Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages

April 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html?ref=global-home
By SAM ROBERTS
The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.

“My wife is from Java and my children were born in Jakarta — they don’t associate with the Mamuju,” he said. “I don’t read books in Mamuju. They don’t publish any. I only speak Mamuju when I go back or when I talk to my brother on the telephone.”

These are not just some of the languages that make New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. They are part of a remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have taken root in New York — languages born in every corner of the globe and now more commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere else.

While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 Census forms.

“It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “We’re sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30 years.”

In an effort to keep those voices alive, Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots.

“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York University and is working with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”

With national languages and English encroaching on the linguistic isolation of remote islands and villages, New York has become a Babel in reverse — a magnet for immigrants and their languages.

New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered languages program. “The quickening pace of language endangerment and extinction is viewed by many linguists as a direct consequence of globalization, said Juliette Blevins, a distinguished linguist hired by City University to start the program.

In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan), Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands), Irish Gaelic, Kashubian (from Poland), indigenous Mexican languages, Pennsylvania Dutch, Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland) and Romany (from the Balkans) and Yiddish.

Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Endangered Language Alliance will apply field techniques usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.

“Nobody had gone from area to area looking for endangered languages in New York City spoken by immigrant populations,” Professor Kaufman said.

The United Nations keeps an atlas of languages facing extinction, and U.N. experts as well as linguists generally agree that a language will probably disappear in a generation or two when the population of native speakers is both too small and in decline. Language attrition has also been hastened by war, ethnic cleansing and compulsory schooling in a national tongue.

Over the decades in the secluded northeastern Istrian Peninsula along the Adriatic Sea, Croatian began to replace the language spoken by what is described as Europe’s smallest surviving ethnic group. But after Istrians began immigrating to Queens, many to escape grinding poverty, they largely abandoned Croatian and returned to speaking Vlashki.

“Whole villages were emptied,” said Valnea Smilovic, 59, who came to the United States in the 1960s with her parents and her brother and sister. “Most of us are here now in this country.”

Mrs. Smilovic still speaks in Vlashki with her 92-year-old mother, who knows little English, as well as her siblings. “Not too much, though,” Mrs. Smilovic said, because her husband only speaks Croatian and her son, who was born in America speaks English and a smattering of Croatian.

“Do I worry that our culture is getting lost?” Mrs. Smilovic asked. “As I get older, I’m thinking more about stuff like that. Most of the older people die away and the language dies with them.”

Several years ago, one of her cousins, Zvjezdana Vrzic, an Istrian-born adjunct professor of linguistics at New York University, organized a meeting in Queens about preserving Vlashki. She was stunned by the turnout of about 100 people.

“A language reflects a singular nature of a people speaking it,” said Professor Vrzic, who recently published an audio Vlashki phrasebook and is working on an online Vlashki-Croatian-English dictionary.

Istro-Romanian is classified by Unesco as severely endangered, and Professor Vrzic said she believed the several hundred native speakers who live in Queens outnumber those in Istria. “Nobody tried to teach it to me,” she said. “It was not thought of as something valuable, something you wanted to carry on to another generation.”

A few fading foreign languages have also found niches around New York and the country. In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck.

The Rev. Eli Shabo speaks Neo-Aramaic at home and his children do, too, but only “because I’m their teacher.”

Will their children carry on the language? “If they marry another person of Syriac background, they may,” Father Shabo said. “If they marry an American, I’d say no.”

And in Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people around the world. One of them, Dakhil Shooshtary, a 76-year-old retired jeweler who settled on Long Island from Iran 45 years ago, is compiling a Mandaic dictionary.

For Professor Kaufman, of the Graduate Center, the quest for speakers of disappearing languages has sometimes involved serendipity. After making a fruitless trip in 2006 to Indonesia to find speakers of Mumuju, he attended a family wedding two years ago in Queens, and Mr. Husain happened to be sitting next to him. Wasting no time, he has videotaped Mr. Husain speaking in his native tongue.

“This is maybe the first time that anyone has recorded a video of the language being spoken,” Professor Kaufman said, who founded a Manhattan research center, the Urban Field Station for Linguistic Research, two years ago.

He has also recruited Daowd I. Salih, a 45-year-old refugee from Darfur who lives in New Jersey and is a personal care assistant at a home for the elderly, to teach Massalit, a tribal language, to a linguistic class at New York University. They are meticulously creating a Massalit lexicography to codify grammar, definitions and pronunciations.

“Language is identity,” said Mr. Salih, who has been in the United States for a decade. “So many African tribes in Darfur lost their languages. This is the land of opportunity, so these students can help us write this language instead of losing it.”

Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick.

Mr. Lovell, who came to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”

But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends.

“Whenever they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr. Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment in itself.”

105,000 Dots for Iraq, and Counting

Check out the EFA for more information on this exhibit, and don't forget to watch the livefeed on March 8th!

March 4, 2010, 10:08 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/15000-dots-for-iraq-and-counting/
By ALI ADEEB
Warzer Jaff Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, as his back was being tattooed. On Monday, Mr. Bilal will remove his shirt and subject his back to 24 hours of nonstop tattooing.
Updated, 3:08 p.m. | An earlier version of this post misstated the number of ink dots that will represent Iraqi casualties. It is 100,000, not 10,000, for a total of 105,000 dots. The start time of the performance was also misstated — it is 8 p.m., not 8 a.m.

In the annals of performance art, this may be one of the more masochistic acts. On March 8, Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, will remove his shirt and subject his back to 24 hours of nonstop tattooing.

The plan calls for a tattoo artist to burn 105,000 dots into his skin in the shape of Iraq. Five thousand will be done with red ink, to represent American casualties in the Iraq War. The remainder, representing unidentified and forgotten Iraqi victims, will be done with ink that is visible only under ultraviolet light.

The performance, called “… and Counting,” has an ambitious philanthropic goal: Mr. Bilal hopes to raise $1 per dot in support of Rally For Iraq, a new nonprofit that plans to bring Iraqi orphans to the United States as students.

“This is the least I can do to try to help my country and my people. “ said Mr. Bilal, assistant arts professor teaching photography and imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. “The pain that I will be going through is nothing compared to the suffering of my people. I am afraid that the American public is forgetting about them, and I want to bring attention to the situation in Iraq.”

Mr. Bilal, who left Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991 and has lived in the United States since 1992, has been an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War since it began in 2003.

His antipathy deepened in 2004 when an American missile attack at a checkpoint killed his brother.

The tattoo project is not the first time he has merged his politics and art. In 2007, in a performance titled “Shoot an Iraqi,” he spent a month living in a room of a Chicago art gallery and being shot at by a paintball gun. The gun was connected to an Internet site through which viewers could command the trigger. He turned the event into a book, “Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun.” That year, Mr. Bilal was named the artist of the year by The Chicago Tribune.

The following year, in a project called “Dog or Iraqi,” he allowed the audience to decide whether he or a dog should be subjected to the torture technique called waterboarding, in which water is poured over a person’s face and into his mouth and nose, causing a drowning sensation. He was chosen over the dog and was waterboarded.

He said he believed that artists should be more than educators; they should be provocateurs.

“The best we can hope for is to shock the audience and create engagement,” Mr. Bilal said. “It is not always about education all the time, but agitation also.”

“… And Counting” is the first fund-raising event for Rally for Iraq, which was founded by a group of Iraqi-Americans. The organization intends to raise enough money to support an initial group of five students.

“We believe that educating the new generation will be the best way to help our country build its future,” said Hussein Al-Baya, one of the organization’s co-directors.

Mr. Bilal’s performance will begin at 8 p.m. March 8 at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and will be streamed on the foundation’s Web site using two cameras, one showing Mr. Bilal’s back and the other showing the audience. Throughout the event, a litany of names of people killed in the war will be read aloud. Mr. Bilal is to fly to San Francisco the day after the performance to exhibit his artwork.

In preparation for the event, he has already inked the names of 16 Iraqi cities on his back.

Mr. Bilal visited his family in Iraq last July. He felt that he needed to get to know his sisters and brothers again. The war, he said, had stolen their hope.

“Some people say that when you cross the ocean it doesn’t matter anymore, but we Iraqis are always nostalgic,” he said. “It would be a great achievement if my work can help bring some hope to Iraqis for a better future.”

Ali Adeeb is a former intern and Baghdad newsroom manager for The New York Times. Kirk Semple contributed reporting.

When Fear Turns Graphic

January 17, 2010
Abroad
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ZURICH

SWITZERLAND stunned many Europeans, including not a few Swiss, when near the end of last year the country, by referendum, banned the building of minarets. Much predictable tut-tutting ensued about Swiss xenophobia, even though surveys showed similar plebiscites would get pretty much the same results elsewhere.

A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus. “We make posters, the other side goes to the judge,” is how Alexander Segert put it when we met here the other day. “I love it when they do that.”

