Tariq Ali and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Afghanistan and Pakistan

Came across a somewhat-dated but nevertheless kickass speech by Tariq Ali today while drinking after class. Since I didn't know either, I quote from Democracy Now, which calls him a "British-Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian, Tariq Ali spoke at Hampshire College on November 17 for the the Twelfth Annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture. The annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture honors the teaching, scholarship, and activism of the late Eqbal Ahmad, who was a longtime Hampshire College professor."

I cast this video into the web because Ali has the wonderful habit of saying things like this:

I'd say the big problem in Pakistan is the grinding poverty; is the lack of education; is the lack of basic health facilities; is the fact that many many villages still do not have electricity. Running water is in short supply. And on top of this you have a corrupt political and military elite—they're equally corrupt—who sit on the country, live in a bubble, send their children to the top schools, send them abroad, and use the English language to maintain their monopoly.

Wonderful.

As the World Burns (And Encouraging Message of Hope from Your Humble Narrator)

Much as I despise the American Empire, I live here too, in the heart of a major American city I’d just as soon not see reduced to a cloud of ash.

Yet it is inevitable. Someone, at some point, will acquire the Bomb and use it, a fact previous generations understood. Visions of nuclear apocalypse are less popular now, with the Cold War a distant memory and the Terror War fast receding into the black hole at the heart of American national memory. Still, they do have their own, sick utility, insomuch as they inspire personal, national and international efforts to put the genii back in the bottle. A foolish dream, perhaps, and hard to hold in an era where non-martial dreams are ridiculed and despised, but it’s mine, nevertheless.

Others dream of phantom enemies. In a report released two weeks ago, as open, armed conflict resumed across northern Pakistan, David Albright—that is Dr David Albright, president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security—warned “the public” (which, according to my handy English-to-Think Thank-ese dictionary, means “Congress”) that “the security of any nuclear material” produced by Pakistan’s ever-increasing number of nuclear reactors “is in question.”

It’s not enough that al Qaeda-allied crazy folks are sixty miles from the capital. It’s not enough that the Pakistani military is, even now, bombing the northwestern portions of its own country back into the Precambrian Age. It’s not enough that this violence has displaced millions, killed thousands, and enraged untold multitudes who won’t hesitate for a moment to join up with the next charismatic asshat who comes riding over the mountainous border, intent on recruiting fresh martyrs to the cause. No. They have to have dirty bombs, too.

From The Power of Nightmares: