tv Q A CSPAN August 21, 2011 8:00pm-9:00pm EDT
8:00 pm
square, the original name. people are shouting, we are free. they are shooting at his poster. a lot of celebratory gunfire. >> the international criminal court confirming one this week on "q&a"," pamela constable discusses her latest book, "playing with fire: pakistan at war with itself." book chronicles life in contemporary pakistan through the lives of ordinary citizens and highlights the extremes of class and culture within that
8:01 pm
country. host: pamela constable. i want to show you a photograph from your book, "playing with fire," of a gentleman, the last picture in the book. tell us who he is and why that's in the book? guest: that's a photograph of abdul fatar edi, an extraordinary gentleman. he's in his 80's. he has a lovely majestic elderly demeanor. he is the founder of a private charity which provides free ambulance service to accidents, any sort of need. the edi ambulances go all over the country. that's what he's famous for but what's really interesting about him is that he's much more than a provider of charity. he's really a social revolutionary. he's someone who has spent the last three or four decades not trying to help the poor but to empower the poor and to bring dignity to the poor in a country
8:02 pm
that's very socially stratified and where people who are outcast because of poverty, because of problems they have, because of health problems, because of social status, really don't have much hope, and so he has personally taken on this mission with his wife and a small army of volunteers that work with him, to really try to uplift people who are at the bottom of that society. he's an extraordinary man. host: why do you have him in the book? guest: he's my epilogue. the book has a lot of discouraging things in it, a lot of bad news. and i decided to end the book with mr. edi because it's a positive note. i describe him as possibly pakistan's only living hero. he's an extraordinary man so if you read the book and come away thinking, oh, god, does pakistan have a future at all, you read about him, it gives you hope. >> in that same photograph, there is a photograph or
8:03 pm
picture, or a painting above him. who is that gentleman and how important is he to pakistan? >> that is muhammad ali gena, the founder of pakistan. i describe him in one place in the book as pakistan's washington, jefferson and kennedy all thrown into one. he remains the leading political historic figure of pakistan and he obviously lived in india because pakistan used to be part of india, and was a lawyer and political activist and he championed the notion of creating a muslim homeland. father of pakistan. unfortunately, he died less than a year after pakistan's creation and ever since then, pakistan has had a lot of difficulty with its political leaders and many feel he died too soon. if he lived a bit longer, perhaps the foundations of pakistan's democracy might have been stronger.
8:04 pm
host: that was in 1947. what happened that created pakistan? guest: well, it was a mess. and it was a mess from which the country really has never recovered, in a way. this was during the time of british rule in the subcontinent of india and the decision was made very quickly and very arbitrarily by the british colonial rulers to separate, to make a new country. they arbitrarily divided northern india into india and pakistan and in a matter of weeks you had literally millions of people fleeing in all directions. you had indians trying to rush south into what was going to be india and -- sorry, hindus and sikhs fleeing into what would be india and muslims fleeing north into what would be pakistan and there was mass slaughter, mass
8:05 pm
chaos. tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, were killed during that chaotic burst which has divided the two countries not only geographically but psychologically and politically ever since. host: what would jinnah think if he came back today, saw the country? guest: i think he would be very discouraged. there has been a long series of really unfortunate political developments in pakistan. it's never really been able to develop strong democratic institutions, strong leadership. it's had a number of civilian leaders either killed or thrown out of office before their time was due. it's had a number of military interventions for various reasons. there have been positive moments. in fact, i describe one scene in the book. there was a movement by lawyers. there are many lawyers in pakistan. and they spearheaded a movement the restoration of democracy in 2007 when the country was governed by a military general,
8:06 pm
and that movement, which was nonviolent, peaceful protest movement, spread across the country, and eventually led to enough pressure that the dictator was forced to step down and in one scene when i describe that movement, i say, muhammad ali jinnah would be smiling from the grave. host: i read that 44% of the population are punjabis, what does that mean? guest: there are four ethnic groups in pakistan, there are smaller ones, as well, and punjabis are the most dominant and punjab is the most important province economically and politically. pakistan has never really coalesced as a state, as a nation. has a great deal of ethnic tension, a lot of secessionist tendencies around the edges and a lot of jealousy and rivalry among ethnic groups.
