Global Water Trends Afloat Pakistan’s Water Crisis

Water is necessary for human survival and development while water is a scarce good. Conclusively lack of water hinders development and also dignified life. This assessment is obvious from global trends, as well as from Pakistan’s national and local struggles for better access to water.

According to figures available by the United Nations and other international organizations, 1.1bn people are devoid of sufficient access to water, and 2.4bn people have to live with no sufficient sanitation. In keeping to current trends the projection is that about 3bn people of a population of 8.5bn will experience water shortage by 2025. 83% of them will belong to developing countries, more often than not in rural areas where even today now and then only 20% of the population have contact with sufficient water supply. This definite lack of water is contrasting to the academic conclusion that there is enough ground water in all regions of the world to certify plenty of water supplies for all people. Only 6% of global freshwater is used by households, while 20% is utilized industry and another 70% by agriculture. The finale drawn from these framework conditions is that water shortage and the unequal distribution of water are global problems rather than regional problems that need international solutions.

Inadequate supply of drinking water is the foremost cause of diseases in developing countries. Already in 1997, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development maintained that 2.3bn people suffer from diseases rooted in unsatisfactory water provision and quality. More than five years later, it was anticipated that 2.4bn people were suffering from water related diseases, and the World Health Organization reckons that 80% of all infections are traceable to poor water conditions. 5,483 people die daily of water caused diarrhea – 90 percent are children under five. Taking into credit all water linked diseases and deaths, international organizations estimated in 2001 that 2,213,000 people died because of derisory water supply – ten times more than the tsunami disaster caused in December 2004.

In 1995, UNDP considered Pakistan as country having among the highest water potential per person out of 130 countries that should severely perk up its water situation to prevail over the present crisis and prevent future ones. Obviously, Pakistan failed to make any progress. Subsequently in 2003, the United Nations dropped Pakistan’s ranking, because its overall renewable water resources per capita per year have been predicted as 114th out of 180 countries.

Only three percent of Pakistan’s sweet water resources are consumed for household purposes and drinking. Therefore the dispute on access to water in Pakistan is subjugated by irrigation disagreements, mega-projects of dams and canals, and climate modifications. The focal point is on water for agriculture rather than for people. This production oriented outlook continues in the debate about groundwater use and withdrawal. It is probable that surface water meets only 75-80 percent of crop water requirements. As a result, groundwater is merely seen as a reserve water resource for irrigation and food production, as well as the major factor for the growth of agricultural production in the late 20th century. With regard to the availability of safe and sufficient drinking water, Pakistan lacks reliable statistics. While data about the availability of water and field studies about water quality exist, there is no sufficient data that take both into account. To some extent it is recognized that lacking safe and sufficient drinking water is not a geographical but social problem.

Official records about the access to drinking water vary between 60 and 90 percent of households. In rural areas a decline of households with access to water is documented; figures about accessibility differ between 10 and 53 percent. In addition, having access to water in Pakistan is not parallel to access to safe and sufficient water supply. Pakistan’s water quality ranks as 80th out of 122 nations. The Pakistan Council of Research and Water Resources (PCRWR) estimate that approximately 50 percent of urban water supply is insufficient for drinking and personal use. This research takes information about availability and quality into relation and concludes that an average of 25.61 percent of Pakistan’s 159 million inhabitants have access to safe and sufficient drinking water. This computation shows that in rural areas only 23.5 percent and in urban areas approximately 30 percent can use their source of water without putting at risk their health. These results come close to a conclusion by independent experts who predicted that already in 2001, with prevailing consumption rates and a population growth of 4 million people per year, one out of three people in Pakistan would face dangerous shortages of water, “threatening their very survival”.

Deficient water supply is primarily a local issue rooted in national omissions to address the needs of the people in a sufficient manner. In order to address these issues properly, international advice, cooperation and standard-setting is needed. Human rights and human development are two sides of the same coin that is titled as water crisis. Pakistan spends officially approximately 80 times more into its military than on the provision of water and sufficient sanitation facilities to its people.

In the face of the minimal practical impact of the great number of world conferences, declarations and action programs, this dialogue has sensitized governments and international actors with respect to the issue of water shortage and the human right to water. Because of this sensitization, the institutions, bodies and agencies of the United Nations have been finally talking about the issue of water shortage increasingly from the standpoint of other dying out human rights, such as the right to food, health, shelter, education and development.

