The December issue of Harper’s contains a short story called ‘Lost in Uttar Pradesh,’ more exoticized claptrap about oddness in India. One could pick a much less prosaic state than U.P. for the title; this is sort of like Louis Leakey traipsing around the mystical badlands of Cleveland.
This week’s New Yorker includes a cover story on the Pakistan quake aftermath:
Musharraf seized power in a coup, six years ago, and at the time he described the Army as… the only body disciplined enough to fix the country’s ills… yet, when the earthquake hit, the Army appeared neither efficient nor consumed by any sense of urgency… ten days after the earthquake struck, Musharraf’s government signed a billion-dollar contract for Swedish military surveillance aircraft, a bewildering priority… “If you were a Westerner asked to provide humanitarian financial assistance to a country led by a military government obsessed with the regional ‘military balance,’ what would you think?”…“The villagers, when tensions run high, can’t even do free farming out on their terraces, because the Indians fire at them,” he said. “They and their animals are often wounded.” Half a mile up, a section of the gorge wall had collapsed. Small tombstones protruded at odd angles from a mound of dirt. A bloated corpse wrapped in a black shroud lay on top of the mound. Apparently, the person had been killed by a falling graveyard…
As we approached the Line of Control, Abbas lost his way. He made a U-turn in the gorge, swung right into another canyon, and then hurriedly made a second U-turn. A soldier assigned to spotter duty pointed down at a tricolor Indian flag flapping directly underneath the helicopter… It’s hard to imagine how the two militaries keep track of the line in any event. The border twists from side to side and up and down, as if tracing the fingers of a very thick hand. [Link]
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p>The pointlessness of the conflict, which serves only to keep politicians in power:
If the conflict is ever settled peacefully, the ceasefire line–which was named the Line of Control in 1972–will likely become an international border; as a practical matter, it already is. [Link]
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p>Terrorist groups in Pakistan were as successful in winning over the local population in the face of government inefficiency as the Tamil Tigers were in the aftermath of the tsunami:
The success of jihadi groups in providing earthquake relief have only strengthened their claims to legitimacy in Pakistan. [Link]
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p>Unlike every American newspaper, the magazine doesn’t uncritically repeat the Pakistani military’s ‘we provide only moral support to jihadis’ canard:
For the past fifteen years, the Pakistani Army has supported rebellion on India’s side of the Line of Control by aiding violent Islamic groups, some of them with ties to Al Qaeda… Under American pressure, President Musharraf formally banned Lashkar-e-Taiba in early 2002, but he allowed it to create a domestic charity under a new name, Jamaat ud-Dawa (the Preaching Society), but with the same leader… [Link]
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p>The post-quake milieu made for odd bedfellows:
Less than a mile from the main Jamaat ud-Dawa camp in the Azad Kashmir capital, the U.S. Army has erected a field hospital. American Humvees on break from chasing remnant Al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan were sharing Muzaffarabad’s streets with ambulances from the Al Rashid Trust, a Pakistani charity whose funds were blocked by the Bush Administration in 2001 because of accusations that it aided Al Qaeda. [Link]