He designed the poster in question. As manager of Goal, the public relations firm for the Swiss People’s Party, Mr. Segert has overseen various campaign posters. This one, for the referendum, used minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles (“mushrooms,” Mr. Segert demurred, implausibly). Beside the missiles a woman glowers from inside a niqab. “Stop” is written below in big, black letters.

The obvious message: Minarets lead to Sharia law. Never mind that there are only four minarets in Switzerland to begin with, and that Muslims, some 340,000 of them, or 4 percent of the population, mostly from the Balkans and Turkey, have never been notably zealous.

In this heavily immigrant country the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party is now the leading political party, aided at the polls by incidents like the New Year’s Day attack by a Somali Muslim immigrant in Denmark on Kurt Westergaard, the artist whose caricature of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban was among the cartoons published in 2005 in a Danish newspaper that provoked violent protests around the world. All across Europe populist parties are growing, capitalizing, to an extent unknown across the Atlantic, on a very old-fashioned brand of propaganda art. The dominance in America today of the 24-hour cable news networks and the Internet, the sheer size of the country, the basic conventions of public discourse, not to mention that the only two major parties have, or at least feign having, a desire to court the political center, all tend to mitigate against the sort of propaganda that one can now find in Europe.

It manages, if often just barely, to skirt racism laws. In Italy, where attacks on immigrant workers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno this month incited the country’s worst riots in years, the Lega Nord, part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, has circulated various anti-immigrant posters. One, mimicked by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front Party in France, showed an American Indian to make the point that immigrants will soon turn Europeans into embattled minorities stuck on reservations.

The National Front also distributed a poster of Charles de Gaulle alongside a remark he once made (in the context of the Algerian occupation) to suggest that true Gaullists today would vote for Le Pen. “It is good that there are yellow Frenchmen and black Frenchmen and brown Frenchmen,” de Gaulle is quoted as saying. “They prove that France is open to all races,” adding, “on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France will no longer be France.”

In Austria the far-right Freedom Party has come up with a poster bearing the slangy slogan: “Daham Statt Islam, Wir Für Euch” (roughly, Home Instead of Islam, or Islam Go Home, We Are for You). And Britain’s neo-Nazi National Party, which, to the great embarrassment of the country’s political leaders, lately won two seats on the European Parliament, swiped the minaret poster by switching the Swiss flag for a Union Jack. Mr. Segert and the Swiss People’s Party weren’t too pleased, populists being one thing, neo-Nazis, another.

It may be hard for Americans to grasp the role these images can play here. In subways and on the streets in America, posters and billboards are eye-catching if sexy or stylish, like Calvin Klein’s advertisements, or if modish and outrageous, like Benetton’s, but they’re basically background noise. By contrast, they’re treated more seriously here, as news, at least when they’re political Molotov cocktails. Cheap to produce compared with television commercials and easy to spread in small countries like Switzerland, where referendums are catnip to populists, they have the capacity to rise above the general noise.

Mr. Segert is the de facto reigning minister of such propaganda. He has used red rats to caricature Swiss leftists. He came up with an image of black and brown hands riffling through a stack of Swiss passports. And (until the minaret poster, this one caused the biggest kerfuffle) he cooked up the idea of three fluffy white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag. “For More Security” was the accompanying slogan.

Cries of racism, occasional legal proceedings — none of which ended up in fines against him, Mr. Segert hastens to point out — and even bans on their display in left-leaning cities like Basel and Geneva, have only increased the reproduction of the images. All of which, as Mr. Segert said, suits him and his bosses just fine.

“If what we do stirs up controversy, then we’ve already won the election,” he told me, a thought echoed when I met with Marc Bühlmann, a political scientist here. “All these right-wing populist parties have learned to get TV and newspapers to show these posters over and over with the excuse of asking, ‘Should we allow such images?’ ” Mr. Bühlmann said. “The aim in making the posters is to be as racist as possible, so then when critics complain, the populists can say elites don’t want ordinary people to know the truth. And the media fall for it every time.”

Mr. Segert wouldn’t disagree. Crude, cleverly exploiting the ancient power of a still picture over moving ones to fix an image in a viewer’s mind, the posters share a calculated homeliness and violence that is in its own way artful. I showed a variety of them to Jacques Séguéla, chief creative officer for France’s second-largest advertising agency, who ran François Mitterrand’s presidential campaign.

“Fifty percent Stalin, 50 percent Norman Rockwell,” was his assessment. “The images are aggressive, not funny, without charm, straight to the point, clear and” — he was speaking aesthetically here — “in no way radical. They’re the opposite of most advertising today. They aim just at their target audience.”

And that’s all they need to do. Marcus Stricker, creative director of Netprinz, which handles advertising for Switzerland’s Free Democratic Party, a competitor of Mr. Segert’s, credits the minaret poster with employing a bygone graphic style that conjures up “good old Switzerland, when everything was safe, clean and growing.” Like Mr. Bühlmann he blames the news media for providing, as he put it, “effectively millions of dollars in free advertising.” It went without saying that my own interest in the poster brouhaha multiplied the problem.

He was nevertheless reluctant to give Mr. Segert too much credit for swinging the vote. Local issues did more to sway public opinion, he said. We met in a crowded bar above the Zurich train station, and before parting he unfurled a poster by a human rights organization called the Society for Swiss Minorities, distributed by the Swiss Council of Religions, showing a mosque, a synagogue, two churches and a Buddhist temple beneath a broad, pale blue sky, with the slogan “Der Himmel über der Schweiz ist gross genug” (“the sky over Switzerland is big enough”) in discreet lettering across the top.

It was made to compete with Mr. Segert’s work. Two can play that game, Mr. Stricker wanted me to know. Except that the image, tasteful and vague, stressing elegance over incitement, actually suggested the opposite.

Mr. Segert knows why. A 46-year-old German (yes, an immigrant himself in Switzerland), he is the father of two adopted children from North Africa, although he declined to talk about his personal life. He was happy, on the other hand, to discuss work, which he volunteered he would gladly do for the Green Party or Social Democrats, if they hired him. “For me it’s an intellectual exercise,” he said, as if cynicism were a point of professional pride.

In the next room young, clean-cut associates brooded over drawing boards and computer screens. Clients must “do their homework,” Mr. Segert said, by way of explaining how a design evolves. “It sounds easy, but most political parties don’t know their own message.” That’s the problem for centrist and many left-leaning parties.

By contrast, “everyone knows what the Swiss People’s Party stands for,” he said. “It’s against the European Union, for neutrality, lower taxes, no illegal aliens. You can hate it or love it, but the message is clear.” That message must then be refined. “Maybe 80 to 90 percent of people are not interested in elections. So our job is to tell them: Be interested in what doesn’t interest you, make a decision about something you don’t care about, then act on it, vote. That’s a lot for a poster to accomplish. We’re successful because we know how to reduce information to the lowest level, so people respond without thinking.”

This was essential, he stressed: “The message must go straight to the stomach, not to the brain, and connect with specific emotions involving fear, health, money, safety. We can focus just on our target audience so we can speak in a special language and speak to a feeling these people already have. We can’t move anyone who doesn’t already have this feeling. In our case the target audience is low income, with little schooling. They have the same right to vote as people who support the Green Party and read 3 newspapers and 10 magazines.”

I asked whether special language applied to red rats, which can conjure up Nazi propaganda. Mr. Segert brushed off the comparison. As a public-relations man he has “no taboos,” he said. “We don’t begin by thinking what we can’t do. When I chose to show rats, I didn’t ask whether it’s politically correct. I couldn’t do my job if I did that. I only wanted to know whether it serves our purpose, and if we have a problem with the law. My party already deals with taboos like Islam and immigration, so our job is just to think about how to make the strongest image, then let the lawyers tell us whether it’s racist.”

He recounted the making of the minarets design. There were some early all-text trials, he recalled, which looked too wordy. One version showed missiles without the woman, another, the woman in a burqa, without eyes. “That was too impersonal,” Mr. Segert said. He and his colleagues, adding eyes, then debated what should be behind them. “Should they look sexy, not sexy?” he said. “To me the look we decided on is less aggressive than helpless.”

It can also be read the other way around. Mr. Segert added that, instead of the Swiss flag, the Matterhorn was tried, but the mix of minarets with the woman in a niqab and the mountain created confusion. Without the mountain, he said, the image, “could have been Istanbul or Dubai.”

“There was nothing wrong,” he continued, “nothing to disturb the view.”

But a flag solved that. “Minarets and the Swiss flag sent the message we wanted because they don’t fit together. A person looks and thinks, ‘This must be changed.’ ”

A certain person, anyway. The final poster, though heavy-handed, performs a complex task. The image of minarets beside the woman in the niqab stirs up a negative feeling among target voters. “No, I don’t want minarets because I will find myself living under Sharia law,” the viewer decides. But the referendum to ban minarets required a yes vote. “It’s always easier to do a campaign for a no vote,” Mr. Segert noted, “because people instinctively want to maintain the status quo. It’s what they already know. With a yes vote you need some positive symbol. But we had only this negative one, of minarets and Sharia.

