously since 2002.  At the same time approval ratings for the U.S. had reached a new low.

A Strange Choice

Now, if you were designing a public diplomacy program in Pakistan, a country whose cooperation may determine the outcome of the American struggle in Afghanistan, where would your emphasis be? Would you insert yourself gratuitously into Muslim politics in order to smear a bunch of backward-looking violent Islamists who have discredited themselves by their vicious intolerant rule in the Swat valley and by their tendency to kill civilians with suicide bombs throughout Pakistan? 

English speakers have a few clichés for such efforts.  Like: hauling coals to New Castle.  Or: gilding the lily.  In short, the U.S. doesn’t need to do what’s been accomplished, gruesomely, by the Taliban themselves!  The Taliban are now regarded as pariahs, bin Laden’s no longer a true prophet and advancing Islam by killing civilians has lost its noble veneer.

Why, then, is a supposedly brilliant diplomatic mind ready to spend scarce diplomatic capital in a manner that’s sure to make Pakistanis dislike us even more by telling them how to react to already discredited renegade fellow Muslims?  Because, I suspect, the real problem is too painful for Washington or most Americans to contemplate. 

We Americans are congenitally unable to believe that we may be genuinely disliked.  It’s true of us as individuals and very much true of us as a nation.  How can anyone possibly doubt the purity of our motives, the intensity of our good will, the rightness of our collective conviction that America is the best country ever to arise in the history of the world, the sincerity of our generous faith that every other country can, with a little effort at transformation, be exactly like us?  

No More Troops for Afghanistan, Mr. President

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I urge you, Mr. President, not to increase our troop strength in Afghanistan.  Indeed, I urge you to announce instead a gradual withdrawal of American forces whose only justifiable mission, undertaken with the support of virtually all Americans and the whole world, was lost at Tora Bora, when a skinflint strategy dictated from Washington allowed Osama bin Laden to slip away.  Since “failure” was unacceptable to the hawks of the day, that mission was allowed to mutate into this ill-conceived war against the Islamist forces known as the Taliban. The hawks have had their day.  Do not listen to them now.

It's a Civil War within Islam

We have, in Afghanistan, thrust ourselves into the middle of a religious war we tragically helped to ignite.  Now, however, this struggle is in no way ours to win or lose.  That’s up to those who have a direct interest in its outcome, the Afghan people.  Arguments about how properly to fight a war against insurgency, debates about how many troops are needed, advisories about how those troops should behave vis-à-vis the local population—irrelevant!  It’s not our war–and we can’t oh-so-nobly win it for the Afghan people either.  If, after eight years of outside intervention, competent or not, the fractious non-Taliban leaders of Afghanistan have been unable to unite around the task of fielding enough tough-minded, battle-savvy men to defeat the resurgent Taliban, there’s got to be a serious lack of something like will, motivation or interest or sense or urgency. Look at it this way: if the Taliban can fight modern troops to a standstill, then five times as many (an arbitrary but not impossible figure if all non-Taliban sheiks, chiefs, warlords and mullahs would work together) non-Taliban fighters, no better equipped but equally determined, could surely push them back, Afghan-style.  It’s clear that fearful village fence-sitters would back a credible non-Taliban alternative.  Memories (and current experience) of Taliban rule are not pleasant.  

As it is, we pour money into Afghanistan, it seeps into the ground like rain after drought, and still the ground is infertile (except for poppy).  There’s a message here.  We are fools and we are being milked.  I imagine lots of laughter at our expense when the Afghan maliks settle down on their carpets, lounge back on their pillows and sip green tea together after a day of smiling and saying yes, yes, yes, to the Americans.

Two Good Reasons

Two things have emboldened me to write so single-mindedly.  What started this trend of thought was the reaction in Pakistan to Taliban-excesses in Swat, including decapitations and mutilations, as well as to the loss of life from dramatic suicide bombings throughout the country.  The militants even dared to threaten the almighty game of cricket.  Little by little the horror dawned.  The Taliban couldn’t be trusted to honor a self-limiting agreement.  As a result, the war against the Taliban and other such militants had become Pakistan’s, which meant that the Army was no longer in the humiliating position of fighting someone else’s war.  When the army finally went after Baitullah Mehsud, it wasn’t head hunting for the U.S. It was defending a way of life more agreeable to the people of Pakistan.  In short, a mission the majority of Pakistanis could support.  (Note to America: you can’t buy loyalty or reliable allies, a lesson that should also be abundantly apparent in Afghanistan.)