8:07 pm
the punjabis have always dominated and the other groups have always been jealous and tensions remain. host: what cities are in punjab? >> islamabad, the capital, is in punjab. raul pindi is nearby. lahore, the capital of the province of punjab, and is really the most historic cultural capital also of pakistan, is in punjab. that's the heart of punjab. host: how many people? guest: in the country? host: in the country. guest: it's changing rapidly because it has very high birth rate, but it's between 175 and 180 million people and within something like 25 years, it's probably going to be the largest muslim population country in the world. host: it sits next to india with 1.1 billion people and next to bangladesh with about the same population as pakistan? guest: smaller because they've been better at social planning
8:08 pm
and controlling the population growth rate. host: when was the first time you set foot in pakistan and what were you doing? guest: that's a great question. i was -- it was 1998. i had just been sent over to india to actually, as a temporary assignment, and was not expecting to stay very long, maybe six months or so. and then this was in the fall of 1998. i've never been to the region before although i'd traveled many other parts of the world. and i had only been there something like three weeks, i think when i got a call from my editors who said, you know, the american military has bombed all these militant camps in afghanistan, you've got to rush over and try to cover that story. the only way to afghanistan was through pakistan so i ended up traveling to pakistan and trying to get into afghanistan, which did not work. it was a very tumultuous,
8:09 pm
confused time, but it was the beginning of what turned out to be, you know, almost a decade of non-stop, you know, violence and dramatic events and turbulence. i say in the introduction to a previous book i wrote that i thought i was moving to india to cover the stock market and bollywood and hindu festivals and it never happened. i simply never was able to go back and do that because i was spending all my time covering wars and conflicts in pakistan and afghanistan. host: how many total years at "the washington post"? guest: 17. host: how many times have you been to pakistan and how long have you lived there? guest: gosh. i've been there many times, between 1998 and now. i mean, i couldn't -- i don't know, 50. i couldn't really say.
8:10 pm
i've lived there for chunks of time, usually three to six months at a time, and then i've -- what i did for many years was i sort of commuted between kabul and islamabad so i was covering both places often but i didn't live there as a resident ever. host: back in 2007, you talked to peter slen of this network and i want to run a short clip. >> a group of us crossed the border and were trying to get to the capital, kabul, in a convoy of cars and the car closest to us was probably 500 yards ahead on the highway. we really couldn't see it very well. but all of a sudden we saw commotion going on, we heard sounds and sawdust and all of a sudden the driver came around and was rushing back towards us in the car and screaming at us that we should leave so we all turned around and followed him back at 100 miles an hour to the town we'd come from and then he got out of the car and told us
8:11 pm
that gunmen appeared out of the hills and had shot to death his two passengers who were both foreign journalists and the two passengers in the car ahead of him that were also foreign journalists and if we hadn't been 500 yards behind them, i'm pretty sure we wouldn't be here today. host: what was your reaction when that happened? how did you feel about that? is that the only time that you've come close to getting blown up over there? guest: i've had a number of, you know, scary things happen to me. i've been a foreign correspondent off and on for a very long time. and i've had some terrifying incidents with mobs. i'm very afraid of mobs, not because they're angry at me, but because they're angry at the world and you can get trampled. terrible things can happen in mobs. i've been, you know, in situations of crossfire in
8:12 pm
different countries -- iraq was very frightening. i was there several times and went out on a number of patrols with marines and i think that was the most scared i ever was because there were people shooting at us. so, you know, i think i have nine lives. it's really been extraordinary that i've come through it ok. i know i've had a number of colleagues from many countries who have been killed. some i've known quite well. one of my best friends was a journalist killed in iraq, a colleague of mine from the "boston globe." so it's something i think about a lot. you asked about that moment, which i didn't really answer, but there's been a number of those moments when i realized that, you know, i was very lucky to be alive. host: did you ever say, it's time to give this up? guest: not really. i've been feeling lately that it was time to come back and spend
8:13 pm
some more time at home. my parents are getting older and i feel i haven't spent enough time with them and i'd like to do that for the next few months. i think it's time to do that. but i will never get over the bug of wanting to be abroad, wanting to deal with issues of life and death, conflict and hardship. it's what i care about. host: where did you grow up? guest: connecticut. host: where? guest: greenwich. host: how long did you live there? guest: i guess until i went away to college. host: if about you're creating a profile of someone who wants to be a foreign correspondent dodging bullets, greenwich wouldn't be the place you would come from. know. i don't i mean, i've known hundreds of foreign correspondents in my career, a number of them came from, you know, privileged backgrounds, went to good colleges, as i did, were inspired by teachers and
8:14 pm
professors as i was, were the editor of their high school paper, were an editor of their college paper, all of which i was. so it's really journalism that has always attracted me and pulled me and inspired me. and originally, i thought i would be a domestic journalist. my bible as a young person was "let us now praise famous men" and that's what i wanted to do as a young journalist. i wanted to travel all over the united states and find people struggling and write about them and photograph them. i got into international journalism almost by accident. it came along as an opportunity and i started traveling and just became enthralled with the notion of, here i am, a witness, privileged to be a witness, one of the few western witnesses to
