Maybe I’ve lived outside the country too long, but Pakistan seems to be increasingly governed by WhatsApp uncle, with a distinctive mixture of victimization, prejudice and victim-blaming, conspiracy theorising, self-congratulatory realpolitik based on ignorance, naivete and imagined sophistication, and a drawing room mob mentality. The current government exemplifies this. Imran Khan’s visit to Russia on […]
Stormy weather
This morning Russia invaded Ukraine. Is this the start of something new? In the past years of growing fragility and certainties shaken, it has felt as though we are ratchetting up to catastrophic breakdown. It this it? Or is it a story and actually history just keeps going and there is no cataclysmic moment? Two […]
American obcenity
The day after I read the impassioned, clear and very rational testimony from David Miliband and Graeme Smith at the US Senate about the necessity of allowing Afghanistan’s economy to restart, not least by releasing its central bank funds with appropriate conditionalities, I saw the news that the White House had decided to release its […]
Great works
I finished a book I was reading and it was spectacular. It’s part of my East African season and I couldn’t remember as I was reading it which of the two Kenyan female authors it was by – the older one who wrote shortly after independence, or the recent one, a young hope. It was […]
What lies underneath
An unexpected realisation that has come with years spent alive and reasonably aware is of how people find explanations for the past in the anxieties of the present. This ia particularly true in academia. I listened to a podcast interview today with a historian who wrote about the Black Death and described how that pandemic […]
Sick at heart
Afghanistan continues to leave one sick at heart. Today, aside from everything else that has happened in the past days, is the news that a British man got out with scores of animals from his animal shelter, on what must have been one of the last few flights. Aside from leaving countless journalists, working women, […]
Unfounded optimism
Increasingly likely that my dismal optimism was unfounded. They are saying the right things, but it’s easy to read between the lines: women can work in line with the Shariah (as we define it); Shias are free to worship as they wish (because we know they respect the caliphs like we do), etc. It is […]
The Fall
So, the fall, more quickly than anyone seems to have expected, even the Taliban. Their return feels unbelievable, the end of an era that began on 9/11 and that for those of our age defined our understanding of the world. Certainly without 9/11 my life would have been different as I doubt the GF would […]
Watching history
Watching Afghanistan gives a true sense of history unfolding, even in my lifetime. I was born around the time the Soviets entered Afghanistan. In my earliest memories the war next door was a fact of life and its effects were barely noticed because they just were. Then there are the memories of the Soviets leaving, […]
Horrors returning
Afghanistan falls, bit by bit to the Taliban. What was the point of the past 20 years? Pakistan bears so much guilt which will never be acknowledged or accepted. It was a bad situation, yes, but I can’t believe the decisions made were the right ones for anyone – not Pakistan, not Afghanistan. There is […]