“So we needed some bridge, some transition from no to yes.”

The designers experimented with the word “Verbieten,” meaning to forbid, but this turned out to look too complicated. The obvious solution, arrived at after a few false starts, was simply, “stop.”

The word performs a double role, emphasizing the initial message (stop minarets) then causing a viewer, when arriving at the word, mentally to stop, be free to switch gears and register “yes,” written just below “stop.” That is, vote yes.

“So there are three steps to the image,” Mr. Segert concluded. “Minarets lead to Sharia. No to minarets. Yes to the referendum.”

“It looks simple,” he said, staring at the finished image.

“But that’s the art of it.”

He smiled.

Pakistanis View U.S. Aid Warily

October 7, 2009, 11:00 am
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/pakistanis-view-us-aid-warily/?ref=global-home

By Salman Masood

Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Ali Rizvi, left, and Umair Anjum outside a McDonald’s in Islamabad. The men say the Kerry-Lugar aid bill will undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As the Obama administration weighs a shift in its military strategy in Afghanistan, it is also stepping up its efforts to increase aid to neighboring Pakistan. The Senate on Sept. 24 approved legislation to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for the next five years. However, conditions laid out in the bill, authored by Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, have unleashed street protests and a flood of criticism from Pakistanis who say the bill compromises their country’s sovereignty.

President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan has agreed to the stipulations in the Kerry-Lugar bill, but he is coming under sharp criticism from opposition parties and many Pakistanis who view America as a cavalier and condescending ally. Pakistan’s Parliament is discussing the Kerry-Lugar aid bill Wednesday, and it is expected to be a fiery debate.

I spoke with several Pakistanis who shared their concerns about the bill and America’s relationship with Pakistan.


Enver Baig, 63, a former senator, said he felt that America needed to change how it has treated Pakistan and its democratic governments. “We always loved the Americans, but they deserted us soon after the first Afghan war,” he said. “Since then, the trust is gone. It is time to rebuild that trust, but with the introduction of Kerry-Lugar bill, distance between America and Pakistan is increasing because of some severe conditions in the aid package.”


Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Enver Baig says the “trust is gone” between Pakistan and America.
Mr. Baig said. “There is an impression that America wants to micro-manage everything in Pakistan,” he added.

Mr. Baig said he thought the Pakistani government had poorly negotiated draft of the aid bill and instead of asking for aid, which he thought was “peanuts,” the government should have asked that previous loans from the United States be “written off.”

“There is a lot of pressure on the government to get this bill reviewed,” he said. “There are serious reservations with the country’s armed forces as well because the aid package puts curbs and conditions on them in various ways and means. I am sure the armed forces will approach the government and convey their reservations.”

He suggested three things that the United States could do to win over the Pakistani people: It could improve the aid package, increase market access to Pakistani products and have more interaction with the country’s public, politicians and opinion makers.

Umair Anjum, 21, and Ali Rizvi, 22, who said they were studying to be accountants, sat outside a McDonald’s, enjoying a cigarette and the early October breeze. Their views reflected how many urban, educated, English-speaking young Pakistanis view the relationship between their country and America.

“Pakistanis hate America, to some extent because you don’t bomb an ally,” Mr. Rizvi said. “People here do not like the drone attacks. They are important in the war against terror, all right, but America should respect our sovereignty.”

Mr. Anjum said he felt Pakistan was routinely betrayed by the United States. The Kerry-Lugar bill, he said, “is bound to undermine our sovereignty in every possible way. The Americans are trying to dictate us in every walk of life. America is working against our interests. It is promoting India, which has a huge presence in Afghanistan. Our armed forces and people should act like Iran and stand up to American pressure.”

The young men also said that employees from private security firms such as Blackwater were operating with impunity inside Pakistan.

“There are thousands of Blackwater operatives in the country now if you go by the media reports,” Mr. Anjum said. “They have been given a license to kill. They are not accountable to anyone here. Would India allow Blackwater on its territory? Not at all.”

Mr. Rizvi said simply, “They are spies.”

Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns Peer Book Centre in Aabpara, a bustling market, said that American aid was not reaching many Pakistani people. “Had it been so, people would not be fighting for sugar and flour in long queues across the country,” Mr. Rehman, 49, said. He is currently on bail, having spent a few weeks in prison on charges of selling Islamic books that had been banned by the former government.

Mr. Rehman said the economic crisis had hit him hard. “I have been selling books for 30 years,” he said. “But now the earnings have dropped by half. I don’t have money to timely pay the wholesale trader from whom I get stationery.”


Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns the Peer Book Centre, also views U.S. aid with suspicion.
He said a friend of his, Abid Rehman, died in the terrorist attack on World Food Program office in Islamabad. But he refused to accept that Taliban militants were behind the attack. It was a conspiracy, he said. Even the public claim of responsibility by a Taliban spokesman did not convince him.

Like most Pakistanis, he also voiced suspicion over the United States’ interests in Pakistan, saying that America wanted to denuclearize Pakistan.

During the conversation with Mr. Rehman, an old bearded man, leaning on a walking stick, entered the store. Everyone stood up in deference.

Fazl-e-Haq, 87, dressed in a blue striped shirt and gray trousers, was a former inspector general of the Pakistan Police. Since 1980, he has been writing a column in Jang, the country’s most widely read Urdu daily.

“There will be a revolution in Pakistan by the third quarter 2010,” Mr. Haq said in a somber voice.

“In a country where people are dying of hunger, where women are being kidnapped and raped, where justice or flour is not available to the poor, revolution does not come by knocking at the door first,” he added. “And this will not be a peaceful revolution. It will be a bloody revolution. We have lost our honor. We have sold ourselves.”

Everyone gathered in the store nodded.

And what about America, I asked after having a little dose from this harbinger of doom.

“America is breathing its last,” Mr. Haq replied in a trembling but sure-sounding voice. “Afghanistan will be the graveyard of American imperialism.”

Sudan Fines Woman Who Wore Pants

September 8, 2009
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and WALEED ARAFAT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/africa/08sudan.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

NAIROBI, Kenya — A Sudanese woman who wore pants in public was fined the equivalent of $200 but spared a whipping Monday when a court found her guilty of violating Sudan’s decency laws.

The woman, Lubna Hussein, an outspoken journalist who had recently worked for the United Nations, faced up to 40 lashes in the case, which has generated a swarm of interest both inside and outside Sudan.

Mrs. Hussein vowed to appeal the sentence and even marched into the court in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, wearing the same pair of loose-fitting green slacks that she was arrested in.

Manal Awad Khogali, one of her lawyers, said the judge hearing the case called only police witnesses to testify and refused to allow Mrs. Hussein — who has pledged to use her trial to bring attention to women’s rights in Sudan — to defend herself.

“He didn’t give us a chance,” Mrs. Manal said.

After the trial was over, Mrs. Hussein, a 34-year-old widow, seemed defiant as ever. “I will not pay a penny,” she told The Associated Press.

The judge had threatened to jail her for one month if she did not pay the fine. But according to The A.P., Mrs. Hussein flatly said: “I would spend a month in jail. It is a chance to explore the conditions in jail.”

On Monday night, after refusing her lawyers’ advice to pay up, Mrs. Hussein was whisked off to jail, though her lawyers said that in the coming days a committee formed for her defense may pay the fine and free her.

Sudan is partly governed by Islamic law, which calls for women to dress modestly. But the law is vague. According to Article 152 of Sudan’s penal code, anyone “who commits an indecent act which violates public morality or wears indecent clothing” can be fined and lashed up to 40 times.

It was the potential lashing, customarily carried out with a plastic whip that can leave permanent scars, that seemed to raise so many eyebrows. On Monday, diplomats from the British, French, Canadian, Swedish and Dutch Embassies showed up at the Khartoum courthouse, along with a throng of women protesters, many wearing pants. Witnesses said several bearded counterprotesters in traditional Islamic dress also arrived and yelled out “God is Great.”

Riot police broke up the demonstration and carted away more than 40 women. Sudanese officials said they were released shortly later. Witnesses said the police beat up at least one woman.

Mrs. Hussein is a career journalist who recently worked as a public information assistant for the United Nations in Sudan. She quit, she said, because she did not want to get the United Nations embroiled in her case.

But just as it did with the closely-watched case of a British schoolteacher, who faced whippings and a prison sentence in 2007 for allowing her 7-year-old students to name a class teddy bear Muhammad, the Sudanese government found a compromise.

Sudan’s leaders are eager to normalize relations with the United States and other Western countries and appeared to come up with a solution in which Mrs. Hussein was punished but not so severely as to draw more international ire.

She was arrested in July, along with 12 other women, who were caught at a cafe wearing trousers.