8:15 pm
an earthquake, a cyclone, a revolution, an election in a difficult place, to meet world leaders who were iconic, to be part of these extraordinary struggles that take place across the globe but which most people in america don't really have a chance to find out about. they may see 30 seconds on the tv, but we, the actual people wearing the sneakers and carrying the backpacks, we get to go in and spend time finding out what's really going on and to me, as i said in my previous book, i still can't believe i get paid to do that. host: what was your university? guest: i went to brown. host: what about your parents? what did they do? guest: my dad was an executive at i.b.m. and my mother was a fashion designer. host: do you remember when you first got this interest and who led you to it? guest: it was my ninth grade english teacher. my sixth grade english teacher and ninth grade english teacher
8:16 pm
were the two people that absolutely inspired me and steered me towards becoming a writer and a journalist and i dedicated my last book to my ninth grade english teacher, who is now dead. he not only taught me, he had gone to e.a.o. and he'd decided to become a teacher of young people, not of older ones, because it was really his passion. so, i mean, he saw that i wanted to write and knew how to write and really encouraged me and inspired me and long after i finished that school, for years we corresponded and i still have all his letters. host: let me go back to your book and read a quote from page 238 of your book. "it also says a great deal about failure of decades of american financial assistance. educational opportunities, cultural appeal, and strategic alliances, to a dozen u.s. administrations from the 1950's
8:17 pm
to the present to overcome the deep seated suspicions shared by a majority of pakistanis that the united states and its western allies are out to destroy their religion, trample on their sovereignty and seize their nuclear arsenal." break that paragraph down. guest: it's one of the great sort of contradictions of our time and of that region. i mean, pakistan and the united states have been strategic allies for many, many years. they've had close relationships for many years. they worked closely together in the 1980's to defeat the soviet union and afghanistan. they are now partners in the war on terror. i can remember years ago standing out, when you were still allowed to go near the u.s. embassy, i remember years ago going to the u.s. embassy.
8:18 pm
there was a parking lot outside it and the lines for visas would be hundreds and hundreds of people waiting all day in lines for visas. everybody wanted to go there. they wanted to study there, they wanted to get advanced degrees there. host: here in the united states? guest: i'm talking about the u.s. embassy in islamabad, pakistan. it has always been a great of any pakistani who could to get to the united states to study, to work, to get a higher degree, to find opportunities that they couldn't find at home. so the relationship is old and solid and constant. but what's happened in the past, i mean, it's really been about 25 years, but particularly in the past five to 10 years, is that it's changed, and what started changing it was the fact that after the soviets were defeated in afghanistan in 1989, the united states basically sort
8:19 pm
of dropped pakistan and sort of the aid was cut off, interest was lost, there was no longer the soviet threat. so pakistanis felt very abandoned by the united states and they'll tell you this all the time. and then more recently when you had 9/11 you had the u.s. invasion of iraq, you had u.s. support for israel, obviously. what started happening was that religious organizations and leaders in pakistan started really focusing on the bad side of the relationship and started, you know, i used to go and listen to these preachers on fridays preaching these sermons and saying that america is out to destroy islam, they're attacking iraq, they're attacking afghanistan, they're attacking chechnya, they want to destroy israel. so this haranguing from particularly religious leaders but also opinion makers of other kinds, has really filtered through the populace, so over
8:20 pm
these recent years, people have felt more and more alienated from the united states and more and more threatened by it, i think, inaccurately, but the feeling is very deep there. and it's shown in all the opinion polls that have been done. and then even more recently, you've had this campaign of drone attacks, these unmanned predator planes with different names but they basically are sent over the border from afghanistan to attack, to do targeted missile strikes on suspected islamic militants who live in the no-man's land, the border area between afghanistan and pakistan and even though most of these drone attacks are seen and heard by very few people and they're not on the nightly news because they're invisible in a sense, but psychologically, they have really incensed the populace and they've really heightened this resentment of american, perceived american aggression
8:21 pm
against pakistan. host: i want to show you a picture in your book. who took the pictures in your book? guest: me. host: in color. guest: yes, the reproduction is lovely. a picture of some young fellas in lahore, you say, and you say also in your book you've been in as many as 10 madrassas. explain the memorizing of the koran and the kind of education these young guys are getting. guest: it depends on the sort of where the seminary is on the religious spectrum. some of them are very harsh and extreme in what they're teaching. others are much more moderate in their vision for islam. they're not all bad and they're not all draconian in their teaching, but basically they all teach one thing, which is you learn to recite the koran by heart and you're also taught
8:22 pm
other aspects of other islamic -- we're now talking about sunni islam here for the most part. so you're taught other elements of islamic liturgy and philosophy, the sayings of the prophet and his companions. there's a vast body of literature beyond the koran that they're taught. so it's very much sort of 90% of it is all about religion. now, in more recent years, there's been pressure on these organizations to introduce other topics such as math, science, some even have computers now. some of them are teaching modern languages but that's not why they were set up. they were set up to indoctrinate students in islam. host: there's another photo of young shiite muslim men in lahore whipping themselves with chains. weave we've seen that from time to time.
