Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteComposed and posted as a response at modelmayhem.com, a photographer's hangout for the hip, the lovely, the lonely, the nearly famous. With half a million users (probably more), so I hear, the interest community, has have others, has gone far "off topic", especially with the Punch-and-Judy Show of off-hand, competitive, not-to-deep, American political commentary. For that, community social programmers have developed a virtual soap box, which discussion group in fact served as the springboard, the motivation, for creating "Oppenheim Arts & Letters" and getting away from all that other stuff.
Starting about 15 months ago, all of this has been a little bit like leaving the bar or lounge and stepping instantly back into the university classroom, full autumn, crisp and clear, and with its library and information resources at the core.
The following comprises a response to a complaint about the Bush Administration's diversion of troops to Iraq from needs in Afghanistan. You may read the precipitating post at http://www.modelmayhem.com/po.php?thread_id=343396.
In light of this past week's events in Pakistan's more remote border regions--more outrages--I've not argued with "economic development", jobs, health, food, and shelter proving universally good things, but rather have emphasized the necessity of loyal, reliable, inherently good distributed state security, which in such frontiers have been lacking for both staying power and strength.
American policy makers may emphasize lifestyle issues--e.g., economic development--when addressing militant Islam, presuming a stance in which they tell themselves, "They need us."
They don't.
What both Afghani and Pakistani villagers need first and foremost are defenses against militant tactics, which include assassinations, bombings, public displays of punishment and of the vanquished (on occasion, beheaded bodies), etc., all pursued less with the intent of forcing submission to Allah (the victims are already Muslim and often enough pious at that) than with promoting obedience to such a leadership's will and way.
In Iraq, which may serve as a test bed for both Afghanistan and Iraq, the distribution of state forces--not U.S. or coalition--throughout areas formerly plagued by violence, most of it between Muslims, may have dampened AQ and other enthusiasm for pursuing all aims with Kalashnikovs. We're going to find out about that pretty soon as troop withdrawals, however small or large, commence.
In the affected Pakistani areas--those currently ceded to now Taliban-aligned tribes (sometimes aligned peacefully, at others by force)--there have been minimum contingents of military and police presence. The Taliban, a movement, not a tribe or a people--it may take a second to get your head around that--is/are a way adopted or promoted through leaders who have found power in their alignment with the license and mentality provided by their interpretation of the Qur'an, and there is no one to stop them.
If you follow the news where it is really taking place--not where the suicide bombers was delivered, but where the components were assembled, you may come across leads like this one several times each week.
"MINGORA: Seven people, including a nephew of a Pakistan People's Party-Sherpao (PPP-S) leader, were killed and three more schools were torched by militants in restive Swat Valley on Tuesday." The International News, September 10, 2008: http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=17154
Civilians, which may be defined as men busy with other than militia, face difficult choices in these hot conflict zones: leave, and many, alone or with family, do exactly that, becoming Internally Displace Persons the day that do; lay low, go about business as usual, and try not to be bothered by either armed local or state forces; go along, get in, and bond with the force of the day--or fight it.
Autonomous resistance, especially on the part of traditional tribal chiefs, is not unknown. However,
Jan had reason to worry. Seven members of his family — his father, two brothers, two uncles and two cousins — have been murdered by militants who inhabit the area. Jan said he believed his father was killed by Uzbek and Tajik gunmen who fled to South Waziristan after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. His father had opposed them. Jan’s cousins, he said, were killed by men working for Baitullah Mehsud. Jan’s father was a malik, and thousands of Waziri tribesmen came to his funeral: “the largest funeral in the history of Waziristan,” Jan said.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07pakistan-t.html?pagewanted=7&_r=1&adxnnlx=1221135441-7NAOfvD8fRqGBM9fH6O0ZA (Filkens, Dexter. "Right at the Edge." The New York Times Magazine, September 5, 2008).
Dexter Filkins' article in the Times Magazine is a great one, one of the most comprehensive I've seen in short pieces, but just sticking to what happens in these remotely governed areas, including, according to Filkins' piece, the witnessing of Arabs riding Arabian horses out on the range ("“They ride horses, Arabian horses; we don’t have horses like this in Waziristan,” Jan said. “The people from the town take food to the Arabs’ horses in the mountains. They have seen the horses. They have seen the Arabs. These horses eat better than the common people in the town," Filkins quotes a source), there is little sufficient muscled resistance to the spread, by force, of the Taliban way.
The "Jan" quoted above is a pseudonym for one of Filkins' sources, by the way, the cover a necessity in the neighborhood.
I'll stop here, but after all the verbiage about divine texts, clashes of civilizations, and competing forms of government, most of the warfare in Asia, but elsewhere too in the Middle East and in Africa (Morocco, Somalia), drives back to a very few clerics and warriors whose influence has been spread by language, where speech is open or under their control, and by violence, where that works too as it may be met with little resistance or alternative.
Given simple security against crime--assassination of rivals and their officers; detonation among innocents--a more accurate picture of Islam free of "Kalashnikov Shar'ia" may emerge.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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