Why you just dont understand Pakistan

jemima-khan It is nigh on impossible for the average observer to understand Pakistan. Even the most well-informed commentators talk about it in a form of abstraction, a regional fault line, a failing state, or a central front in the long-abased War on Terror. However, for the average American (though that concept is in itself a clumsy approximation), it is probably not in their experience to be able to mentally see inside such a country – the maelstrom of people, the strength-sapping heat, the assault on the senses of the walls of noise, smell, color, movement, and always an absence of easy access to silence or space. If you haven’t experienced the sheer crush of humanity in Asia, it is hard to understand the psyche beating at its heart. If you haven’t felt inelegant, as a Westerner, as you tried to join the instinctive almost-dance like movements as the locals manage to flow in a river of moving bodies on the pavements, and that you will disturb by stopping, starting, and attempting to dodge, you cannot understand their thinking. It is not just another country, it is another world. Sadly, it is a world viewed at a distance, or from above in a drone control trailer in Nevada, or by a policy analyst sitting in Washington DC, and understood by none of them.

It is in this world, that the Taliban live and breathe. It is against this backdrop that we in the West try to analyze, dissect, and rationalize that the human intelligence we receive from there. However, in reality, it is in the refugee camps where you can hear a child say to another, as quoted in a beautiful article by Jemima Khan, “..Two children are fighting over coloured crayons when I arrive. A girl with blistered burns on her face from the sun shouts at a small boy who turns out to be her brother: “If you don’t give them back to me I’ll tell the Taliban and they’ll cut your throat.” It is in that statement that the magnitude of the human dimension exists.

If you can’t stomach another analysis about the state of Pakistan, the cruelty of the resurgent Taliban, or the Swat Valley bloodshed, then just read Jemima Khan’s article alone. As Matt Damon once said, ‘Americans could benefit from getting fatter…fatter passports.’ If you can’t travel there in reality, then read her piece about a world where the children joke that the only thing worse than being caught by the Taliban is being rescued by the Pakistan Army. If you can set aside your limited distractions in your comfortable environs, then immerse yourself in the world she describes. If you do, then you will be closer than many to understanding the real conditions on the ground in Pakistan, and why when you hear the phrase ‘today another drone attack in Pakistan…’ it has more dimensions than the media often presents:

A group of small children are drawing pictures, part of an art therapy programme run by Unicef in its child-friendly spaces within the camps. Here traumatised children can play volleyball, sing songs and be read stories in shaded safety.

A boy called Salman hands me a precisely drawn and signed picture of a Kalashnikov. A shy eight-year-old girl sitting cross-legged next to him, with her grubby green dupatta half obscuring her smile, offers me hers of a helicopter shelling a village. “That’s my house,” she says, pointing to some scribbled rubble.

Their schools and homes have been destroyed. All have had relatives killed. An orphanage in Mingora was caught in the crossfire when soldiers based themselves on the roof of the building with 200 children trapped inside.

After an hour and a half in the camp we are asked to leave for security reasons. Apparently the Taliban have been infiltrating, trying to recruit supporters.

There’s certainly support for the Taliban in the camps. They represent, for many, an opposing force to an army that “drones” (it’s now a verb here) its own people. America’s war on terror, supported by the Pakistani army, is unanimously viewed here as a war on Islam. Newborn twins have been named Sufi Mohammad and Fazlullah after the two militant leaders in Swat.

Jemima Khan’s broken country – Times Online.