Moyers began the program with some fairly standard reporting painting the situation in Pakistan as dire, then eased into a discussion that called that viewpoint into question. The way it was done was actually as informative and thought-provoking with regards to ourselves as with regards to Pakistan:
BILL MOYERS: President Obama was burned in effigy in Pakistan the other day. This photo from the Associated Press depicts a crowd of men with signs saying "Go America Go," meaning go home as an image of the President goes up in flames.
Writing in "The Wall Street Journal," columnist James Taranto said the burning symbolizes, to all Americans who may doubt it, that Obama is a war president....
Our own children and grandchildren are already fighting there, and more are on the way. Look at this recent headline in London's "Sunday Times," relaying an American threat to the Pakistani government - "Stop the Taliban now, or we will."
Things have gotten worse in the past week. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled Pakistan's northwest region to escape fighting between the country's army and the Taliban.
The news is confusing, misleading, fragmented and sometimes, frightening, so we've asked two informed observers of that region, both of whom have lived in Pakistan to try to help us sort it out.
Juan Cole teaches history at the University of Michigan. His "Informed Comment" blog at juancole.com has become a go to destination for anyone interested in the politics of Islam. The author of several books, this is his latest, "Engaging the Muslim World."
Shahan Mufti recently returned from a six month tour covering Pakistan's ongoing political crisis. He reports for globalpost.com, the new international news website. A Pakistani American, Shahan also has written about Pakistan for "The Christian Science Monitor" and "The Boston Globe" as well as many other print and broadcast news outlets.
But his guests quickly changed the tone and the direction:
BILL MOYERS: Shahan, what did you think about this photograph?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Well, it tells a story. But, as any photo, it doesn't tell the complete story. There are protests like this all over the country. There have been ever since the war in Afghanistan began and America started getting involved in the region. This is the story that we get through the mass media for the most part. But there are many other currents in the country that aren't being covered as well.
JUAN COLE: The Jamaat-e-Islami represents very few people. It's a cadre organization. It gets, typically, three percent when there's elections. So, yes, they mount these demonstrations. And you can see that's probably a very small one. And so to make so much of this little picture, it shows a lack of appreciation for proportionality for what really is important in the country.
Which, of course, has been one of our most fundamental misunderstandings from the very beginning. We have never appreciated how much good will and good sense there is in the Middle East--not that we've done very much to deserve it, with all the local tyrants we've supported, and continue to support to this very day. Imagine what we could do if we chose to build on that goodwill, instead! And most of us were foolish enough to believe that Obama was smart enough to realize this.
Not so much, apparently, as the discussion goes on to reveal. But first.... we discover that we're as much in the dark as we were with Bush when it comes to the basic facts of battle. The reasons may have changed, but the situation is still the same:
BILL MOYERS: What is important right now? What's missing from the reporting and the analysis we're getting from Pakistan?
SHAHAN MUFTI: One thing that's missing, obviously, that's hard to get into reporting is context. But also hard information. Hard fact. So we're hearing about this military operation going on in the north of Pakistan right now. Yet there are no reporters, no reporters on the ground. They had-
BILL MOYERS: I have heard a couple from NPR. They seem to be right among the refugees who are fleeing there.
SHAHAN MUFTI: The refugees are outside of the war zone now. These are the people who have been internally displaced within the country. And they have been, actually, have been evacuated by the army. So before the army moved into these northern areas they disseminated information through radio, television, to tell the people to get out 'cause they were going to move in.
And we've heard of hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, moving out of these areas. So, really, all the information that we are relaying as reporters, as the media, as information, really is coming from army press releases, for the most part.
There's very little room to independently confirm a lot of the information. Especially in this most recent offensive. That is a huge thing that, as that reporters in Pakistan I know are dealing with. They're referring to "alleged" military operations.
So they're in a position where they can't even independently confirm that an entire military operation took place. Let alone the figures of the Taliban militants dead, or how many civilian casualties there are, or how many armed forces-- people in the armed forces have died. So that is one thing that's very troubling, as a reporter.
It's so, so easy to spin when you have no first-hand facts at all to worry about. And that's exactly where we find ourselves once again.
