Afghans in the Indian Film Industry

Here is an interesting article on an effort to trace the roots of the Khans in the Indian film industry to their ancestoral lands in present day Afghanistan. Read more here

What’s the deal with Pakistan?

Reactions to the Pakistani role in Osama’s residence near the heart of the country have varied from “what the heck?!?” to “so what?” and the jury is still out.

It’s true that Bin Laden was reportedly killed in an attack in the city of Abbottabad, only few kilometers from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad and only few hundred meters from a Military Academy in a somewhat large residence. What is questionable, however, is whether the Pakistani authorities knew anything about him, especially if he was there for several years, and according to most recent released videos, he was well connected with the world. What I want to suggest, albeit unfortunately, is that despite being the year 2011, we will NOT know the truth as we have yet to know the truth about many other significant events, simply because our world is getting ever more complicated and the first victim of this complexity complex is often the truth.

It is true, as some have counter argued that a large and barb-wired house, is not uncommon in that region. So that can’t be a good argument for why the Pakistani authorities should have known about his residence. Nor is the proximity to a military academy a good enough reason. But regardless of finding a “good enough,” it is simply highly unlikely for a country like Pakistan (with its “anti-terror” mandate and nuclear possession) to not know about this fact. Their not knowing would reveal, as a Pakistani civilian was quoted to have said, that "at best it's incompetence, at worst it's complicity." Doubts about their role were recently reflected by Obama’s saying that Bin Laden must have had some sort of support network there.

It is this “some sort of” part that I want to draw some attention to. Arguing whether Pakistani officials, the government, the ISI, the army or the people knew something or not about Bin Laden’s whereabouts poses the question as binary, and is thus misleading. It assumes unanimity and paints all actors within the country as one. The truth is that there are significant and deep rooted divides and cleavages within the country, even within each unit. But given that we watch the events from a distance, we do not see the underlying tensions and frictions within. Were all the Pakistanis unanimous in allying with the US during their invasion of Afghanistan? Obviously not. Are they unanimous in their reactions to the recent events? Far from it.

But at least on the surface, these events allow for some blame shifting and finger pointing, e.g. the ISI initially called their lack of knowledge “an embarrassment.” Others point to Pakistan’s “double game” and Hamid Karzai proudly said at a news conference “we have always said that terrorists must be targeted in their sanctuaries and in the place where they are fueled, not in Afghan villages where there is no terrorism."

In a recent article, Elizabeth Rubin discusses the Pakistani double game in more details. Yet many important questions have been left unaddressed. Is Pakistan truly able to outsmart the US as argued by many?!? If Pakistan does play a double game, which obviously hurts many people, especially civilians in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, who does this game really benefit? After all, it is true that Pakistan has lost about 30,000 civilians, 5,000 military personnel and suffered other financial losses (as echoed in a recent speech by Pakistani PM, Gilani). But it can’t hurt everyone! Other important questions to pose are, if this event had happened in a country other than Pakistan, what would have been the American reaction? What would have been the domestic reaction from that country? Would they have also responded with anger, seeing it as a violation of their sovereignty? Could they?

Another hero falls off the pedestal? Greg Mortenson

There are some serious allegations floating around against the guy who is considered by many as one of the models of how truly humanitarian assistance must be delivered in some of the toughest regions in the world. Greg Mortenson, the author of best-selling “Three Cups of Tea” and the founder of the Central Asian Institute (CAI, not to be confused with CIA), has often been on a pedestal by many, including recently some top ranking officials in the US army and those engaged in multi-billion dollar efforts in Afghanistan, as his charm made his way through the reading of his book by the spouses and family members of these officials. All of a sudden we are told that even he is not as “good” as we thought he was. Personally, I was as shocked, or even more, as I was when I heard the allegations against the Nobel Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank aka the “Bank for the Poor.” Not to mention another Nobel Prize winner, who except for his most recent victory in eliminating Osama, has lost his public support dramatically.

What on earth is going on? Why are all our role models turning out to be such disappointingly fake and undeserving of our respect?

At least in the case of Mortenson, I can’t help but see these allegations with suspicion, which might make me look bizarre at best and conspiratorial at worst. While agreeing in principle with Jon Krakauer – another mountaineer and author of best seller “Into Thin Air” among others – on the need for transparency, accountability and truth in writing whatever you claim to be true, I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that in addition to becoming increasingly an influential voice on how aid should be used, especially in volatile areas such as the remote villages in the depths of rural areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mortenson had also become an increasingly “critical” voice of how billions have been spent in this region and elsewhere.

Spicing up his stories aside, which I am not trying to defend or justify in any way, the allegations about his misuse of funds is a serious and important question that needs much further scrutiny and appropriate follow up – whatever that may look like. In doing so, what we need not lose sight of, which I am suggesting that we may end up doing, is that the same standard must also be applied to all those aid agencies involved around the world, whose annual budgets are several times the entire budget of Mortenson’s CAI in the last decade. SIGAR continues to report on billions of dollars being “unaccounted for” in the Afghanistan reconstruction efforts, yet not much is being done to follow up or raise public awareness or bring the perpetrators to justice or even stop the misuse of taxpayers hard earned dollars. This is my biggest worry, not the accuracy of Mortenson’s narrative in his book, or how much he spent on his “education and outreach” in the US. Some of the schools he built may not be actively used by the people, but he at least did build the schools, and at a fraction of the cost that schools are currently being built in Afghanistan.

I can go on and on, but the point is to make us look beyond the surface.

So is Osama's death the end of the story?

Well, it is easy to celebrate and say "justice is done" and if one were to complete this sentence, it would read "...to the 3000 dead on 9/11," but is it? And are these 3000 all that needed justice? I think the answer is emphatically NO for both questions.

Nothing you can do will bring the dead back to life, un-orphan the orphans, etc. Looking back at the last almost 10 years, would the 3000 innocent people who died on 9/11 wanted to see what has unfolded since then? Did all their families, friends and loved ones want justice to be done this way? Does the end justify the means? What else did we lose in the process? More than a thousand American lives, with several hundred wounded and traumatized for life. What about the other often forgotten side, the numbers of which far exceed all American lives lost both during the 9/11 and since then? Several thousand Afghans, some justified as "insurgents" others (albeit a small percentage) admitted as mistakes, have been wounded and killed.

So, no justice was not and cannot be done. The best one can probably say is a partial revenge was taken.

And it is certainly not the end of the story. Bin Laden may be dead, but his organization, his doctrine, and his ideology remains not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but around the world. Many more Osama's are born every day and we cannot simply assassinate them one by one. If anything this last decade teaches us all should be this. And that war hurts all and benefits only few. True that a lot has been achieved, but many challenge remains ahead, some of which include doing justice to the millions of voiceless Afghans, who have yet to see anything good in the last decade, preventing the rebirth and re-organization of other extremist groups and ideologies and addressing the root causes of terrorism rather than ameliorating the symptoms.