8:23 pm
what is this about? guest: the shiites, who are a minority, but a large minority in pakistan. they don't dominate but have quite a bit of influence, and their beliefs are, in some areas, quite different than those of sunni muslims and as you know this has caused enormous conflict in other countries, as well. but what you're seeing in that photograph is a ritual that's quite controversial in pakistan during the festival of mohram in which shiites recall the death of hussein, the nephew of the prophet, in a battle of hundreds of years ago, and they commemorate this every year during this festival of mohram and on the 10th day of the festival, young men and boys come out on the streets and flagellate themselves in different ways as a kind of mourning ritual and it's a very
8:24 pm
emotional, it's a very deep, deep kind of experience that they have. and it's shocking to western audiences and it's not approved of by many sunnis, but generally speaking, the sect do tolerate each other, do get along. there have been conflicts and battles in some areas but there are so many of them, you know, they can't just be written off as this weird group. host: back to the madrassas and the wahabis, you point out in your book that the saudis and the united arab emirates fund these and you say there are 20,000 seminaries in the country of pakistan. why are the saudis funding these? guest: this, again, goes back to the era of the war between the
8:25 pm
soviet union and afghanistan. so the 1980's, you know, pakistan has a long, long tradition of being a very moderate muslim country, a very moderate, very tolerant. many people go to shrines, beautiful oasis of mystical communion with god. their tradition is what we call south asian version of islam, a peaceful, non-aggressive. what happened during the war with afghanistan, sorry, the war against thean soviet union, is that you started attracting more extreme versions of islam, more extreme sects. osama bin laden was a saudi who was -- was instrumental in bringing thousands of non-afghans, and non-pakistanis to fight what they called a holy war in afghanistan. that was the beginning of it. and after the war ended, a lot
8:26 pm
of these people hung around and what happened is that the saudis, the middle eastern, more fundamentalist muslim countries governments and groups saw it as an opportunity to have influence in the region, so they began supporting and building these religious seminaries, particularly in the northwest of pakistan where they were sending fighters into afghanistan to fight, and then, of course, they just stayed open and they started to multiply and they became more popular and you had at least two major political/religious parties in pakistan that also had their own versions of these seminaries and began to proliferate. so it's been growing as a counter influence and you can call it sort of a middle eastern version of islam, has been growing quite prolifically in
8:27 pm
the past 20 years and is becoming -- its influence is becoming much stronger than it ever was before. people used to say in pakistan, oh, they're just extremists, they'll never be elected to parliament, they're not respected, they're sort of fringe people. but that is definitely changing now. host: what was your point of putting the photograph in of the young kids with the toy guns? guest: my point was -- that picture was taken in swatt, an area taken over by the taliban and the army pushed them back out and the army took thrus to visit the area. the point of that photograph was to show that, you know, what was once a very, as i said, moderate, peaceful, agricultural region, had really become a gun culture and now there are guns all over pakistan. and these islamic groups that are now threatening both the state of pakistan as well as their neighbors, you know, there
8:28 pm
millions of weapons in that country. host: you point out in the book, one of the polls show 17% of respondents in pakistan found america to be a favorable country. i haven't seen it but i suspect it's the same way going the other way after all this. and you have to ask, why are we spending billions and billions and billions of dollars from us to pakistan, and how much -- have you ever totaled up the figure from the beginning? guest: i've heard a lot of different figures over the years and some of it's military, some is economic. there have been different sources of aid in different amounts but certainly in the many billions but actually what's happening right now is the opposite. right now, aid is being cut off, suspended, delayed. the tensions between the two countries are very high right now and so what once used to be a pretty much open, you know, open font of largess is no longer. and i think that's going to be
8:29 pm
that way for quite some time. the relationship is very damaged right now, especially in the military and intelligence establishments because of all that's gone on. so i think that aid is not going to be as forthcoming as it has been. hand, i want to mention the floods. there were these horrible floods -- sorry, in pakistan last year, which inspired enormous outpouring of sympathy from pakistanis and from people in the west and all over the world. so that was sort of a surge of aid but that was very specific and that was very much humanitarian aid to go to farmers that were flooded out. host: what was the impact on the pakistanis after the united states took out osama bin laden? guest: it's been a complicated time. i mean, you know, the view of pakistanis of that incident was very different from what an american's view would be. nobody was congratulating anybody. it was seen as -- principally
8:30 pm
