Ahmed Rashid: Descent into Chaos

A good overview of Pakistan and Afghan history and American involvement - and a very bleak assessment of where they're headed. The gist of the book is that both Afghanistan and Pakistan are hovering somewhere on the point of no return, descending into chaos and bringing the whole region down with them. It's very well researched, and the author really knows what he's talking about - there is a lot more in the book -

It's a brilliant, encyclopedic summary of the current situation in Pakistan. The book, just like his last book, is extremely timely, as region after region in Pakistan falls to the Taliban, and the government pulls back further and further.

From bad to worse

Back in the 60's, no onein Pakistan really thought Pakistan would split into two.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and once again a chunk of Pakistan has left the fold. Back in the days, it used to take a formal declaration of independence and a lot of deaths - in today's modern world it's pretty much the same, except the declarations are on TV and the internet, and the deaths by decapitation and stoning.

The NWFP was never really part of Pakistan from the beginning, and despite official denials all around, for all practical purposes it's definitely no longer part of Pakistan. It was never governed by Pakistani law anyways, and scraped by on age-old custom, bullets and tribal jirgas. Men were men, sheep were sheep and women and the government stayed far away, out of sight, and if they ever ventured to do anything were slapped back in to submission double quick.

Micheal Pollan: In defense of Food

Michael Pollan visits Google's Mountain View, CA, headquarters to discuss his book, "In Defense of Food."

Signs of a fast crumbling government

No more democracy. When the Prime Minister keeps referring to an unelected emperor (Zardari) for every single decision of note, there is no democracy, or government for that matter.

The current elected govt ran the whole campaign on a single theme - that of restoring the judiciary, and are now trying to convince the country that that promise wasn't actually promise, it was more of an intention, and even though they won't actually follow through, the intention will remain!

The whole world is watching on in horror, as there is no one at the rickety bus which is Pakistan. The NYTimes very politely puts it: Leadership Void Seen in Pakistan - a few excerpts from the article are below:

Pakistan is in a leaderless drift four months after elections, according to Western diplomats and military officials, Pakistani politicians and Afghan officials who are increasingly worried that no one is really in charge.

The problem is that local politicians don't read, so they still don't know what is going on. Not they they ever know, but these days it's really gotten ridiculous.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Don't read the reviews. Just read the book. It's that good.

A damn good book, as well as a good history of Zia. Sure it's fiction, but considering how much of Pakistani history is fictionalized, this is as close as you can get. How did Zia die? Put down all those dusty histories and read this to find out!

Highly recommended. Best read after Charlie Wilson's War, which fills on some of the back story on all the American/Afghan intrigues hinted on in the book.

It's not often a author gets added to my "Must read all his books" list - looking forward to his next one!

book reviews from elsewhere

• Amazon page on the book
• NYTimes Book Review

Headline of the week: I'm not ready to be useless vegetable - Musharraf

The first stage is always denial.

President says he will not dissolve Parliament, is not 'an unbalanced person'

It's always good to know that the President is not an unbalanced person, let alone a useless vegetable. #

The worrying part is that it's not just the president who's a useless vegetable, but the entire parliament, the prime minister especially.

While the president goes about on tv declaring his lack of vegetables, the prime minister has come out of the closet and shamelessly parades his vegetable state to anyone who cares - all two of them.

Far up, above all the elected crud hanging around in parliament, Zardari is doing something. The President and the Prime Minister can't even begin to guess what, let alone this weblog.

Observations on a visit to a govt office in Karachi

Truth is stranger than fiction - who could have imagined that a country eats it's young and once their souls and minds are gone it spits out the dried hollowed out husks into government bureaucracies around Pakistan.

You walk inside in the valley of the shadow of askew shelves groaning with files, all askew, stuttering fans stirring up yellowing pages under the light of flickering tube lights. People sit around listless, waiting for the next cup of tea and sms message, disturbed now and than by a visitor who mistakenly wanders in trying to get some work done, and sometimes by a peon shuffling around bulging files, in a endless cycle from desk to desk, sometimes only making the journey to the person sharing the same desk, other times all the way outside the room into an adjoining office.

Karachi's beaches: terminally ill, soon to perish

The Economist on tourism in developing countries:

Emerging economies are suspicious about the developed world telling them to act responsibly. Why shouldn't they exploit their natural resources? A pristine hard-to-reach beach with a small exclusive hotel may be just what rich Westerners want; local fishermen would prefer new schools for their children. But with tourism, it is not so clear that rapid development really is in the locals' economic interest. If their government trashes their natural habitat, it is like an investment manager who pays you big dividends out of your capital. The money is good for a while, but you lose in the long term.

While Karachi has no tourists per se, this article gets straight to the heart of Karachi's endless cycles of self destruction. The entire development of Karachi's coastline is straight out of Jared Diamond's book Collapse. Hoteliers from around the world have rushed in to take advantage of the city govt. selling away the coastline for a pittance, and now we find ourselves in the enviable position of living in a city by the sea with not a single public beach.

There are no more beaches left in Karachi - there are a few pathetic remnants of once beautiful beaches - the rest have all been taken over by the military or sold off to private developers. Needless to say, they're all walled off - I already wrote about it earlier, but each visit to what's left of Karachi's coastline leaves me ever more depressed.

Out with a dictator, in with an emperor

Pakistan has laughably simple politics. While there is a lot of skulduggery going on in the background, the governing rule is that the flavor of the day, whether an army dictator or elected emperor, is going to do whatever it takes to maintain his iron clad grip on the peacock throne.

In a democracy, you need a functioning independent judicial system. A functioning judiciary will take action to right wrongs as per the law, and that's where the problem lies in Pakistan. Whether elected or brought up through the army ranks, the leader of the country is always on the wrong side of the law, and thus a functioning judiciary is impossible.

The judiciary in Pakistan was hanged by Musharraf back in March 2007, and Zardari is exhuming the corpse and sending it before a firing squad to ensure it doesn't come back to haunt him. In a slight change from the Moguls of old, instead of only killing their entire family to ensure there is no challenger to the throne, these days all and sundry are targeted.

Zardari has made numerous promises over the last year to restore the judges, and recently he was asked on TV why he was not honoring his word to do so. His famous reply: "That was a political promise. It has nothing to do with reality".

Time will tell how naked the emperor really is, in this case just a measly 4 days till May 12th, when yet another deadline is due to restore the judges illegally deposed by the old dictator.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan

A wonderfully insightful book, strolls though history, academia, psychology, cognitive science, probability theory, philosophy, statistics and more. The back of the book claims that the book "will change the way you look at the world", and it does.

A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.

Taleb argues that events and life itself are far more random than we perceive them to be - the human brain just isn't able to cope up with the complexities of the modern world, most of which have sprung up in the last couple of hundred years, while our brains still haven't evolved much further than the hunter-gatherer stage. This is the most interesting part of the book, where Taleb discusses various studies on how the human brain processes and perceives information, probability and data. We fit explanations to events post-facto - but the world is not so easily squeezable into the theories we built to describe the past and than extrapolate to predict the future.

Our brains are wired in a such a way that we construct linear narratives, or theories about events, in an attempt to simplify and understand - but real life is not linear, and these stories about how events happen are too simplified to be of much use when the next Black Swan comes about.

Reading in Karachi

Adil Najam wonders if Pakistani's read? and links to a fascinating article in the newspaper on the number of libraries in Pakistan.

Lahore, an ancient city of culture, now has more polo grounds than libraries. Lahore even has more offices for the chief minister (four in all) than libraries. Of course, the Chief Minister needs office space more than our children need libraries.

He hasn't visited Karachi, where far as I know there are no public libraries at all. There is this interesting library run by the Army where you need to be a millionaire in order to join - they require you to first buy a plot of land in a army run housing scheme before borrowing books!

Lack of cities aside, Karachi is a tough city to read books. The average new book price is a 1000Rs, and while used books are much cheaper the selection is really limited. Ordering from Amazon is a hit and miss process - if you order by DHL or UPS the books always arrive, but the shipping costs are so high that it's not worth while, and sometimes they charge duties on books. If you order by regular post, than the books get stolen sometimes, and it takes anywhere from 1 month to a year for the carton to arrive. The locally published books are also very expensive, and there just isn't enough variety.

Parliament Watch - What do MNA's and Senators do?

My MNA has a name, but I have no idea what she stands for, what she does, and how is it that she came to be standing for elections. Now, I can find out what his/her name is, but beyond that there is absolutely no information at all. Come election time, just a month or two before voting takes place candidates suddenly appear from nowhere running for election, and provide zero information about themselves in their entire campaign. What did the MNA accomplish in his/her last stint in office? What about their tax returns, their life, their positions on important issues (besides the rhetoric)?

Older Entries

• Pakistan, Egalitarian - Posted 01 Apr 08 in Pakistan
• A tale of two Chief Justices - Posted 30 Mar 08 in Pakistan
• Tim Harford: The Logic of Life - Posted 25 Mar 08 in Books
• Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons - Posted 13 Mar 08 in America, Books, Pakistan
• Of Judges and Hope - Posted 09 Mar 08 in Pakistan
• Everyone was right, the elections were rigged - Posted 23 Feb 08 in Pakistan
• The King's party loses, we were all wrong about the rigging - Posted 19 Feb 08 in Pakistan
• My voting experience in the 2008 elections - Posted 18 Feb 08 in Pakistan
• The Undercover Economist - Posted 12 Feb 08 in Books, Pakistan
• Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. - Posted 11 Feb 08 in Books, Misc

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