The second reason for my strongly urging you, Mr. President, not to send more troops to Afghanistan is related.  It derives from the data in a recent Pew Research Center study.  Over the past six years, and ironically while America’s popularity has been in free fall, confidence in bin Laden’s likelihood to “do the right thing” has plummeted, from about 58% to 28% in Jordan, from 60% to 25% in Indonesia, from 15% to 2% in Turkey, to mention just a few countries.  Suicide bombing and other violence inflicted on civilian populations “to defend Islam against its enemies” has also dramatically lost support.   This trend, it should be noted, can't be traced to the American anti-terrorism campaign. 

Lemon Trees, Olive Trees and Orange Trees: Israel Needs a Better Narrative

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

While both Hamas and Israel may be guilty of war crimes against civilians last winter, a U.N. fact-finding mission has concluded that Israel carried out “a deliberate disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize” the people of Gaza.  This, sadly, is not the first time Israel has been accused of gross disproportionality in response to violence originating in Gaza, which is one very important reason why so many people who used to be Israeli supporters are not very sympathetic anymore.

When I was growing up, we were taught in school to admire Israel because hard-working farmers had planted lush, well-irrigated orange orchards in a desert—an arid, neglected, largely uninhabited land that was Jewish by right of prior possession, to say nothing of the blood-bathed, guilt-inducing politics that had brought the modern state of Israel into being.

Those Other Trees

Only much later did I learn of the much-cherished lemon trees that were being burnt or uprooted when Palestinian houses were bombed or bulldozed by the Israeli army.  Or become aware of the countless acres of olive trees, some extremely ancient, that were being destroyed to build Jewish settlements on conquered and occupied lands—and more recently to make way for a wall routed so as to appropriate as much land as possible lest a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine stand-off actually be put into practice. 

Never in school did I hear about Irgun, the Jewish terrorist organization whose leaders, years later, would command respect, although evidently their counterparts in Hamas are never to be talked to.  Don't even think about respect!  Furthermore, much to my shame, I preserved for far too long my orange-orchard fantasy by not paying sufficient attention to some very ugly cases of what we now call ethnic cleansing—murderous operations to rid the newly born state of Israel of its inconvenient population of Arabs.  Evidently, the land had not been vacant!

The Eye for an Eye Fallacy

There’s a reason for my willful blindness.  My family was not Jewish, but my political consciousness was pricked to life by the mistreatment of Jews in my own country as well as by what my childish eyes saw in the news reels toward the end of World War II.  As a little kid, I saw the bodies of the dead piled like firewood and the equally skeletal bodies of the barely living clustered at the gates of liberated concentration camps.  At the same time, I also saw signs in America saying “Gentiles only.” I heard neighbors worrying about the neighborhood “going Jewish.” I read about “Jewish quotas” at Princeton and Yale.  And I saw a connection. 

Molotov-Ribbentrop and Russian Selective Amnesia?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

 

“The Baltic Way was an uninterrupted 600 kilometre human chain uniting the Baltic capitals of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, in which two million indigenous people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, then still occupied by the Soviet Union, joined hands to demand freedom and independence. The Baltic Way was organised by the joint efforts of the three Baltic countries’ Popular Fronts on the 50th anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939, which served as a basis for the Soviet Union to occupy the Baltic countries in 1940. The aim of the Baltic Way (was) to draw the world’s attention to continuing Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries and (it) emphasised the non-violent nature of the Baltic nations’ struggle for freedom.”  - Inscription on an envelope issued by the Estonian postal service in 2009 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Baltic Way. 

Did Natalia Narochnitskaya, the historian who heads the Foundation for Historical Perspective, a Russian think tank in Moscow, really tell Financial Times columnist Charles Clover that ‘even throughout the whole cold war, no one questioned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’ but that “Now everything is being thrown open?”

That’s what he said she said in his September 9, 2009 column entitled “Putin’s Polish room reignites battle over war memories.”

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact a Non-Issue during the Cold War? Oh, really.

If that’s so, then I wonder where Narochnitskaya was when I was Press Attache at the American Embassy in Helsinki from 1988-1991 because I certainly heard Estonian and other Baltic independence leaders question the legality of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact during that waning period of the Cold War.  Furthermore, strong popular objections to the terms and results of the Pact caused the formation of the Baltic Way, an event that took place on August 23, 1989.  The Baltic Way linked the three Baltic peoples in a human chain that ran from Estonia through Lithuania via Latvia in a gesture of solidarity against the continuing Soviet occupation of the Baltics based on that illegal pact.