seen as a huge blow to the self image and the prestige of the military establishment. as you know, osama was found and killed living in a city which was essentially a military city, he was less than a mile from pakistan's equivalent of west point. there's a lot of weapons production in that area. it's a highly militarized area so the only question that could be asked was, if they knew, you know, they were colluding with the world's most-wanted terrorist against an ally. if they didn't know, then they're grossly incompetent, so it didn't give them a lot of good choices. so the army, which has always been seen as the most respected and most effective functioning institution in pakistan, this was an enormous blow to its ego credibility and people were shocked and upset but not
8:31 pm
because of him being killed, but because of how it made them look. host: have you been there since that time? guest: i have. host: what did you find that had changed since the last time you were there? guest: you know, i guess the simplest way to put it is that the -- what you were describing or we were talking about a little bit earlier about sort of the attitudes. you can see a sea change in attitudes towards the united states, towards the government there. people are very frustrated, very alienated, they're confused, and people are turning much more towards religion and something else that happened this spring that wasn't as famous as the osama incident, was that two leaders in pakistan, who either spoke out for or were members of the christian minority, were
8:32 pm
assassinated. and this was especially shocking because within the pakistani context, i mean, osama bin laden was a foreigner killed by foreigners. these two men, one of them, governor of punjab, and the other, a christian member of the federal cabinet, were assassinated by pakistanis. and so i spent quite a bit of time meeting people, talking to people, going to find out about this. and what was really shocking to me and to many people in pakistan was that these assassinations were welcomed, were congratulated by many pakistanis. these are not terrorists, not al qaeda, not taliban, but ordinary pakistanis who feel that their religion is threatened, that the country's becoming too secular, that the islamic values are under attack,
8:33 pm
and that blasphemy, anything that insults the prophet or islam, is something to be defended with your life. this is an incredibly emotional feeling that many pakistanis and in the case of both of the people that were accessinated, they were both in favor of modifying the laws against blas fame. if i sat here and insulted the prophet, i could be condemned to death. even if i said he was ugly. it's a very, very draconian law and many people feel it should be modified but as a result of the popular response to the assassinations, the politicians backed off and something will change that blasphemy law now. so you have increasing emotionalism and empowerment of these more extreme views about
8:34 pm
islam. i'm not talking about terrorists, just ordinary people who just feel somehow that their faith is under attack. host: is there a difference how women think of islam and how men do? guest: -- host: and add to that, where's the woman's place in pakistan? guest: i would say that i can't exactly answer the question about how women versus men feel about islam, but i can describe sort of the differences in their lives. in the cities, the big cities, there are plenty of professional women who go to high school, go to college. there are women lawyers, lots of women lawyers, there are women doctors, all sorts of women professionals, there are women in parliament, there are women judges at these high levels of society, women live very
8:35 pm
and privileged lives. in the countryside, especially certain areas of the countryside, women basically have no rights at all and they live very much under the thumb of the male elders of their tribe, the male members of their families. there are terrible, terrible incidents that take place in these tribal, these male tribal councils, especially in cases of elopement. if a young woman runs away with a young man, they can be brought back to the village and be stoned to death with all their male relatives participating in this. so in many cases that i've written about and others have written about over the years, if you are a peasant woman in a small village in many parts of pakistan, as is also true in
8:36 pm
afghanistan, if you commit adultery or run away with a boy or do something that's sort of beyond the bounds of what's allowed by your family, you can be killed, and there's nothing to be done about it. host: when you talk to official americans involved in the process of our relationship with pakistan and afghanistan, what makes -- what do they really think they can accomplish? we've spent, as you know, a trillion dollars or more over in that part of the world. are we accomplishing anything? guest: it's -- my opinion on that, it's evolving. i used to be more optimistic. i used to think that we were getting closer and that we were helping. i'm thinking more of afghanistan now when you ask the question, because i went to afghanistan sort of at the beginning, when
8:37 pm
the taliban were being overthrown and there was that enormous hope that was created and excitement and anticipation of building a new democracy, huge amounts of money were pouring in, and what's happened over time is that there's been so much corruption and so much misuse of money and so many terrible political decisions, there's been enormous amount of disillusionment and money has havepeared and leaders turned out to be bad leaders so there are a lot of bad feelings now. pakistan is a bigger country, a more established country and more modern. it has superhighways, factories, a huge army, a parliament. it's a functioning country, not a failed state as i say in the book. i disagree with those who say it's a failed state. but the disappointment in pakistan that many, many people feel and that i reflect in the book, is that unlike afghanistan which essentially started from
8:38 pm