“I am Muslim. I understand Muslim law,” Mrs. Hussein said in an interview on Friday. “But I ask: What passage in the Koran says women can’t wear pants? This is not nice.”

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Waleed Arafat from Khartoum, Sudan.

Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book

August 13, 2009
By PATRICIA COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/books/13book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=yale%20university%20press,%20danish%20islam&st=cse

It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed.

So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”

In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”

“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”

Mr. Donatich said that the images were still provoking unrest as recently as last year when the Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad’s turban as a bomb. He quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale — Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria — as concluding: “You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.”

Aside from the disagreement about the images, Ms. Klausen said she was also disturbed by Yale’s insistence that she could read a 14-page summary of the consultants’ recommendations only if she signed a confidentiality agreement that forbade her from talking about them. “I perceive it to be a gag order,” she said, after declining to sign. While she could understand why some of the individuals consulted might prefer to remain unidentified, she said, she did not see why she should be precluded from talking about their conclusions.

Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, who had discussed the summary with Ms. Klausen, said on Wednesday that she was merely following the original wishes of the consultants, some of whom subsequently agreed to be identified.

Ms. Klausen, who is also the author of “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe,” argued that the cartoon protests were not spontaneous but rather orchestrated demonstrations by extremists in Denmark and Egypt who were trying to influence elections there and by others hoping to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya and Nigeria. The cartoons, she maintained, were a pretext, a way to mobilize dissent in the Muslim world.

Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.

Rather than sign a joint editor’s note for the book and the removal of the images, Ms. Klausen has requested instead that a statement from her be included. “I agreed,” she said, “to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations.”

Other publishers, including The New York Times, chose not to print the cartoons or images of Muhammad when the controversy erupted worldwide in February 2006.

Ms. Klausen said, “I can understand that a university is risk averse, and they will make that choice” not to publish the cartoons, but Yale University Press, she added, went too far in taking out the other images of Muhammad.

“The book’s message,” Ms. Klausen said, “is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”


August 13, 2009, 1:06 pm
Discussion: The Yale Press Decision Not to Publish Controversial Cartoons
By Patricia Cohen
Yale University Press decided to pull 12 controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming book after a number of experts on Islam and counterterrorism warned that reprinting them could cause violence. When the cartoons were published in 2005 and 2006, riots erupted around the world and more than 200 people were killed. The press withdrew the drawings as well all other images of the prophet from the book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” which details the entire controversy. Some argue that Yale University Press’s decision is a defeat for free expression and a victory for extremists. Others maintain the removal of the images is prudent given the risk of violence.

August 13, 2009
3:45 pm


The university should be apologizing to the author for not only removing the so-called “offensive” cartoons, but also removing other noted illustrative examples of Muhammed.

Central to the point, Muslim extremists are using their clout to forcefully bend the laws of the land to cater their specific needs, just witness Europe, Middle East, Asia. They should learn to assimilate and become part of the new country they selectively chose for themselves, and learn to live in harmony with their neighbors.

Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart

— FireInsideTheMan

4. August 13, 2009
5:11 pm


Apparently the post-modern university requires an outside panel to tell them what’s right. I would too if I didn’t have any convictions of my own.

— Stewart Trickett

5. August 13, 2009
5:28 pm


This strange and sad decision by Yale raises questions not only of academic freedom, but also of the role of universities and university presses in our culture. University presses provide a vehicle for disseminating scholarly research that is important to human knowledge and understanding, but not always commercially viable. As universities such as Yale grow into mega-corporations preoccupied with brand management, the university presses within them are squeezed by these pressures and their very integrity and reason for being are inherently subject to compromise. This could have happened at Harvard, Princeton, or Oxford University Press instead. It may well be for this reason that the author decided not to pull the book entirely, wishing to see her life’s work published in imperfect form rather than not published at all. The author has my sympathies, but my deepest concern is for all of us and for what other realms of knowledge and understanding will remain unpublished or even unexplored if this troubling trend continues.

— Ilsa Frank

6. August 13, 2009
6:02 pm


“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”

Too bad the cowards at Yale are so afraid of being politically incorrect so they exercise self censorship

Milton had a few things to say on the subject as well.

Yale betrays the whole ethos of Western liberalism to the cause of convenience.

I’m with Ilsa.

— david wilder

7. August 13, 2009
6:41 pm


brave, brave Yale Press. I’m so proud.

— jeff hamren

8. August 13, 2009
7:33 pm


Probably Yale is partly funded by Saudi donations?

— Gerald Boisen

9. August 13, 2009
10:34 pm


Lux et veritas? Sad and scary tale…

— esthermiriam

10. August 13, 2009
10:36 pm


Brandeis has closed its fine art museum and wants to sell its collection, Yale edits out the visual from a work of scholarship about them — what is going on out there?

— esthermiriam

11. August 13, 2009
11:56 pm


Mr. Donatich justifies the Press’s acquiescence with the panel of authorities by equating publication of the images with having “blood on [his] hands.” But these anonymous advisers have nothing to gain and everything to lose from giving the Press the green light. Was the reverse question asked: who would be helped, and who might be protected, by Ms. Klausen’s contribution to the debate?

— Emily Satterthwaite

12. August 14, 2009
3:33 am


The cowardice and the tortured excuses are breathtaking. There is another point besides the obvious one of academic freedom and bowing to generalized intimidation. The book is an effort to examine these images and put them in a context of other images of Muhammad. By not printing these images, Yale University is effectively disassociating itself from this point of view. The sub-text is that these images are too offensive to even reprint. This undermines the author’s work. I wish some other university press would step forward and offer to publish the book as is. Or even better, a joint publication of a broad range of scholarly publishers.

— Robert Sadin

13. August 14, 2009
8:56 am


Yale’s decision sadly confirms the diminishing role of academia in expanding our understanding of the world around us. This is a complex story worth exploring fully without censorship!

— Sam Cruz

14. August 14, 2009
9:19 am


Not only is this proof of people knuckling under to the undue influence of religions (whatever ones they may be), it also shows how censorship rears its ugly head much too often in today’s world. In addition, can anyone reading this book really take any of it seriously when they do not print the very cartoons that the book is about? Is the Yale University Press going to now start printing art books with hundreds of high-grade blank pages because someone, somewhere, might object to a bit of Renaissance nudity. Titian beware! The invasion of the YUPies is near!

— David

15. August 14, 2009
10:47 am


Why blame Yale only? None of the U.S. newspapers or publication published those articles- but they did widespread reporting on it.

— Karan

16. August 14, 2009
12:28 pm


Well done! The most rational and decent desision made in a long time by those in the world of commications. In a culture bent on ratings and firing people up the simplicity in simply doing the right thing is without a doubt the most powerful. People need to be more reflective about their own behavior and right now I choose to think about the word - respect - and what it means, and then finding the power in this word, and then the act of being respectful, towards all things and all people.
Well done Yale Press, well done.

Ellen

— Ellen Shanley

17. August 14, 2009
3:23 pm


Way to go guys - stand up for academic freedom at all costs and then…..
Oops, my mistake - sorry about that.

— Charles Duwel

18. August 14, 2009
10:32 pm


The current administration at Yale, like an increasing number of their colleagues in the American academy, while continuing to wave their flags of pedagogical excellence fervently in a mild breeze, fold them away when the winds pick up. They believe in very little.

What they do seem to believe in and have done very well is raising money, and previously generous alumni who are upset by this nauseating display of academic cowardice and censorship should take note.

— Ben Ledbetter

19. August 15, 2009
10:10 am


The money trail is pretty clear. Yale is a partner to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. I am sure they do not want to lose their $50 million gift from the Saudis by offending them with this book.

— Roberta Wagner

20. August 17, 2009
9:36 am


Will the Yale School of Medicine begin to censor their textbooks and language when discussing conditions concerning “private areas”? After all, everyone can see this material on the internet. That would be favorable over offending someone living near, say, the Indonesian embassy.

— Brian

21. August 17, 2009
12:23 pm


Yale is setting a frightening precedent as one of the leading academic presses in the country. In not publishing these images (not only the cartoons, but other widely viewed and available images of Muhammad), Yale Press believes it will protect people from the furor they incite – instead it is allowing such furor to trump reasonable discussion, debate and scholarly investigation, which is exactly what Ms. Klausen is arguing in her book: “The book’s message is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”

You can read more about how First Amendment advocates are responding to this at the National Coalition Against Censorship’s blog: http://ncacblog.wordpress.com.

— Claire

22. August 17, 2009
1:12 pm


This is the very definition of Cowardice.

— Christian in NYC

23. August 19, 2009
12:42 pm

To #8….i do believe that ex president whats his name and his father did at least drive by yale, but am uncertain as to what education they may have received there …and yes, as i recall, the ex pres. does have extremely warm relations with saudi arabia.

