Report
SufiLore #7 – Development Assistance and Aid in Pakistan
The presentation held in Vienna as a Talaash discussion round can be downloaded as a Powerpoint here (.ppt, 9.5 MB) in short form, or as JPG slides for the original slides (.jpeg, 2.4 MB) (I wasn’t able to downsize the original presentation to a convenient size).
Events, dear boy! Events.
As part of my National Security Lecture I just finished a very good paper by Jolyon Howorth (published in Christopher Hill & Michael Smith (eds.), The International Relations of the European Union, Oxford University Press, 2004) on the EU’s defence and security outlook. While Germany is struggling with it’s deployment of troops in Afghanistan, Austria is buying planes while not knowing what to use them for and discussing a new law adressed for Austrians who trained in terror camps one wonders where the plans of the EU about it’s multilateral national security looks like.
Flawed basis for our reasoning
Gallup Pakistan has recently published statistics on opinion of Pakistanis and Afghanis on whether the presence of the Taliban in their country has a positive or a negative influence on their homeland. The results were clear, 72% in Pakistan and 79% in Afghanistan see it as a negative influence.
US “presence” in Pakistan
Financial support to Pakistan by the US is extensive, discussions about the security of the state’s personel there ongoing (here and here) but all the foreigners I see on the ground are non-US citizens. In 4 years in Lahore, Kashmir, the Northern Areas, the Tribal Areas and Peshawar I have met 4 American Nationals. I do not count my visits to horrible expat paries in Isloo with tipsy girls and tough guys or my encounter with well-built guys on the airport, who had a special escort past the queue and were obviously not here to taste Daal or learn a foreign language but to look grim and foster a clicheed, conspirational Xe-image, US citizens based in Pakistan nowadays have.
pundit mayhem
Experts on AfPak sprout out of the ground like mushrooms – everyone gets his go at what it’s all really about and what should have been done in the first place or what the future will definitely look like. While one would expect, that having so many smart people around who all know so much about this place that noone really seems to understand, the picture would become more clear, the floods of opinions and predictions on the topic just make the situation worse.
SufiLore #5 – Mathematics of War
Some truely interesting material circles around a recent research paper published in Nature that got some criticism around – maths and conflict. I am fascinated by it since these are tools we commonly use in our field (especially for Hydrology) and I really wouldn’t have thought about applying it in conflict studies. So basically I have no clue about joining these two topics and am myself just about to dive into the topic.
SufiLore #3 – Database
In an attempt to shorten my delicious list – some databases I have recently stumbled over:
Track II / India Pakistan dialogue
Summary of the recent meeting of Indian and Pakistani delegates (8-9th October, Bangkok) concerning the Track II dialogue. Topics included Water, Siachen, Trade, Afghanistan and Terrorism.
Pani ki kahani – Running on Empty
Where all the players, which in recent months were used by Pakistanis as scapegoats for all their sorrows come together – a report on Pakistan’s water crisis. It includes Kerry-Lugar, the sugar industry, WAPDA, Kalabagh and India – and brings it all together to give a meaningful insight of what goes wrong and what right. [...]
The Life of two foreigners in Kandahar
Most interesting article of two western foreigners living in Kandahar, the heart of Taliban resistance. They report about he boredom of sitting in their flat, because leaving would be too dangerous, but also about the thrill living so close to the “faltline” of history.
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