We also find ourselves where we've always been when it comes to understanding who's out there fighting on the other side:
BILL MOYERS: Who are the Taliban and what do they want? What are their goals?
JUAN COLE: What we're calling the Taliban, it's actually a misnomer. There are, like, five different groups that we're swooping up and calling the Taliban. The Taliban, properly speaking, are seminary students. They were those refugee boys, many of them orphans, who went through the seminaries or Madrassas in northern Pakistan back in the nineties. And then who emerged as a fighting force. Then you have the old war lords who had fought with the Soviet Union, and were allied with the United States. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, they have formed insurgent groups to fight the Americans now. Because they had fought the Soviet occupation, they now see an American occupation, so they've turned on the United States. They were former allies.
So we're calling them Taliban. And then you have a lot of probably disorganized villagers whose poppy crops, for instance, were burned. And they're angry. So they'll hit a NATO or American checkpoint. So we're scooping all of this up. And then the groups in northern Pakistan who are yet another group. And we're calling it all Taliban.
Nice and precise, no? Maybe if we actually realized they were a bunch of separate groups, we might have an inkling of a political approach that could reach out to some, isolate others, devise a strategy for integrating as many as possible into one or another forms of peaceful development? Pretty hard to do if we don't even know who the heck they are.
BILL MOYERS: How many of them?
JUAN COLE:Well, how many of them is impossible to know. But in Pakistan the estimates for fighters are small. 15 thousand. And the current military operation in the Swat Valley is pitting 15 thousand Pakistani troops against 4 thousand Taliban fighters.
That's what's being said. This is small. And the idea that these 4 thousand Taliban in Swat Valley, you know, can take over the capital of the country, or that they're going to spread into the other provinces, which are ethnic provinces, like the Punjab and Sindh, where they're very, very unpopular.
This is what we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year fighting against--an armed force of less than 20,000 men. We could pay each of them $1,000,000 and that would only come to $20 billion!
Talk about waste, fraud and abuse!
Cole continued;
We have a Gallup Poll now, 60 percent of the Punjabis, who are the majority group in Pakistan, say that it's very negative that there should be Taliban operating in Pakistan. And only ten percent say that it's a positive. So in Pakistan, as a whole, this is a small group. It's not a mainstream, big, mass movement.
On his own blog this Thursday, he reported:
A Gallup poll done in Pakistan in December, 2008, reveals that the presence of the Taliban in some areas of the country is viewed as a negative by nearly half of Pakistanis, with only 1 in 6 saying it is positive and another large bloc refusing to state an opinion.
Gallup Poll Results: Presence of Taliban in Parts of the Country Negative or Positive?
Punjab:
Negative: 60%
Sindh:
Negative: 44%
North-West Frontier Province:
Negative: 49%
Positive: 10%
Don't Know: 41%
Baluchistan:
Negative: 22%
Postive: 21%
Don't Know: 58%
Pakistan as a whole:
Negative: 47%
Positive: 14%
Don't Know: 39%
Could not afford food for their families in the past year
Pakistan: 30%
North-West Frontier Province: 33%
What's that last bit? From the report Cole links to in Dawn:
Relief agencies estimate that the number of Pakistanis fleeing the Swat valley and nearby districts could soon swell to as many as 1 million, further inflating the number who have been displaced since last August.
This mass exodus poses a humanitarian crisis in a country where many are already struggling to provide the basics: More than 3 in 10 Pakistanis told Gallup that there had been times when they could not afford food for their families in the last year and nearly 2 in 10 said they had been unable to buy adequate shelter. In NWFP, roughly a third of residents said they were unable to afford food or shelter at times.
So, once again, what's really needed is basic security--not the men-carrying-guns kind of security, but the food, water and shelter kind of security. You know: domestic development aid. The exact opposite of what our Pentagon-centric system is set up to deliver.
But it's not just passive idiocy on our part, as Cole goes on to explain. This is active US policy at work that's causing the massive displacement of up to a million people--they've just got to love us for that! (Aside from the fact that it's militarily foolish.)
Here's how it breaks down:
BILL MOYERS: But how do you explain this mass exodus of, as you say, maybe a million people on the move out of that northwest region where the fighting is going on?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Well, it's very clear that why that happened is because the Pakistan army asked, or wanted the people, the civilian population, to move out of there because it was- is being fought as a guerilla war. So the militants are embedding themselves into the civilian population, which is their strength.
And so this movement out of these northern regions, where the Taliban had control, is a tactical operation. And moving the people out of there, unfortunately, also, it seems, to be military tactic right now
JUAN COLE: The Pakistani military is a tank, you know, traditional, almost central European kind of military. It was formed to fight India and most of the tanks and the troops are down on the border between India and Pakistan. And they're not trained to do counterinsurgency or counterterrorism.
So their idea of putting down the Taliban is to invade the Swat Valley. And if you've got 15,000 troops with artillery, helicopter gunships, fighter jets, operating a military operation in a valley with a million people in it, is going to produce massive displacement.
They're not sending in SWAT teams against these 4 thousand fighters, which I think is what they should have been doing. So when the US caused this. They pressured Pakistan's army to launch a conventional military attack on this small group of guerillas. And is going to inconvenience, you know, probably half a million people in a very dire way. And is that really going to settle the Pashtuns down?
So, it's not just us, but our allies on the ground. No one is prepared to fight the war that is--which is first of all a war on want, only secondarily a war on diverse resistance groups we can't even distinguish between, and not at all a war which can be won with tanks, missiles and unmanned drones.
So no wonder the mighty Pakistan army can't put the Taliban down. But that's nowhere near saying that the Taliban could take over the country and get their hands on nuclear weapons.
I interrupted mid-thought, actually. Back to the interview:
SHAHAN MUFTI: I would say the Pakistani army feels strong pressure to show that they are performing. So whether they're using - whether they're being heavy-handed, whether they're using a lot of fireworks, to prove a point to the United States. And the government, as well as the army, do feel - who are recipients of large American aid, and all, but also clients of the American military - they feel, they do feel, I think, an obligation to perform well, at least to put up a show that they are performing, and that they're performing well.
BILL MOYERS: Are you two saying that the Taliban are not as great a threat to Pakistan and the United States as the United States has been claiming?
JUAN COLE: Well I have to be careful here. Because, on the one hand, I don't want to be interpreted as saying this is not a problem. I mean, you've got several thousand militants operating in the North-West Frontier Province. This is a problem. And it wasn't like that, you know, even ten years ago. The idea of Pakistani Taliban is a new idea. The Taliban were always an Afghan phenomenon. So it is a problem. And it needs to be dealt with. But what I'm saying is that let's just have a sense of proportion here.
Shocking little reminder, there, so let me repeat it:
This is a problem. And it wasn't like that, you know, even ten years ago. The idea of Pakistani Taliban is a new idea.
In short: This is a problem that's been created SINCE 9/11!
Yet one more example of Bush's failed "war on terror" strategy. And the only thing Obama really seems intent on changing so far is the branding of it!
Cole continues:
The North-West Frontier Province is 10 percent of the Pakistan population. That's where this stuff is happening. And most of it is actually happening not in the Province itself, but in the Federally Administrated Tribal Regions. Which are kind of like our Indian reservations. Only 3.5 million people live there. It's the size of, like, New Hampshire. Pakistan is a country as big as California, Oregon and Washington rolled up in one, with a population of 165 million. So to take this threat, which is a threat locally, to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, to parts of the North-West Frontier Province, and to magnify it and to say, "Whoa, the Pakistani government is six months from falling, the Taliban is going to get their hands on nuclear weapons." The kinds of things that are being said in Washington, are just fantastical and some kind of science fiction film. How would these guys, with the Kalashnikov machine guns, take over a country that has an army of 550 thousand? Which has tanks and artillery and fighter jets? How would they even know here the nuclear weapons are? In Pakistan, I just quoted you the Gallup Poll. People don't like Taliban, for the most part.
"some kind of science fiction film."
That's what Versailles is dealing with.
Reality? Not so much.
That's only the beginning of the interview. I urge everyone to go read the whole thing. The "political reality" in Washington is as far out of touch as it's ever been, not least because of the false impression that we've begun to change in some sort of fundamental way. |
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