Does Google Make Us Stupid?

by Janna Quitney Anderson, Elon University, and Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project
February 19, 2010

From: To:

Respondents to the fourth "Future of the Internet" survey, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center, were asked to consider the future of the internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the likely innovation that will occur. The survey required them to assess 10 different "tension pairs" - each pair offering two different 2020 scenarios with the same overall theme and opposite outcomes - and to select the one most likely choice of two statements. Although a wide range of opinion from experts, organizations, and interested institutions was sought, this survey, fielded from Dec. 2, 2009 to Jan. 11, 2010, should not be taken as a representative canvassing of internet experts. By design, the survey was an "opt in," self-selecting effort.

Among the issues addressed in the survey was the provocative question raised by eminent tech scholar Nicholas Carr in a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly magazine in the summer of 2008¹: "Is Google Making us Stupid?" Carr argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. "I'm not thinking the way I used to," he wrote, in part because he is becoming a skimming, browsing reader, rather than a deep and engaged reader. "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.... If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture."

Jamais Cascio, an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, challenged Carr in a subsequent article in the Atlantic Monthly. Cascio made the case that the array of problems facing humanity - the end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, among others - will force us to get smarter if we are to survive. "Most people don't realize that this process is already under way," he wrote. "In fact, it's happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It's visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity." He argued that while the proliferation of technology and media can challenge humans' capacity to concentrate there were signs that we are developing "fluid intelligence-the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge." He also expressed hope that techies will develop tools to help people find and assess information smartly.

With that as backdrop, respondents were asked to indicate which of two statements best reflected their view on Google's effect on intelligence. The chart shows the distribution of responses to the paired statements. The first column covers the answers of 371 longtime experts who have regularly participated in these surveys. The second column covers the answers of all the respondents, including the 524 who were recruited by other experts or by their association with the Pew Internet Project. As shown, 76% of the experts agreed with the statement, "By 2020, people's use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid."

Respondents were also asked to "share your view of the internet's influence on the future of human intelligence in 2020 -- what is likely to stay the same and what will be different in the way human intellect evolves?" What follows is a selection of the hundreds of written elaborations and some of the recurring themes in those answers:

Nicholas Carr and Google staffers have their say:

• "I feel compelled to agree with myself. But I would add that the Net's effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking."-- Nicholas Carr

• "My conclusion is that when the only information on a topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist. I would also like to say that Carr has it mostly backwards when he says that Google is built on the principles of Taylorism [the institution of time-management and worker-activity standards in industrial settings]. Taylorism shifts responsibility from worker to management, institutes a standard method for each job, and selects workers with skills unique for a specific job. Google does the opposite, shifting responsibility from management to the worker, encouraging creativity in each job, and encouraging workers to shift among many different roles in their career....Carr is of course right that Google thrives on understanding data. But making sense of data (both for Google internally and for its users) is not like building the same artifact over and over on an assembly line; rather it requires creativity, a mix of broad and deep knowledge, and a host of connections to other people. That is what Google is trying to facilitate." -- Peter Norvig, Google Research Director

• "Google will make us more informed. The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world." - Hal Varian, Google, chief economist

The resources of the internet and search engines will shift cognitive capacities. We won't have to remember as much, but we'll have to think harder and have better critical thinking and analytical skills. Less time devoted to memorization gives people more time to master those new skills.

• "Google allows us to be more creative in approaching problems and more integrative in our thinking. We spend less time trying to recall and more time generating solutions." -- Paul Jones, ibiblio, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• "Google will make us stupid and intelligent at the same time. In the future, we will live in a transparent 3D mobile media cloud that surrounds us everywhere. In this cloud, we will use intelligent machines, to whom we delegate both simple and complex tasks. Therefore, we will lose the skills we needed in the old days (e.g., reading paper maps while driving a car). But we will gain the skill to make better choices (e.g., knowing to choose the mortgage that is best for you instead of best for the bank). All in all, I think the gains outweigh the losses." -- Marcel Bullinga, Dutch Futurist at futurecheck.com

• "I think that certain tasks will be 'offloaded' to Google or other Internet services rather than performed in the mind, especially remembering minor details. But really, that is a role that paper has taken over many centuries: did Gutenberg make us stupid? On the other hand, the Internet is likely to be front-and-centre in any developments related to improvements in neuroscience and human cognition research." -- Dean Bubley, wireless industry consultant

