Arundhati Roy: 'The Press Decides Which Revolutions To Report'

The celebrated dissenter on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, mass uprisings in the Arab world, the Anna Hazare movement, her old comrades-in arm like Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, Maoism, writing and much else.

Arundhati Roy

Rajesh Joshi: The 10th anniversary of September the 11th attacks on the US is upon us. What do you think has changed in the world, or hasn’t changed, in these years?

Arundhati Roy: Plenty has changed. The numbers of wars that are being fought has been expanded and the rhetoric that allows those wars —that are essentially a battle for resources —is now disguised in the rhetoric of the war on terror, and has become more acceptable in some ways and yet more transparent in other ways.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing that has happened is that increasingly we are seeing that these wars can’t be won. They can be initiated. But they can’t be won. Like the war in Vietnam was not won. The war in Iraq has not been won. The war in Afghanistan has not been won. The war on Libya will not be won. There is this initial pattern where you claim victory and then these occupation forces get mired in a kind of slow war of attrition. That’s also partially responsible for the global economy slowly coming apart.

The other difficulty is that the more the weapons of conventional warfare become nuclear —and all this kind of air bombing and so on —the more it becomes clear to people who are fighting occupations that you can’t win a conventional war. So, ironically the accumulation of conventional weaponry is leading to different kinds of terrorism and suicide bombings and a sort of desperate resort to extremely violent resistances. Violent, ideologically as well, because you have to really motivate people to want to go and blow themselves up. So, [it's a ] very, very dangerous time.

You have been very critical of the war on terror, especially the US policy. Would you have preferred a Saddam Hussain or a Taliban regime in Afghanistan?

Well, it does look as if the Taliban regime is going to return in Afghanistan in some form or shape. And

On Terrorism: Articles by the legendary Eqbal Ahmed

A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder

October 12, 1998 

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was described 

as "terrorist." Then new things happened. By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, 

and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the 

Western world. 

At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started 

to be described, by 1944-45, as "freedom fighters." At least two Israeli Prime 

Ministers, including Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in the books 

and posters with their pictures, saying "Terrorists, Reward This Much." The 

highest reward I have noted so far was 100,000 British pounds on the head of 

Menachem Begin, the terrorist. 

Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied 

the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described 

repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, William Safire of the New 

York Times, as the "Chief of Terrorism." That's Yasir Arafat. Now, on September 

29, 1998, I was rather amused to notice a picture of Yasir Arafat to the right 

of President Bill Clinton. To his left is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 

Netanyahu. Clinton is looking towards Arafat and Arafat is looking literally 

like a meek mouse. Just a few years earlier he used to appear with this very 

menacing look around him, with a gun appearing menacing from his belt. You 

remember those pictures, and you remember the next one.

A Second Chance by Cyril Almeida: Very sharp and important op

A Second Chance

SOMETIMES big decisions turn on simple questions. In the aftermath of 9/11, the question was a simple one: did we get it? Did our generals get that 9/11 was an epochal, seismic shift, that the old way of doing business had to be chucked out, replaced by a new pragmatism to fit new realities?
The generals didn’t get it. They thought 9/11 was a blip, one that required temporary adjustments and deflections, for which they would be rewarded handsomely, before eventually going back to business as usual.
No thought was given to long-term changes or course corrections, which made sense for a state which rarely has anything by way of strategy, statecraft here being limited to haphazardly responding to crises.
Ten years on, Pakistan is struggling mightily with the consequences of misreading 9/11 and what it meant for this country and the security choices before it.
Which is why debating the minutiae of the present round of accusations and recriminations between Pakistan and the US matters little. Has the CIA been handed a bunch of Pakistani visas as a result of an explicit understanding that no unilateral American operations will take place on Pakistani soil or was it more of a mumbled half-promise accompanied by severe arm-twisting?
Has Ghulam Nabi Fai been outed as a warning that if Pakistan continues to hamper American efforts to get what it wants most — eliminating terrorists who may threaten the US homeland

Kamran Shafi writes about the Media and its close-bind agendas

An end to media-driven agendas?

http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/19/an-end-to-media-driven-agendas.html