— FAL

Showcase: Neighborly Hatred

If you have the chance check out the NYTs gallery of photos and video on their website! Plus Justyna's website, which is amazing!!!

September 3, 2009, 12:00 am
By James Estrin
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/showcase-45/?ref=global-home

PERPIGNAN, France — If you want to understand why Justyna Mielnikiewicz has spent eight years photographing border disputes and ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus, you should know two stories from her childhood.

First: When she was a child in Marklowice, in the Silesian region of Poland, she said her family spoke “proper” Polish at home and the local Silesian dialect outside, to fit in with the locals. Justyna watched her sister switch to dialect the moment she crossed the fence around their yard. But Justyna was a stubborn child and got it in her head to speak only proper Polish everywhere. As a result, she was mercilessly bullied by her schoolmates and nicknamed “the stranger.”

Second: On the way to school every day, she passed a large monument commemorating the Auschwitz prisoners who were marched through her village by the German army as they retreated from the Russians in early 1945. Thousands died along the way.

Now, Ms. Mielnikiewicz, 36, focuses on the crossroads between ethnicity, political borders and history. She sees the Caucasus — where Russia has recognized the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent from Georgia — as a place perfectly suited to explore these themes.

She recalled: “When I started going to Abkhazia, people said: ‘Why are you coming here? Nobody’s interested. I said it’s because it’s my personal journey to learn why people are doing this to each other, why people who live together can suddenly hate each other.”

This eight-year journey has now brought Ms. Mielnikiewicz to the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival in France, where she is to receive the Canon Female Photojournalist Award on Saturday. It is presented by the French Association of Female Journalists and includes a prize of 8,000 euros ($11,418) that will enable Ms. Mielnikiewicz to finish a project that will be exhibited at next year’s festival in Perpignan.

Ms. Mielnikiewicz photographed the war in South Ossetia for The Times. Her coverage included an audio slide show, “Photographers Journal: Fleeing the Georgian Conflict” and her pictures appeared in “Conflict in South Ossetia.”

Patrick Witty, the international picture editor at The Times, worked closely with Ms. Mielnikiewicz. On the second day of the war, he recalled, she sent him an e-mail message saying she had no ambitions to become a war photographer. “Despite this,” Mr. Witty said, “and despite her lack of a flak jacket, a helmet, or any experience photographing conflict before, she made the most memorable and moving pictures of the war. Her work is breathtaking.”

For the Perpignan competition, however, the photographs she submitted were not about the war but about the context of the war and the forces that create divisions.

While the chaos of war was a jarring experience for Ms. Mielnikiewicz, it was the the empty streets of the the Georgian city of Gori that really bothered her.

“I never realized that silence was the scariest thing, more than the explosions,” she said. “There were no cars, no one walking. It is not normal to hear silence in a big city. During war, reality goes upside down.”

The fighting has ended — at least for now — and Ms. Mielnikiewicz has gone back to documenting the context of the conflict . She is still trying to figure out why people can act so cruelly to their neighbors.

For Longtime Captives, a Complex Road Home

September 1, 2009
By BENEDICT CAREY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/health/01psych.html?ref=global-home

Jaycee Dugard has suffered sexual abuse, neglect and emotional manipulation to an extent hard to imagine, according to the charges in the case involving her abduction. But therapists say the biggest challenge facing Ms. Dugard, who was found last week after 18 years in captivity, may be switching families.

“Her captor was her primary relationship, and the father of her two children, and at some level separation may be difficult for all of them,” said Douglas F. Goldsmith, executive director of the Children’s Center in Salt Lake City. Dr. Goldsmith added that any therapy “has to be mindful that there are three victims, not one, and that they will be entering a new life together.”

About two-thirds of children who are kidnapped or abused suffer lingering mental problems, most often symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression.

Recent studies have found that about 80 percent of victims do show significant improvement in mood after three to four months of trauma-focused weekly therapy. Still, given the information available so far, experts say Ms. Dugard and her two children face an unusually complex task.

Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, says she has already told her mother of feeling guilt that she bonded with the man who kidnapped her when she was 11. She and her children will have to learn to connect with and trust her first family, the one from which she was taken in 1991.

“The way I think about this case is that it is an extreme version of a phenomenon that is really not that uncommon: a child engaged in an abusive relationship when young and, not knowing any better, coming to accept it as their life, adapting as best they can,” said Lucy Berliner, director of the trauma program at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. “Certainly every case is different, but we now have some proven interventions we can use.”

Therapists say Ms. Dugard’s transition to a new life is likely to take some time, probably years. Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman held in a dungeon by her father for 24 years, has reportedly undergone extensive therapy and still struggles mentally, 16 months after she was freed.

And Shawn Hornbeck, abducted in Missouri at age 11 in 2002 and held captive for four years, told reporters nearly two years after being freed that he was still learning to cope with the emotional effects.

By contrast, Elizabeth Smart, the young woman in Utah who was kidnapped at age 14 in 2002 and held for nine months, is now reportedly doing well, a student at Brigham Young University. When she was reunited with her family, she told CNN last week, “we just spent time as a family, which was like — it was the best thing I could have done.”

The main challenge in all such cases, experts say, is breaking the bond with the captor and abuser. David Wolfe, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has studied victims and some perpetrators of long-term abusive relationships.

In these cases, as in many kidnappings, perpetrators work hard to win the trust of their victims. “It’s a common element,” Dr. Wolfe said. “The child is frightened, and the perpetrator works to gain or regain the child’s confidence, to come across as a really good person: ‘I’m not going to hurt you, everything’s going to be O.K.’ and so on.

“So the child never knows when to fight or run,” he continued. “Do I wait and it’ll get worse? Or do I believe him and I won’t be hurt?”

Humans are wired to form social bonds, and such scraps of kindness can deepen even a relationship built on manipulation and abuse. Some victims have profoundly ambivalent feelings toward abusive captors, psychologists say, and tend to do better when they acknowledge their mixed feelings. Thinking of the perpetrator as a monster feels unfair; on the other hand, it would be wrong to call him merely misguided.

Once victims have shaken the influence of a perpetrator and re-established trust with loved ones, they can better learn through therapy how to ease the impact of their ordeal, said John A. Fairbank, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at Duke and co-director of the U.C.L.A.-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.

The most rigorously tested therapy is called trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. In weekly sessions over three to four months, people learn how to examine and refute suspect assumptions about their ordeal. One of the most common of these is “I can’t trust anyone anymore.” Another is “It’s my fault I didn’t resist more.”

“Of course it is not their fault, and we communicate that,” said Dr. Berliner, the Seattle therapist. “But at the same time, in many cases they did go along, they did make decisions not to fight or run, and we help people examine why they made those decisions — to understand that judging themselves harshly in retrospect might not be fair to the child they were in that moment.”

Typically, people in trauma-focused therapy also learn methods to regulate the strength of their emotions. These methods include simple breathing and relaxation techniques, as well as mindfulness, an exercise in allowing an emotion to take hold and pass without acting on it.

Finally, victims often work with the therapist to build a narrative, oral or written, of the entire ordeal, then file it as a chapter of their lives rather than the entire story. If appropriate, they may also “relive” the experience multiple times until its emotional power wanes. This approach is not for everyone — it seems to make some people more distraught — but experts say it can be helpful in some patients.

So far, Jaycee Dugard seems to be doing just as her fellow abductee Ms. Smart advised: staying with family, keeping herself and her children away from public scrutiny. Those are good instincts, therapists say.

“It’s not like resilience is out of the question in a case like this,” said Dr. Judith A. Cohen, medical director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. “In a lot of kidnapping cases, people do remarkably well, and this woman has already shown amazing survival skills.

“That she managed to survive for so long suggests that she might do well in the years to come.”

Police Find Bone Fragment

SAN FRANCISCO — Law enforcement officials in the Bay Area community of Antioch said Monday that a bone fragment had been found in the search of a house neighboring the property of Phillip Garrido, the man charged with abducting Ms. Dugard. But a spokesman for the county sheriff said it was not clear if the fragment was human.

Searchers have been looking for evidence not only in the Dugard case but also in a string of murders in the area. The authorities suspect that Mr. Garrido had access to the neighbor’s property, and may have lived there, in 2006.

2 HBO Filmmakers Blocked From Chinese Festival

September 2, 2009
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/world/asia/02quake.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

BEIJING — When the American filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill traveled around Sichuan Province last year to document the anger of parents whose children had died in school collapses during the earthquake in May, they ran into a chilly reception from officials.

Police officers harassed the two men and their co-workers, detained them and interrogated them for eight hours, they said.

Now, the Chinese government has denied both of them visas, blocking them from presenting their documentary, “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province,” at the Beijing Independent Film Festival this week. The two men, who made the film for HBO with co-producer Peter Kwong, said their visa applications were rejected late last week. No explanation was given by the Chinese Consulate in New York, where the application was filed, they said.