nowhere, pakistan had so much to lose. i mean, pakistan is a country that could be as successful, as dynamic, as evolving as india or bangladesh or turkey or indonesia or mexico. it has all the potential in the world. and what's so sad is that for various reasons which you could up basically as failures of leadership, it hasn't lived up to those hopes. host: five years into our presences in afghanistan, you were in our call-in show talking about the relationship between afghanistan and pakistan. let's watch this. >> historically, a border was artificially created by the british over a century ago between pakistan and afghanistan and it was really an artificial border because the same tribes live on both sides and they do to this day so you have already a complicated situation there. you also have dreams by many of
8:39 pm
the ethnic pashtuns on the afghanistan side of taking over, of moving that border back towards punjab in the south so that all the pashtuns would have one land call pashtunistan which would be on both sides of the border. i don't think that's likely to happen but she's right when she writes this is one of the reasons it's been a safe haven for people like bin laden, presumably, and mullah omar because those tribal lands on sides of the border which are not controlled by armies, which are not controlled by police, which are self governing, are essentially tribal lands where foreigners can't go. the police don't go there, the army doesn't go there. host: is that the area where everybody is saying osama bin laden was? guest: yes. there are the tribal agencies, called agencies for some reason. there are seven of them stretching along the afghan-pakistan border and in
8:40 pm
addition to many people thinking osama was there, there have been thousands of islamic militants who have taken refuge there from afghanistan over the years and more recently there have been more thousands of pakistani islamic militants who have sort of moved into that area and made it like a bastion of like a sanctuary for them to sort of operate. and the pakistani army has resisted for a long time going in there and trying to do anything because these are semi autonomous regions and the army really doesn't want to go in there. they finally did go in because it was beginning to spread. you were getting this militancy spilling out of the tribal areas and into the surrounding areas, swat and bonir being the main ones where the taliban were trying to take over, coming closer and closer, and at one point -- i can't remember, i guess it was the spring of 2008 or 2009, i can't remember.
8:41 pm
they were coming within 60 miles of the capital and once people realized that, once people realized that the taliban, really -- there were mountains in between, but still, people were saying, oh, my gosh, they're going to start coming into punjab so people got very worried about it, and then the army did go in and did a major operation and regained control of swatt but the tribal areas themselves remain sanctuaries for, again, thousands of islamic militants, both pakistani and afghan. book is this for you? guest: my third. host: and the photograph on top is not yours but the one on the bottom is? guest: yes. host: did you choose both of those photos? guest: i met with the publisher, the editors and the photo editors of the book and i had given them about 100 pictures of mine and they chose about 30 for the book, as well as this one on
8:42 pm
the cover. host: whose idea it was to use one word for your chapter headings? guest: not all of them. they're all my chapter titles and i think all but two or three of them are one word. it was mine. have the flood, sahib, honor, hate, khaki, talibanization, the siege, the girl from swatt, justice, drones, the murder of democracy and your epilogue. which one of those was the hardest to write? guest: chapters or titles? host: which chapter and why? guest: probably the chapter on the army because, you know, the army is a very self contained institution that does not -- that wants to control its image very much, and within that is the intelligence establishment which even more so wants to control information about its activities. and so all the other chapters
8:43 pm
were based on numerous interviews with all kinds of people, you know, from peasants to shopkeepers to lawyers to doctors to all sorts of people, but the chapter on the army and intelligence agencies, you know, you don't get that kind of access. you can't sort of go talk to a soldier, for example. so it really had to come from, you know, other kinds of interviews, from local press sources, and from available information. so it was harder to write an onhoritative chapter institutions to which i had less access. host: what's the point of the chopping block picture? guest: the beutjer? it was a photograph i liked because it showed daily life and the publisher seemed to like it a lot. it wasn't one i would have chosen to highlight. it was self just showing a man doing a very simple job which is very typical of what somebody would do in a place like that. host: is that lamb?
8:44 pm
guest: yes. host: on a day-to-day basis, what kind of food do they eat in pakistan? guest: if you're very poor in pakistan, which many people are, you mostly eat wheat, like pancakes, fried or cooked in hot oil, and then you use them to scoop little stews made of lentils, like lentil soup and they put hot chili peppers in it to give it flavor so there are a lot of people who live on that food, sometimes rice, as well. and then tea with lots of sugar. sugar is a huge component of the diet to give people energy. but there are a lot of people that don't eat meat. there are a lot of people that don't get fruit or eggs. there are not many starving people in pakistan. pakistan can feed itself and pakistan actually exports wheat and other products, but there are a lot of people that cannot afford a healthy diet.