IT is good to hear that the Pakistan-American relationship is on the mend as a spinoff of the recent visit to Washington D.C. of the ISI chief.
It is good to see that so-called ghairat, or at least the foolish version of ghairat peddled by our hard-right press, did not stand in the way of Gen Shuja Pasha’s visit to see CIA officials to urgently straighten out the kinks that had surfaced in this vital relationship as a result, first of the Raymond Davis case, and then Osama bin Laden’s killing by US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad
Cantonment.
Astonishingly, even the Mehran naval airbase attack was twisted out of shape and put on the shoulders of the Americans by the Ghairat Brigades by letting out rumours and innuendo on the Internet by the bright young things, about five or six unidentified Americans being seen in Karachi on the eve of the attack and then disappearing the next day and other such tripe when it was clear, even before Saleem Shahzad’s book came out, that it was an inside job made that much easier because of lax naval security standards.
It is important to recall that these kinks appeared as a direct consequence of the above-mentioned section of the extreme right-wing jingoistic media, print and electronic, running a shrill and raucous campaign which even our great Rommels and Guderians (who at the drop of a tin-hat get

Pakistan's patchy fight against Islamist violence sows confusion: by Myra MacDonald in Reuters

By Myra MacDonald

MINGORA, Pakistan | Fri Jul 8, 2011 6:50am EDT; Reuters
(Reuters) - At the rehabilitation center for former militants in Pakistan's Swat valley, the psychiatrist speaks for the young man sitting opposite him in silence. "It was terrible. He was unable to escape. The fear is so strong. Still the fear is so strong."

(A man takes a nap next to a poster of Osama bin Laden at the Chauburji monument in Lahore May 13, 2011. The message written on the posters read: "The prayer absentia for martyr of Islamic nation is a duty and a debt"/Mani Rana)

Hundreds of miles away in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, a retired army officer recalls another young man who attacked him while he prayed - his "absolutely expressionless face" as he crouched down robot-like to reload his gun.

Both youths had been sucked into an increasingly fierce campaign of gun and bomb attacks by Islamist militants on military and civilian targets across Pakistan.

But there the similarity stops.

One is now being "de-radicalized" in the rehabilitation center in Swat, the northern region which only two years ago was overrun by the Pakistani Taliban and has since been cleared after a massive military operation.

He will be taught that Islam does not permit violence against the state and that

Look back in sorrow - By Ardeshir Cowasjee

By Ardeshir Cowasjee

IN times of dire turmoil, when things on all fronts seem hopeless and one does not know what might happen in the coming minutes, when the system just does not work because those put in place to work it are, to put it mildly, unfit — the leadership consisting of alleged criminals, hoodlums, substandard minds, liars and deceivers — some of us look back into time when violence was not the theme of the day.

This year has been a beast, it opened with a bang, literally and January has been followed by incidents awful and dispiriting, the month of May being the high point in what is very much Pakistan’s war against itself.

What never ceases to amaze is that those guilty for the happenings and disgrace, even humiliation — particularly of the not-so-merry month of May — are all in place, where they were, having evidenced not an iota of shame. The shameless flourish, and they are legion.

Mid-year blues were with us last month when coincidentally a number of columnists came out to remind us what this sad country once was, and how life was lived in consonance with the rest of the democratic free world, of how there was hope, of how there was enjoyment, of how life for the particular few held happiness.

Down the decades we have all failed to even begin to learn from history that when religiosity — the stressed false selective practice of religion — overtakes a state, imposed upon it by those who use the easiest of artifacts, their own brand of religion, for reasons of expediency or to prop up a dicey or failing regime, things fall

US and Pakistan: The rocky AmPak affair- By Tariq Ali in Guardian

By: Tariq Ali
Published in Guardian UK, July 15
While US threats to hold back aid mean little, its hunting on Pakistani soil is heightening tensions

Nato fuel tankers in Pindi Gheb, 122km east of Islamabad, which were set alight by unidentified gunmen in May 2011. 

Ever since the US occupation of Afghanistan began almost 10 years ago two fictions, common in nuclear families, have dominated the discussion on American-Pakistan relations. The first is that neither side is fully aware of what the other is doing; the second is that a total breakdown of the relationship is imminent.

As long as the Pentagon bankrolls the Pakistan army to fight its wars and Nato troops remain in Afghanistan there will be quarrels, charges of infidelity, a reduction in the household allowance, perhaps a separation – but a divorce? Never. The cash-arms nexus is crucial to this most recent phase of the AmPak relationship. In return, as WikiLeaks revealed, Washington defines the rules of the marriage. It drones the country, it violates its sovereignty, its agents kill citizens on public highways. International law is arbitrary and Pakistan's latest response suitably mild:

A Wearily Familiar Bag of Tricks: By Cyril Almeida in Dawn News

ONE set of rules for themselves. Another set for the people they rule over, or who dare cross them. The army has been busy rounding up the OBL support network.