“We are extremely disappointed that the Chinese government denied our request for visas and that we will not be permitted to discuss this film with a Chinese audience in Beijing,” Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill said in a joint e-mail message. “The denial of our visas fits in with a pattern of what seems to be a complete commitment on the part of this Chinese government to crush any inquiry into the possibility of wrongful deaths during the earthquake in Sichuan.”

Chen Cong, a vice consul in the press office of the Chinese Consulate in New York, declined to explain the rejection, saying that diplomatic organizations had “the right not to give a reason for why the visa was denied.”

Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill have both won Emmy Awards and have worked together on highly praised documentaries, including “Baghdad ER.” The Sichuan documentary was shown on HBO in May, one year after the earthquake, and got positive reviews. The official Web site of the film is blocked in China.

The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to silence any mention of the collapsed schools and, according to an official count, the 5,335 children who died or remain missing. In the weeks after the earthquake, which left nearly 87,000 people dead or missing, parents took to the streets to demand official investigations into why so many school buildings had collapsed even though other buildings around them remained standing. The parents said shoddy construction and corruption were the obvious causes.

Local officials ordered security forces to detain the parents or tried to buy the silence of the parents with compensation money. Meanwhile, journalists who tried approaching the schools were stopped, and two rights advocates who pressed for official inquiries were detained. The two advocates, Huang Qi and Tan Zuoren, were put on trial last month.

Artists trying to raise the consciousness over the collapsed schools have been similarly harassed. The Chinese filmmaker, Pan Jianlin, was tracked by security officials after his documentary on the deaths, “Who Killed Our Children?” was shown last year at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea. Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who often criticizes the Communist Party, had his Web site blocked after he tried to compile online a comprehensive tally of dead schoolchildren. He was temporarily detained in Sichuan last month when he tried to attend the trial of Mr. Tan.

A person helping to organize the film festival in Beijing said the HBO documentary would be shown on Thursday even though the filmmakers will not be able to attend. The festival is showcasing more than 80 films, and each one is generally shown once.

Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill said there might be a possibility of talking to the audience by phone.

“We knew there was the possibility of rejection,” they said, “but we were hopeful that the Chinese government would allow us to discuss our work openly and in a spirit of constructive dialogue.”

Women at Arms

This is a really interesting article on women in the US Military Forces. If you enjoy the article, check out the link, and visit the multimedia the NYT offers on the subject.

August 16, 2009
G.I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier as War Evolves
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/16women.html?_r=1&hp
As the convoy rumbled up the road in Iraq, Specialist Veronica Alfaro was struck by the beauty of fireflies dancing in the night. Then she heard the unmistakable pinging of tracer rounds and, in a Baghdad moment, realized the insects were illuminated bullets.

She jumped from behind the wheel of her gun truck, grabbed her medical bag and sprinted 50 yards to a stalled civilian truck. On the way, bullets kicked up dust near her feet. She pulled the badly wounded driver to the ground and got to work.

Despite her best efforts, the driver died, but her heroism that January night last year earned Specialist Alfaro a Bronze Star for valor. She had already received a combat action badge for fending off insurgents as a machine gunner.

“I did everything there,” Ms. Alfaro, 25, said of her time in Iraq. “I gunned. I drove. I ran as a truck commander. And underneath it all, I was a medic.”

Before 2001, America’s military women had rarely seen ground combat. Their jobs kept them mostly away from enemy lines, as military policy dictates.

But the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, often fought in marketplaces and alleyways, have changed that. In both countries, women have repeatedly proved their mettle in combat. The number of high-ranking women and women who command all-male units has climbed considerably along with their status in the military.

“Iraq has advanced the cause of full integration for women in the Army by leaps and bounds,” said Peter R. Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to Gen. David H. Petraeus while he was the top American commander in Iraq. “They have earned the confidence and respect of male colleagues.”

Their success, widely known in the military, remains largely hidden from public view. In part, this is because their most challenging work is often the result of a quiet circumvention of military policy.

Women are barred from joining combat branches like the infantry, armor, Special Forces and most field artillery units and from doing support jobs while living with those smaller units. Women can lead some male troops into combat as officers, but they cannot serve with them in battle.

Yet, over and over, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army commanders have resorted to bureaucratic trickery when they needed more soldiers for crucial jobs, like bomb disposal and intelligence. On paper, for instance, women have been “attached” to a combat unit rather than “assigned.”

This quiet change has not come seamlessly — and it has altered military culture on the battlefield in ways large and small. Women need separate bunks and bathrooms. They face sexual discrimination and rape, and counselors and rape kits are now common in war zones. Commanders also confront a new reality: that soldiers have sex, and some will be evacuated because they are pregnant.

Nonetheless, as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women have done nearly as much in battle as their male counterparts: patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, disposed of explosives, and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads. They have proved indispensable in their ability to interact with and search Iraqi and Afghan women for weapons, a job men cannot do for cultural reasons. The Marine Corps has created revolving units — “lionesses” — dedicated to just this task.

A small number of women have even conducted raids, engaging the enemy directly in total disregard of existing policies.

Many experts, including David W. Barno, a retired lieutenant general who commanded forces in Afghanistan; Dr. Mansoor, who now teaches military history at Ohio State University; and John A. Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel who helped write the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual, say it is only a matter of time before regulations that have restricted women’s participation in war will be adjusted to meet the reality forged over the last eight years.

The Marine Corps, which is overwhelmingly male and designed for combat, recently opened two more categories of intelligence jobs to women, recognizing the value of their work in Iraq and Afghanistan. In gradually admitting women to combat, the United States will be catching up to the rest of the world. More than a dozen countries allow women in some or all ground combat occupations. Among those pushing boundaries most aggressively is Canada, which has recruited women for the infantry and sent them to Afghanistan.

But the United States military may well be steps ahead of Congress, where opening ground combat jobs to women has met deep resistance in the past.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a group that opposes fully integrating women into the Army, said women were doing these jobs with no debate and no Congressional approval.

“I fault the Pentagon for not being straight with uniformed women,” said Ms. Donnelly, who supported unsuccessful efforts by some in Congress in 2005 to restrict women’s roles in these wars. “It’s an ‘anything goes’ situation.”

Poll numbers, however, show that a majority of the public supports allowing women to do more on the battlefield. Fifty-three percent of the respondents in a New York Times/CBS News poll in July, said they would favor permitting women to “join combat units, where they would be directly involved in the ground fighting.” The successful experiences of military women in Iraq and Afghanistan are being used to bolster the efforts of groups who favor letting gay soldiers serve openly. Those opposed to such change say that permitting service members to state their sexual orientation would disrupt the tight cohesion of a unit and lead to harassment and sexual liaisons — arguments also used against allowing women to serve alongside men. But women in Iraq and Afghanistan have debunked many of those fears.

“They made it work with women, which is more complicated in some ways, with sex-segregated facilities and new physical training standards,” said David Stacy, a lobbyist with the Human Rights Campaign, which works for gay equality. “If the military could make that work with good discipline and order, certainly integrating open service of gay and lesbians is within their capability. ”

From Necessity, Opportunity

No one envisioned that Afghanistan and Iraq would elevate the status of women in the armed forces.

But the Iraq insurgency obliterated conventional battle lines. The fight was on every base and street corner, and as the conflict grew longer and more complicated, the all-volunteer military required more soldiers and a different approach to fighting. Commanders were forced to stretch gender boundaries, or in a few cases, erase them altogether.

“We literally could not have fought this war without women,” said Dr. Nagl, who is now president of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington.

Of the two million Americans who have fought in these wars since 2001, more than 220,000 of them, or 11 percent, have been women.

Like men, some women have come home bearing the mental and physical scars of bombs and bullets, loss and killing. Women who are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars appear to suffer rates of post-traumatic stress disorder comparable to those of men, a recent study showed.

Men still make up the vast majority of the 5,000 war deaths since 2001; nearly 4,000 have been killed by enemy action But 121 women have also died, 66 killed in combat. The rest died in nonhostile action, which includes accidents, illness, suicide and friendly fire. And 620 women have been wounded.

Despite longstanding fears about how the public would react to women coming home in coffins, Americans have responded to their deaths and injuries no differently than to those of male casualties, analysts say. That is a reflection of changing social mores but also a result of the growing number of women — more than 356,000 today — who serve in the armed forces, including the Reserves and the National Guard, 16 percent of the total.

Over all, women say the gains they made in Iraq and Afghanistan have overshadowed the challenges they faced in a combat zone.

“As horrible as this war has been, I fully believe it has given women so many opportunities in the military,” said Linsay Rousseau Burnett, who was one of the first women to serve as a communication specialist with a brigade combat team in Iraq. “Before, they didn’t have the option.”

Although women make up only 6 percent of the top military ranks, these war years have ushered in a series of notable promotions. In 2008, 57 women were serving as generals and admirals in the active-duty military, more than double the number a decade earlier. Last year, Ann E. Dunwoody was the first woman to become a four-star Army general, the highest rank in today’s military and a significant milestone for women. And many more women now lead all-male combat troops into battle.

The Army does not keep complete statistics on the sex of soldiers who receive medals and tracks only active-duty soldiers. But two women have been awarded Silver Stars, one of the military’s highest honors. Many more women have been awarded medals for valor, the statistics show.

To be sure, not all women in the military embrace the idea of going into combat. Like men, a few do what they can to try to get out of deployments. Military women and commanders say some women have timed their pregnancies to avoid deploying or have gotten pregnant in Iraq so they would be sent home. The Army declined to release numbers on how many women have been evacuated from a war zone for pregnancy.

In addition to the dangers, military life is grueling in other ways, especially for mothers juggling parenting and the demands of the military, which require long absences from home. And while the military is doing more to address the threat of sexual harassment and rape, it remains a persistent problem.

Bending Rules, Shifting Views

The rules governing what jobs military women can hold often seem contradictory or muddled. Women, for instance, can serve as machine gunners on Humvees but cannot operate Bradleys, the Army’s armored fighting vehicle. They can work with some long-range artillery but not short-range ones. Women can walk Iraq’s dangerous streets as members of the military police but not as members of the infantry.

And, they can lead combat engineers in war zones as officers, but cannot serve among them. This was the case for Maj. Kellie McCoy, 34, a wisp of an officer who is just over five feet tall. As a captain in 2003 and 2004, she served as the first female engineer company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division and led a platoon of combat engineers in Iraq.

On Sept. 14, 2003, her four-vehicle convoy drove into an ambush. It was attacked by multiple roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. Three soldiers were wounded in the ambush. As one of the wounded stood in the middle of the road, bloody and in shock, Major McCoy ran through enemy fire to get him, discharging her M4 as she led him back to her vehicle. Then, she and the others returned to the “kill zone” to rescue the remaining soldiers. Insurgents shot at them from 15 feet away. But eventually, all 12 soldiers piled into one four-seat Humvee and sped away.

Major McCoy received a Bronze Star for valor and, most important for her, the admiration of her troops. “I think my actions cemented their respect for me,” she wrote in an e-mail message from Iraq. “I worked hard to earn their respect.”

As an officer, Major McCoy’s assignment followed both the letter and the spirit of the regulations.

But in other cases, the rules were bent to get women into combat positions.

In 2004 and 2005, Michael A. Baumann, now a retired lieutenant colonel, commanded 30 enlisted women and 6 female officers as part of a unit patrolling in the Rashid district of Baghdad, an extremely dangerous area at the time.

On paper, he followed military policy. The women were technically assigned to a separate chemical company of the division. In reality, they were core members of his field artillery battalion. Mr. Baumann said the women trained and fought alongside his male soldiers. Everyone from Mr. Baumann’s commanders to the commanding general knew their true function, he said.

“We had to take everybody,” said Mr. Baumann, 46, who wrote a book about his time in Iraq called “Adjust Fire: Transforming to Win in Iraq.” “Nobody could be spared to do something like support.”

Brought up as an old-school Army warrior, Mr. Baumann said he had seriously doubted that women could physically handle infantry duties, citing the weight of the armor and the gear, the heat of Baghdad and the harshness of combat.

“I found out differently,” said Mr. Baumann, now chief financial officer for St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota. “Not only could they handle it, but in the same way as males. I would go out on patrols every single day with my battalion. I was with them. I was next to them. I saw with my own eyes. I had full trust and confidence in their abilities.”

Mr. Baumann’s experience rings true to many men who have commanded women in Iraq. More than anything, it is seeing women perform under fire that has changed attitudes. But some experts say the hostility toward women in the military was fading on its own. Many young men today have grown up around female athletes, tough sisters and successful women.

As the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan sinks in, some experts and military officers believe that women should be allowed to join all-male combat units in phases (so long as job-specific physical exams are created to test the abilities of men and women).

For New Warfare, New Roles

War is different today, they say. Technology has changed the way some of these jobs are done, making them more mechanized and less strength-dependent. Warfare in Iraq involves a lot more driving than walking.

What is more, not all combat jobs are the same. Handling field artillery or working in Bradleys, for example, are jobs more suited to some women than light infantry duties, which can require carrying heavy packs for miles.

Still, most women in the military express little, if any, desire to join the grueling, testosterone-laden light infantry. But some say they are interested in artillery and armor.

Any change to the policy would require Congressional approval, which lawmakers say is unlikely in the middle of two wars. But women in the military and their allies want their performance in combat to count for something.

“We have to acknowledge it because the military is like any other corporation,” said Representative Loretta Sanchez, Democrat of California and the senior woman on the House Armed Services Committee. “If you are not on the front lines doing what is the main purpose of your existence, then you won’t be viewed as someone who can command.”

Military women said they were encouraged by the words of Representative John M. McHugh, the nominee for Army secretary, who just four years ago supported a failed push in Congress to restrict the role of women in combat zones.

At his Senate hearing in July, Mr. McHugh, Republican of New York, sought to allay concern. “Women in uniform today are not just invaluable,” he said, “they’re irreplaceable.” He added that he would look to expand the number of jobs available to them.

In Mr. Baumann’s view, the reality on the ground long ago outpaced the debate.

“We have crossed that line in Iraq,” he said. “Debate it all you want folks, but the military is going to do what the military needs to do. And they are needing to put women in combat.”

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad.

Ten Letters

Every day, President Obama reads ten hand-picked letters chosen because they can offer him a glimpse of what's on people's minds and in their hearts.

With that in mind, Amnesty International has compiled powerful letters written by 10 influential thinkers – from an exiled poet to a former military interrogator to an esteemed actor and activist – that boldly make the case against torture.

These letters could not come at a more critical time. News reports last weekend stated that Attorney General Eric Holder is considering naming a special prosecutor to look into Bush-era torture. Ever since Obama's first days in office, Amnesty activists and their allies have called on the administration to investigate abuses committed during Bush's tenure and prosecute former officials where warranted.

While we're still obtaining details on the shape of the investigation, it's clear that we're making headway in our fight for accountability.

These ten letters describe what torture does to its victims, how it undermines our spirit, and what it does to a country that lets those who authorized it go unpunished. With your help, we want to make sure that these letters make their way directly to President Obama's desk.

Through Amnesty's Ten Against Torture effort, you can help draw dramatic, high-profile attention to these letters as they reach the White House and help support our call for accountability.

Read the Ten Against Torture letters and send the one you find most moving to President Obama.

Each letter is a passionate plea to President Obama to restore the United States' reputation, respect the rule of law, and act on values and ideals fundamental to the America we believe in.

Please take a moment to read the powerful words of Sister Dianna Ortiz, who has personally suffered the unimaginable pain of torture:


Mr. President, from anonymous graves, voices still cry out. From clandestine prisons, in the midst of indescribable pain, we, my sisters and brothers, beg you to hear. Will you listen to what we alone know of this crime against humanity —what we know from the inside out? Please hear us! Torture does not end with the release from some clandestine prison. It is not something we 'get over.' Simply, "looking forward" is not an option for us.

Read the rest of Sister Ortiz's letter here and send it to President Obama today.

No organization understands better than Amnesty International the power of writing a simple, honest letter.

For nearly 50 years, Amnesty supporters have signed letters to help free political prisoners from jail and bring brutal human rights abuses to an end. Now, by joining in our Ten Against Torture campaign, you can make sure those responsible for the illegal U.S. torture program are brought to justice.

Make sure that President Obama knows that torture has no place in the America we believe in.

Will What We Don't Know (or Care to Know) Hurt Us?

Note for Readers: This article comes from TomDispatch. It is available on-line at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175092/are_afghan_lives_worth_anything_
Mourning Michael Jackson, Ignoring the Afghan Dead
By Tom Engelhardt

It was a blast. I'm talking about my daughter's wedding. You don't often see a child of yours quite that happy. I'm no party animal, but I danced my 64-year-old legs off. And I can't claim that, as I walked my daughter to the ceremony, or ate, or talked with friends, or simply sat back and watched the young and energetic enjoy themselves, I thought about those Afghan wedding celebrations where the "blast" isn't metaphorical, where the bride, the groom, the partygoers in the midst of revelry die.

In the two weeks since, however, that's been on my mind -- or rather the lack of interest our world shows in dead civilians from a distant imperial war -- and all because of a passage I stumbled upon in a striking article by journalist Anand Gopal. In "Uprooting an Afghan Village" in the June issue of the Progressive magazine, he writes about Garloch, an Afghan village he visited in the eastern province of Laghman. After destructive American raids, Gopal tells us, many of its desperate inhabitants simply packed up and left for exile in Afghan or Pakistani refugee camps.