8:45 pm
host: are the 170 million plus people that live there, how many are categorized as poor? guest: easily two-thirds, probably closer to three-quarters. i mean, pakistan has a very wealthy but very small elite. it has a fast growing middle class but that's mostly confined to the cities like karachi, lahore. again, that's in the millions but still relatively small. you have about two-thirds of the populace -- obviously i don't have the numbers in front of me -- living in rural villages and working the land and there are many millions of people that own nothing, no land, they work as farm laborers, tenant farmers, sometimes they're paid in crops rather than in cash and many of them have never been to school. host: so this photograph, title, always moving, reflects what you would see in most of the people in pakistan? guest: no.
8:46 pm
that particular photograph was of a landless peasant family, basically nomads and they go from place to place looking for day labor in the fields. that's not a huge majority. there are probably hundreds of thousands of them, but the great majority of people who work and live in the fields in pakistan are very much rooted to their villages and will stay there forever and will go back generations. host: chapter 9 is called justice. and i picked out this couple of paragraphs -- i mean, couple of sentences, and wanted you to explain it. you're talking about the district courts.
8:47 pm
when i read that, i thought, for a country that is so religious and so passionate about their being muslim, this defies understanding, if truth doesn't matter and all this stuff. explain. guest: it's a very good question that you raise. i mean, how can pakistan be so, as you say, so devoted to its majority faith, which is islam, and at the same time be so famously corrupt, be so famously injust? and one of the things that makes people pull toward extreme versions of islam is the sense of injustice, that the system doesn't provide justice. there is this vast system of state courts -- prosecutors, defenders, all levels of courts all over the country. this was an administrative system set up under british rule. the supreme court, you know, is
8:48 pm
respectable elders serve on the supreme court. it's been in existence since the 1950's. it's a country that has all the trappings of a functioning justice system. but in practice, and in real daily life, the problem of corruption and of political influence are so powerful that justice cannot function. and so what you find, in case after case after case, is that nobody expects that the guilty person will be found guilty and the innocent person will be found innocent. everyone expects that if there's a dispute where it's a murder or a land dispute or whatever. everyone expects that the party with the greater political strings to pull will win. that's just assumed by everybody involved. so if you have stolen someone's cow and the person whose cow you
8:49 pm
stole goes to court to get you to pay back for the cow, what will happen is, people will start making phone calls and both families will call their local provincial council representative and he might call the member of parliament. and then politicians on both sides will call the local police chief and they'll sort of make deals. so it's all about making deals. and i've sat in on so many cases and trials where i realized that we would never know what happened because nobody would tell the truth because it was all about the influence and the pressure being brought to bear on everyone involved. back to a question i asked earlier. what makes us, as a country, think we can impact this, change it? if afghanistan is farther behind than pakistan is, and how much time have you spent in afghanistan? guest: i spent a great deal of time in afghanistan. i basically lived there from the time that the taliban fell up
8:50 pm
through the end of 2005. so i've lived there for long periods of time and spent a great deal of time there. as i mentioned earlier, pakistan is a larger, more sophisticated, you know, more structured country. and actually, i mean, i wouldn't agree that america has been trying to change pakistan or influence pakistan. nowhere near to the degree that it's had a mission to try to help afghanistan sort of rebuild itself after this long period of war and conflict. there were those who said we shouldn't be nation building, we're only going after osama and all that, but essentially, the mission there has been for the past almost 10 years to build and hopefully influence that country. pakistan, unlike afghanistan, because it's so big and has such a large and old establishment, is very, very sensitive about foreign intervention and foreign influence. for example, no military bases, foreign military bases are
8:51 pm
there. no foreign military troops are there. there are very few americans in pakistan, very few, very few westerners in pakistan. most of those are diplomats or businessmen. it's a country that is extremely proud of and defensive about its sovereignty. so it's a hard place to influence in that sense. host: are there more pakistanis in this country studying than there are americans in pakistan living? guest: by far. there are probably half a million pakistanis living in the united states either as students or business people or immigrants or children of immigrants. about half a million. host: where would you find in the american government the person that has a clear understanding of why we're there both in afghanistan and pakistan and has been that way for years and they haven't changed, it's not emotional, and there is a plan? where do you go to find that person?
8:52 pm
guest: i would say, i mean, maybe this is just the first thing coming into my head, but senator kerry and senator lugar who -- and there were others involved, too, who put together this visit aid package, economic aid package for pakistan several years ago and came to pakistan a number of times. i mean, i think they had and presumably still have, although now things are changing quickly, a very clear and long-term notion of what they hoped would be a positive, constructive use of american aid and influence in pakistan. i mean, these are people that care a lot about the country, there have been numbers of times, and were able to forge this consensus to bring in an unprecedented -- unprecedented amount of economic aid. but again, events over the last year or two have really undercut that and i think that now things
8:53 pm
are quite different. host: what's your own suspicion about who knew about osama bin who didn't? guest: i've been asked this question a lot and of course i have no direct knowledge. so my answer is really speculative. i would be very surprised if senior military and intelligence officials knew that he was there. and the reason, the only reason i don't think they knew is because it was so humiliating to them when he was found. i don't think they would have risked it. i think that they knew how high the stakes were. here they were cooperating with the americans, going after al qaeda suspects, successfully proud of their track record cooperating with the united states and british and others on tracking down al qaeda suspects. this just doesn't make sense. it didn't make sense that they would keep him, unless you believe the conspiracy theory that they kept him alive to get our money for their military
8:54 pm
tours which some people do believe. host: go back to the area you were describing on our program in 2006 between afghanistan and pakistan. has the american military been in there? guest: no. there have been a number of incidents of sort of cross-border skirmishes in which american troops have been, either have come close to the border or come close to it a little bit. each time pakistan got very upset. the reason that the c.i.a. has launched the campaign of drone attacks over the past several years is because american troops are not allowed in pakistan. host: the reason i ask you that question, we spend all this money in afghanistan, we're spending $100 billion there and have troops there. our troops aren't going in there and we're allegedly over there to try to get the taliban or al qaeda or whatever it is, trying to prevent them from training, we're leaving this whole area open where they could
8:55 pm
be training in the future and all of our efforts in both afghanistan and pakistan have been for nought. guest: well, i don't think that's quite true. the drone campaign has been quite successful. people are afraid of them. the bad guys are afraid of the drones. it does work when you have planes coming out of the sky with missiles and very real pointed information about what's on the ground, it's terrifying. and we know that. we've heard that, people have said it, people have given interviews talking about how scary it is. so that's definitely something that even though it's very unpopular, is also quite effective. and, you know, also, you know, even though i said earlier that pakistanis sort of the religious center of gravity is shifting towards a more emotional, more defensive, more religious way of thinking, that doesn't mean that people support the taliban. it doesn't mean that people support the bad guys. so, you know, up until very
8:56 pm
recently, sort of the momentum was going the other way and the only reason the army wasn't going into some of the areas, because they didn't want to have -- loose more men. host: i am going to jump from one not so pleasant topic to another one i think you'll find much more pleasant. your picture in the back shows you with a dog and then you also have been responsible for starting a foundation that has something to do with stray animals in pakistan. explain this. guest: actually, it's afghanistan. yes, when i was living in afghanistan, i'm an animal lover and have been my whole life. but afghanistan, when i started spending a lot of time there, as in most poor countries, there were plenty of animals tharpe homeless and hungry and diseased and getting hit by cars. but there was no place -- nowhere to take them, no clinic, no vet, no nothing. and at the same time there were a lot of soldiers, americans, canadians, british, who wanted
8:57 pm
to adopt animals that they found, dogs and cats in the war zone. so i started trying to help them just by keeping them in my office and taking them off the streets and trying to help them but of course it was just not possible. i simply couldn't handle it. so i decided to set up a program here in the united states that would support building a real shelter and clinic for small animals which we did. host: what's that picture? the early,'s one of early dogs we helped. she had been rescued by, i think it was a soldier, her name is ria. she had been rescued by a soldier, a very typical looking afghan dog and we helped him rescue her, vaccinate her, get her in good health and then we arranged to send her home to the united states. host: we're out of time and just getting started, too. thank you, pamela constable. your book is, "playing with
8:58 pm
fire: pakistan at war with itself." we appreciate you coming and spending time with us. guest: you're very welcome. [captions performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> for a d.v.d. copy of this program, call 1-877-662-7726. for free trips -- transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q- q-and-a.org. >> next, british prime minister david cameron and opposition leader ed millabank talk about the recent riots and a chamber
8:59 pm
of commerce event and another chance to see q& a. monday on "washington journal," bill adair, after that, susan glasser on the collapse of the soviet union and its relevance in today's time. later, a look at how medicare has changed over the last 45 years with marilyn serafini of kaiser health news. british prime minister david cameron blames the recent riots in england on a broken society, irresponsibility, and moral collapse. at a youth center in his parliamentary district, he discussed the need for a national dialogue on the riots and pledged to review policies targeting troubled families. across england, approximately
135 Views
IN COLLECTIONS
CSPAN Television Archive Television Archive News Search ServiceUploaded by TV Archive on