But not the network which helped the world’s most wanted terrorist hide a stone’s throw from where the army chief boasted his forces had broken the backbone of the terrorists.

No, the army has gone after the support network that helped capture and eliminate the world’s most wanted terrorist. You couldn’t make this stuff up — unless you knew what makes the army tick in the first place.

The army high command has two constituencies: the public at large and the military rank and file. With those two constituencies won over, and with their rear and flanks thus covered, the army high command is able to do what’s necessary to retain its internal predominance.

Since May, however, those two constituencies — so key to the army high command’s image of itself and what it’s able to get away with at home and outside — have been up in arms.

Perhaps most critically, the army rank and file (the ones at the top have more to lose and so are less inclined to criticise openly) has expressed deep unhappiness with the policies of their institution, increasingly exposed by events as duplicitous.Which leaves Gen K and his diminishing band of supporters in desperate need of something to stop the haemorrhaging of support accumulated through a combination of serendipity and shrewdness since the end of the Musharraf era.

No brilliant thinkers or strategists among them, they have turned to the obvious: pander to the populist tripe they have helped perpetuate and which has become an article of faith for people in uniform — that the US ultimately seeks to harm Pakistan and we must wriggle away from its deadly embrace.

Kicking out the Raymond Davis clones, arresting anyone remotely western-looking on an expired visa, detaining the people who helped piece together the goings-on in the OBL compound — all is meant to try and send a message that the army knows who the enemy is and is willing to take them on.

There is also signalling at another level. The infamous corps commanders’ statement was more carefully crafted than first recognised. “It needs to be clarified that Army had never accepted any training assistance from the US except for training on the newly inducted weapons and some training assistance for the Frontier Corps only. Even that has ceased now.”

See what that does, bold typeface and all? It says, the army is a self-sufficient fighting machine and doesn’t need Americans to teach it how to fight. In the macho world of soldiering, nothing is worse than having to rely on others to defend oneself.

In fact, the entire statement can be read as a point-by-point rebuttal to and reassurance on issues raised during Kayani’s town hall-style meetings with his troops. Faced with a choice — do you put some daylight between the US and the army to appease the rank and file or do you locate the relationship with the US in a necessary and pivotal fight against terrorism and extremism? — the army high command appears to have decided to appease its core constituency, the rank and file.

The path chosen shouldn’t come as a surprise. While the ability for this institution to self-reflect or course correct is non-existent, the survival instinct is well-entrenched. A disgruntled rank and file is never a recipe for survival.

The trouble is, attempting to win back the affections of the rank and file and the admiration of the public at large in this way means pushing the US further away — but that comes at a great cost and in any case, the US has developed a few tricks of its own to hit back.

Since May 2, the media has been used with great success by American officials to keep the squeeze on the army and prevent it from wriggling away.

After the OBL raid, the army was forced to keep changing its account of the American operation almost on the hour. What was initially spun as a ‘joint operation’ eventually became a humiliating admission of failure to detect the US intrusion into Pakistani airspace. Then, when Hillary Clinton presented a list of demands to the generals, American officials made sure those demands were leaked to the media one by one, forcing the generals here to deny yet more secret deals were in the works.

Soon, the North Waziristan bomb factories made their way into the news, ostensibly once again exposing the army’s perfidy and earning it a fresh round of criticism from the US. Now, we are told the local CIA spy network which helped capture OBL is in the army’s bad books — embarrassing the army by making it look petty and vindictive, or worse.

Weak, stupid, vulnerable, secretive, duplicitous — with each successive media leak, the US is chipping away at the army’s self-belief, eroding the space for it to convincingly vilify the US while further vilifying the army in the minds of many who already regarded it with suspicion.

(Of course, this being Pakistan, where things are never simple, the Americans may be being too clever by half. The campaign of embarrassing media leaks may actually be making it more difficult for the army high command to do anything but embrace anti-Americanism further, rendering the anyway likely into the certain.)

All the while, the public at large — the army’s second core constituency and internal line of defence — has been looking on in bewilderment, unsure of what it all means but pretty sure they have been lied to at all times.

What comes next? Unhappily, more of the same for now, it seems.

But at least this army high command won’t be able to argue, after it, the deluge. The deluge is already here.

The writer is a member of staff.

cyril.a@gmail.com