Farahnaz Ispahani and Nina Shea try to speak about Pakistan, but get it entirely wrong. Their blinkered history, their a-historical depiction of the genuine problem that they identify is sad and embarrassing to read. And nothing was more embarrassing to read than their conclusion that states:
The United States should make an unapologetic defense of free speech in every appropriate forum and work to roll back this subversive secular law. We should lend moral support to the majority of Pakistanis who are struggling to retain a semblance of a democratic and pluralist society and peace in the region. To the world’s detriment, the administration underestimated the Islamic State. The damage will be all the greater if we continue to ignore the danger from Pakistan’s blasphemy law.
Instead of tearing this gibberish, hypocritical, ahistorical and frankly completely nonsensical suggestion that somehow the USA is a voice for free speech, or worst, not implicated in the religious madness that has infected Pakistan through its repeated and decades long support for every fanatical dictator that ever spit on the country, let me quote Eqbal Ahmed instead to reveal the true nature of America’s hand in Pakistan:
There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America’s insistence on stability, between our impatience for change and American’s obsession with order, our move towards revolution and America’s belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the ‘third world’, our longing for absolute national sovereignty and America’s preference for pliable allies, our desires to see our national soil free of foreign occupation and America’s alleged need for military bases.
(Eqbal Ahmed in a dialogue with Samuel Huntington, from No More Vietnams: War and the Future of American Policy) Details »