One early dawn in August 2008, writes Gopal, American helicopters first descended on Garloch for a six-hour raid:

"The Americans claim there were gunshots as they left. The villagers deny it. Regardless, American bombers swooped by the village just after the soldiers left and dropped a payload on one house. It belonged to Haiji Qadir, a pole-thin, wizened old man who was hosting more than forty relatives for a wedding party. The bomb split the house in two, killing sixteen, including twelve from Qadir's family, and wounding scores more... The malek [chief] went to the province's governor and delivered a stern warning: protect our villagers or we will turn against the Americans."

That passage caught my eye because, to the best of my knowledge, I'm the only person in the U.S. who has tried to keep track of the wedding parties wiped out, in whole or part, by American military action since the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in November 2001. With Gopal's report from Garloch, that number, by my count, has reached five (only three of which are well documented in print).

The first occurred in December of that invasion year when a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, wielding precision-guided weapons, managed, according to reports, to wipe out 110 out of 112 revelers in another small Afghan village. At least one Iraqi wedding party near the Syrian border was also eviscerated -- by U.S. planes back in 2004. Soon after that slaughter, responding to media inquiries, an American general asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" Later, in what passed for an acknowledgment of the incident, another American general said: "Could there have been a celebration of some type going on?... Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations." Case closed.

Perhaps over the course of an almost eight-year war in Afghanistan, the toll in wedding parties may seem modest: not even one a year! But before we settle for that figure, evidently so low it's not worth a headline in this country, let's keep in mind that there's no reason to believe:

* I've seen every article in English that, in passing, happens to mention an Afghan wedding slaughter -- the one Gopal notes, for instance, seems to have gotten no other coverage; or

* that other wedding slaughters haven't been recorded in languages I can't read; or

* that, in the rural Pashtun backlands, some U.S. attacks on wedding celebrants might not have made it into news reports anywhere.

In fact, no one knows how many weddings -- rare celebratory moments in an Afghan world that, for three decades, has had little to celebrate -- have been taken out by U.S. planes or raids, or a combination of the two.

Turning the Page on the Past

After the Obama administration took office and the new president doubled down the American bet on the Afghan War, there was a certain amount of anxious chatter in the punditocracy (and even in the military) about Afghanistan being "the graveyard of empires." Of course, no one in Washington was going to admit that the U.S. is just such an empire, only that we may suffer the fate of empires past.

When it comes to wedding parties, though, there turn out to be some similarities to the empire under the last Afghan gravestone. The Soviet Union was, of course, defeated in Afghanistan by some of the very jihadists the U.S. is now fighting, thanks to generous support from the CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistan's intelligence services. It withdrew from that country in defeat in 1989, and went over its own cliff in 1991. As it happens, the Russians, too, evidently made it a habit to knock off Afghan wedding parties, though we have no tally of how many or how regularly.

Reviewing a book on the Soviet-Afghan War for the Washington Monthly, Christian Caryl wrote recently:

"One Soviet soldier recalls an instance in 1987 when his unit opened fire on what they took to be a 'mujaheddin caravan.' The Russians soon discovered that they had slaughtered a roving wedding party on its way from one village to another -- a blunder that soon, all too predictably, inspired a series of revenge attacks on the Red Army troops in the area. This undoubtedly sounds wearily familiar to U.S. and NATO planners (and Afghan government officials) struggling to contain the effects from the 'collateral damage' that is often cited today as one of the major sources of the West's political problems in the country."

And, by the way, don't get me started on that gloomy companion rite to the wedding celebration: the funeral. Even I haven't been counting those, but that doesn't mean the U.S. and its allies haven't been knocking off funeral parties in Afghanistan (and recently, via a CIA drone aircraft, in Pakistan as well).

Following almost two weeks in which the U.S. (and global) media went berserk over the death of one man, in which NBC, for instance, devoted all but about five minutes of one of its prime-time half-hour news broadcasts to nothing -- and I mean nothing -- but the death of Michael Jackson, in which the President of the United States sent a condolence letter to the Jackson family (and was faulted for not having moved more quickly), in which 1.6 million people registered for a chance to get one of 17,500 free tickets to his memorial service... well, why go on? Unless you've been competing in isolation in the next round of Survivor, or are somehow without a TV, or possibly any modern means of communication, you simply can't avoid knowing the rest.

You'd have to make a desperate effort not to know that Michael Jackson (until recently excoriated by the media) had died, and you'd have to make a similarly desperate effort to know that we've knocked off one wedding party after another these last years in Afghanistan. One of these deaths -- Jackson's -- really has little to do with us; the others are, or should be, our responsibility, part of an endless war the American people have either supported or not stopped from continuing. And yet one is a screaming global headline; the others go unnoticed.

You'd think there might, in fact, be room for a small headline somewhere. Didn't those brides, grooms, relatives, and revelers deserve at least one modest, collective corner of some front-page or a story on some prime-time news show in return for their needless suffering? You'd think that some president or high official in Washington might have sent a note of condolence to someone, that there might have been a rising tide of criticism about the slow response here in expressing regrets to the families of Afghans who died under our bombs and missiles.

Here's the truth of it, though: When it comes to Afghan lives -- especially if we think, correctly or not, that our safety is involved -- it doesn't matter whether five wedding parties or 50 go down, two funerals or 25. Our media isn't about to focus real attention on the particular form of barbarity involved -- the American air war over Afghanistan which has been a war of and for, not on, terror.

Now, we're embarked on a new moment -- the Obama moment -- in Afghanistan. More than seven-and-a-half years into the war, in a truly American fashion, we're ready to turn the page on the past, to pretend that none of it really happened, to do it "right" this time around. We're finally going to bring the Afghans over to our side.

We're ready to light out for the territories and start all over again. American troops are now moving south in force, deep into the Pashtun (and Taliban) areas of Afghanistan, and their commanders -- a passel of new generals -- are speaking as one from a new script. It's all about conducting a "holistic counterinsurgency campaign," as new Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal put it in Congressional testimony recently. It's all about "hearts and minds"(though that old Vietnam-era phrase has yet to be resuscitated). It's all about, they say, "protecting civilians" rather than killing Taliban guerrillas; it's all about shaping, clearing, holding, building, not just landing, kicking in doors, and taking off again; it's all about new "rules of engagement" in which the air war will be limited, and attacks on the Taliban curbed or called off if it appears that they might endanger civilians (even if that means the guerrillas get away); it's all about reversing the tide of the war so far, about the fact that civilian casualties caused by air attacks and raids have turned large numbers of Afghans against American and NATO troops.

The commander of the Marines just now heading south, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, typically said this:

"We need to make sure we understand that the reason we're here is not necessarily the enemy. The reason we're here is the people. What won the war in al-Anbar province [Iraq] and what changed the war in al-Anbar was not that the enemy eventually got tired of fighting. It's that the people chose a side, and they chose us... We'll surround that house and we'll wait. And here's the reason: If you drop that house and there's one woman, one child, one family in that house -- you may have killed 20 Taliban, but by killing that woman or that child in that house, you have lost that community. You are dead to them. You are done."

The Value of a Life

As it happens, however, the past matters -- and keep this in mind (it's what the wedding-party-obliteration record tells us): To Americans, an Afghan life isn't worth a red cent, not when the chips are down.

Back in the Vietnam era, General William Westmoreland, interviewed by movie director Peter Davis for his Oscar-winning film Hearts and Minds, famously said: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."

In those years, there were many in the U.S., including Davis, who insisted very publicly that a Vietnamese life had the same value as an American one. In the years of the Afghan War, Americans -- our media and, by its relative silence, the public as well -- turned Westmoreland's statement into a way of life as well as a way of war. As one perk of that way of life, most Americans have been able to pretend that our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with us -- and Michael Jackson's death, everything.

So he dies and our world goes mad. An Afghan wedding party, or five of them, are wiped off the face of the Earth and even a shrug is too much effort.

Here's a question then: Will what we don't know (or don't care to know) hurt us? I'm unsure whether the more depressing answer is yes or no. As it happens, I have no answer to that question anyway, only a bit of advice -- not for us, but for Afghans: If, as General McChrystal and other top military figures expect, the Afghan War and its cross-border sibling in Pakistan go on for another three or four or five years or more, no matter what script we're going by, no matter what we say, believe me, we'll call in the planes. So if I were you, I wouldn't celebrate another marriage, not in a group, not in public, and I'd bury my dead very, very privately.

If you gather, after all, we will come.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note: I documented as fully as I could the previous Afghan wedding slaughters in "The Wedding Crashers: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush's Wars" (July 2008). And here's a selection of TomDispatch pieces on related subjects, if you're interested in reading more: "Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan" (September 2008), "What Price Slaughter?" (May 2007), "The Billion-Dollar Gravestone" (May 2006), "Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror" (May 2006), and former U.S. diplomat John Brown's "Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet" (January 2006). You might also visit filmmaker Robert Greenwald's website Rethink Afghanistan.] To view these articles check out Tom's website today!

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt