There's only one bad thing about wikileaks that I can think of, and it's well exhibited here. In this top-of-the-wreck list to you diary. We as a community have portrayed ourselves as the worst kind of what Edward Said called orientalists, or cultural reductionists if you will, because this popular diary completely ignores the brutal culture of oppression represened by the Pakistani judicial 'system," apparently in the name of scoring a quick political prize. Sure, it's not as funny if you bring up reality. But this issue is quite serious and deserves some serious attention. IN particular, I'm quite concerned this could be just the beginning.
This is of particular concern to all of us, not just because it portrays us as being insensitive to the real suffering of millions upon millions of (especially female or homosexual) Pakistanis. It's more than that because the diary is basically just a recycling of an article from The Nation, one of Pakistan's most respected news outlets. So this is a media problem as well as a lefty blogger problem.
I should also add, I'm a grad student of foreign affairs, like the ones at Georgetown and Columbia getting ominous warnings about the wikileaks.
Let me state outright what my meta concern is about wikileaks, before explaining how it applies to this case, hopefully setting the record straight in the process. I think that the problem with wikileaks is that its uncontrolled outflow is going to cause uninformed civic engagement about places that our white asses have never been to, even in wikipedia form. I can assure you that the phenomenon is rampant in our exhibit diary on Pakistan. What this means is that places like Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and ultimately the U.S. will all in some way benefit at the expense of their publics through a sort of nationalist fervor. In America we see this already happening in today's editorials, most notably the Wall Street Journal. This New York Times article has a pretty decent roundup of the flavor of the debate. Here's a chunk of it, quoted from the WSJ:
That still leaves the Lincoln question of how to stop the likes of Mr. Assange? If he were exposing Chinese or Russian secrets, he would already have died at the hands of some unknown assailant. As a foreigner (Australian citizen) engaged in hostile acts against the U.S., Mr. Assange is certainly not protected from U.S. reprisal under the laws of war. Perhaps Lincoln would have considered him an "enemy combatant."
In his Saturday letter urging Mr. Assange to cease and desist, State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh accused the WikiLeaker of breaking U.S. law without mentioning a particular statute. Perhaps Mr. Koh meant the 1917 Espionage Act, a vague statute which has rarely been used to punish leakers, and never against a publisher. As recently as 2009, the government dropped an Espionage Act prosecution against two lobbyists for AIPAC, the American-Israel lobby, after a rebuke by a federal appeals court. One alternative would be for Congress and the Administration to collaborate on writing a new statute aimed more precisely at provocateurs like Mr. Assange. At a minimum, the Administration should throw the book at those who do the leaking, including the option of the death penalty.
So here is American nationalism at its very worst. On the one hand, the editors are proudly attempting to point out that we are living in a new age of freedom of speech long past the age of the espionage act, while on the other they say that we should legislate ourselves back to the early 20th century in terms of first amendment rights, all while coyly, implicitly attacking Obama (the "other," their secret Muslim patsy for all our working class crimes).
Would that this were as far as things should go, as I thought was the case when I started my morning; we would still have plenty of cause for alarm. But what seems to be happening is much worse. In the aforementioned rec-listed diary, there is a weird new kind of orientalism brewing. I should stop and explain the term, although I feel it's fairly well known around these parts. Said was a professor at Columbia, and a staunch defender of one big nationalism, i.e. the attempt to look deep into our own biases for ways that we are structurally bound by our culture to be either imperialist or victimized. He believed in freedom, and he was a utopian, but he spent his tireless years of professorship as a pragmatist, exhaustively critiquing every aspect of cultural studies, and helping us forge ahead toward a brave new world of equality and justice.
The term orientalist is a metaphor for what we are doing when we simultaneously romanticize and victimize an eastern culture that we in the west don't understand. Said wanted to ignore the racists for a while and pay attention to the do-gooders. And as time marches on, we do gooders continue to try to do more good, thanks in large part to him and his legacy. How does this apply to the world post-wikileaks?
The information going out in those cables is completely free of journalistic context. The same is true of this Nation article that the aforementioned diary recycles. While surely true, it is completely misleading to the unfamiliar, and thus, as the diary shows, potentially dangerous:
The court on it remarked may God shower His mercy on such a system which is susceptible to instability through a communication. The judge said we need to face the realities eye to eye. "The secret information may cause trouble for some personalities in Pakistan but it will be good for growth of the nation in the long run.
Sounds good right? Who could argue there? Well let's say I were to argue, would you instantly jump down my throat? Or would you, knowing that I am specializing in the Middle East and South Asia at one of the nation's primary schools for diplomats, actually care to hear what I have to say?
The answer frightens me; I don't want to have to go around announcing to people that I actually read countless books on just this subject, and that the cables can only possibly give a tiny sensitive glimmer of the multi-faceted problem we're facing over there.
In the comments I will try to back my case up. I don't have much time ans I don't want to say anything that could endanger my job in a public diary as such. A brief word about Pakistan's judiciary: they are not better than the United States,' contrary to what this Nation article would have many unsuspecting readers believe. According to Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, Pakistan is among the forty most corruptly perceived public sectors (e.g. states) in the World, trailing states such as Sierra Leone, the Philippines, Nigeria and Belarus, and sandwiched right between Mauritania and Cameroon.
The data collection and analysis used to develop these scores is well respected around the world, and the human rights reports on the ground are atrocious as would be expected from such a ranking in a 2010 report.Here's what Amnesty International has to say about Pakistan in 2010:
Amnesty International has long been concerned about the persistent pattern human rights violations occurring in Pakistan. Arbitrary detention, torture, deaths in custody, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial execution are rampant. The government of Pakistan has failed to protect individuals – particularly women, religious minorities and children – from violence and other human rights abuses committed in the home, in the community, and while in legal custody. It has failed to ensure legal redress after violations have occurred. In addition, Pakistan continues to impose the death penalty on persons convicted of crimes.
Since 9-11, individuals suspected of having links with "terrorist" organizations have been arbitrarily detained, denied access to lawyers, and turned over to U.S. custody or to the custody of their home country in violation of local and international law.
Recent military operations in North West Frontier Province, the Swat Valley and Waziristan, have resulted in the death and injury of civilians and the displacement of over two million people.
Armed groups, including Pakistani Taleban have committed serious human rights abuses, including direct attacks on civilians, abduction, and hostage-taking, torture, and killings. Women and girls are frequent targets of abuse.
And as this commentator made sickeningly clear "Gay Pakistanis face the death penalty," along with girls and boy getting routinely raped, stoned to death for such despicable acts as associating with a man outside of marriage, locked away to be forgotten about in secret prisons, etc. This is my version of the REAL victims of Pakistan. But I'm sorry, the public sector state apparatus doesn't fall under my category. Call ME an orientalist. But I try.
Now, some would argue that I myself am orientalizing an eastern Muslim culture, in the old imperial form of the word, as when, in colonial times, Brittish lords used to go and learn unearthly amounts about the tribes in Waziristan, only to insinuate themselves as district administrator and impose uniform English law in order to save the wretched savages from themselves. That, at least, is the way I was greeted for pointing out that it is insensitive to brave women and men in Pakistan fighting for the rule of law to say their judicial system is better than ours, or to dare suggest that such a corrupt government is capable of using these wikileaks as a PR stunt.
But that is exactly what I believe they are doing, through their Military Intelligence institution, the Interservices Intelligence Agency (ISI), which has since the beginning ruled Pakistan with an iron fist. Let's start from the beginning. In 1947, According the renowned jounalist to Steve Coll:
In 1947, the British government, bankrupted by the Second World War, hastily completed a plan to divide the subcontinent into the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan. The status of a few territories proved difficult to adjudicate. One was the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, ruled by a Hindu maharaja and largely inhabited by poor Muslim peasants. Under Britain’s demographic formula, territories with Muslim majorities were supposed to go to Pakistan, but the maharaja signed an accession agreement to join India. A year later, Pakistan tried to wrest away the territory by sending in a tribal guerrilla force, a gambit that ended in a military stalemate. In a sense, the war of guerrilla infiltration that Pakistan initiated in 1948 has never ended....
...In 1972, after their third formal war, India and Pakistan established the Line of Control and deployed artillery and infantry along its length... For almost two decades, a relative calm prevailed, but in late 1989--inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall-- Kashmiris on the Indian side, who were fed up with rigged elections and job discrimination, staged a mass revolt. The I.S.I., which had used Islamist militias during the anti-Soviet campaigns in Afghanistan, reacted opportunistically, by arming those Islamist factions of the rebellion which sought to join Kashmir to Pakistan....
...Initially, when Kashmiri Muslim boys from villages such as Chahal sneaked across the Line of Control for weapons and training, I.S.I. officers encouraged them to join a local Islamist guerrilla group known as the Hezbul- Mujahideen, which was affiliated with the international networks of the Muslim Brotherhood. During the late nineties, however, Pakistan shifted much of its support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, which adhered to the Salafi strain of Islamist thought prevalent in Saudi Arabia, and later to a jihadi group called Jaish-e- Mohammed, or the Army of Mohammed. The membership of these secondwave groups came not from Kashmir itself but from the Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, where the suffering of fellow-Muslims in Kashmir is routinely exploited by religious and nationalistic political parties.
The Lashkar--Taiba, by the way, are the group Pakistan sponsored to carry out attacks in Mumbai, as was revealed in Bob Woodward's latest book, Obama's Wars.
We can pretty much stop here, but I encourage anyone who isn't aware to read the whole piece from Steve Coll, or if you are really interested, read Ghost Wars, a book about the CIA's secret wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan going back scores of decades.
The interesting thing about the ISI is that they are not even religious ideologues. They are ruthless realists who use ethnic nationalism to achieve their political aims. The problem with Pakistan's nationalism is that it is inflamed by electoral politics, geostrategic significance, and extreme poverty. A sad state it would be to be a freedom fighter for democracy in Pakistan today. I know. That's my dream.
So I take this wikileaks stuff very seriously. I am very much in favor of the transparency aaspect of it, but I am also aware of the irrational way that sensitive information about world leaders can cause societies to act, societies that have been systematically misinformed by their own governments.
What I think is good and fair about the leaks is that they reveal all the governments foibles, not just any one in particular. My fear is that this gives the worst actors an easy pass to make political hay out of this in their own countries, passing laws preserving the right to view the documents as if that makes them democratic, when really they now they just have the least to lose. Another bad actor, Israel, is apparently trying to use the same basic strategy, according to the latest Blog post from James Zogby on Huffingtonpost:
From the day the first batch of WikiLeaks appeared in the international press, the Israelis were crowing "this is good for us". Seizing on documents demonstrating that some Arab leaders bear ill-will toward Iran, the Israeli spin machine went into action. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that "Our region has been hostage to a narrative that is the result of 60 years of propaganda, which paints Israel as the greatest threat", claiming that Iran had, in fact, eclipsed the Palestinian issue as the number one concern of the Arab World...
My first reaction was "how silly, yet predictable". My second was "how dangerous".
Zogby essentially thinks it's wrong for states to build arguments on these low-level classified documents. I say it's even more dangerous for us as civic society to start forming narratives and opinions based exclusively on them, thinking that they are something more than they are, and that we can suddenly see into the crystal ball of world politics just by observing how each state reacts to them. Kossaks, we're a politically savvy bunch. But the ISI spends all of its waking hours, morning noon and night, figuring out how to manipulate the U.S. Of course they're going to score some cheap political points off this. We can't mistake that for a change in the rule of law, just like we can't mistake these cables for a major change in the assymetric informational systems of our global society. Wikileaks may one day change the world. But for now we're still living in Edward Said's world, a world of vast inequalities of almost every kind imaginable, with great efforts already underway to try and redress these problems in a way that can alleviate the unspeakable suffering of tens of millions in a state such as Pakistan. These cables are a sign that change will have to come a little faster. The world itself may be demanding it, as Obama dithered on climate change and the banks. But if you remember one thing as we run off into this new miasma, let it be this quote from Edward Said:
"My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective identity rather than understanding and intellectual exchange."
Namaste.