• "What the internet (here subsumed tongue-in-cheek under "Google") does is to support SOME parts of human intelligence, such as analysis, by REPLACING other parts such as memory. Thus, people will be more intelligent about, say, the logistics of moving around a geography because "Google" will remember the facts and relationships of various locations on their behalf. People will be better able to compare the revolutions of 1848 and 1789 because "Google" will remind them of all the details as needed. This is the continuation ad infinitum of the process launched by abacuses and calculators: we have become more "stupid" by losing our arithmetic skills but more intelligent at evaluating numbers." -- Andreas Kluth, writer, Economist magazine

• "It's a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things ('more stupid') requiring rote memory of information that is now available though Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information ('more intelligent')." -- Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada

• "The new learning system, more informal perhaps than formal, will eventually win since we must use technology to cause everyone to learn more, more economically and faster if everyone is to be economically productive and prosperous. Maintaining the status quo will only continue the existing win/lose society that we have with those who can learn in present school structure doing ok, while more and more students drop out, learn less, and fail to find a productive niche in the future." -- Ed Lyell, former member of the Colorado State Board of Education and Telecommunication Advisory Commission

• "The question is flawed: Google will make intelligence different. As Carr himself suggests, Plato argued that reading and writing would make us stupid, and from the perspective of a preliterate, he was correct. Holding in your head information that is easily discoverable on Google will no longer be a mark of intelligence, but a side-show act. Being able to quickly and effectively discover information and solve problems, rather than do it "in your head," will be the metric we use." -- Alex Halavais, vice president, Association of Internet Researchers

• "What Google does do is simply to enable us to shift certain tasks to the network -- we no longer need to rote-learn certain seldomly-used facts (the periodic table, the post code of Ballarat) if they're only a search away, for example. That's problematic, of course -- we put an awful amount of trust in places such as Wikipedia where such information is stored, and in search engines like Google through which we retrieve it -- but it doesn't make us stupid, any more than having access to a library (or in fact, access to writing) makes us stupid. That said, I don't know that the reverse is true, either: Google and the Net also don't automatically make us smarter. By 2020, we will have even more access to even more information, using even more sophisticated search and retrieval tools -- but how smartly we can make use of this potential depends on whether our media literacies and capacities have caught up, too." -- Axel Bruns, Associate Professor, Queensland University of Technology

• "My ability to do mental arithmetic is worse than my grandfather's because I grew up in an era with pervasive personal calculators.... I am not stupid compared to my grandfather, but I believe the development of my brain has been changed by the availability of technology. The same will happen (or is happening) as a result of the Googleization of knowledge. People are becoming used to bite sized chunks of information that are compiled and sorted by an algorithm. This must be having an impact on our brains, but it is too simplistic to say that we are becoming stupid as a result of Google." -- Robert Acklund, Australian National University

• "We become adept at using useful tools, and hence perfect new skills. Other skills may diminish. I agree with Carr that we may on the average become less patient, less willing to read through a long, linear text, but we may also become more adept at dealing with multiple factors.... Note that I said ‘less patient,' which is not the same as ‘lower IQ.' I suspect that emotional and personality changes will probably more marked than ‘intelligence' changes." -- Larry Press, California State University, Dominguz Hills

Technology isn't the problem here. It is people's inherent character traits. The internet and search engines just enable people to be more of what they already are. If they are motivated to learn and shrewd, they will use new tools to explore in exciting new ways. If they are lazy or incapable of concentrating, they will find new ways to be distracted and goof off.

• "The question is all about people's choices. If we value introspection as a road to insight, if we believe that long experience with issues contributes to good judgment on those issues, if we (in short) want knowledge that search engines don't give us, we'll maintain our depth of thinking and Google will only enhance it. There is a trend, of course, toward instant analysis and knee-jerk responses to events that degrades a lot of writing and discussion. We can't blame search engines for that.... What search engines do is provide more information, which we can use either to become dilettantes (Carr's worry) or to bolster our knowledge around the edges and do fact-checking while we rely mostly on information we've gained in more robust ways for our core analyses. Google frees the time we used to spend pulling together the last 10% of facts we need to complete our research. I read Carr's article when The Atlantic first published it, but I used a web search to pull it back up and review it before writing this response. Google is my friend." -- Andy Oram, editor and blogger, O'Reilly Media

• "Google isn't making us stupid -- but it is making many of us intellectually lazy. This has already become a big problem in university classrooms. For my undergrad majors in Communication Studies, Google may take over the hard work involved in finding good source material for written assignments. Unless pushed in the right direction, students will opt for the top 10 or 15 hits as their research strategy. And it's the students most in need of research training who are the least likely to avail themselves of more sophisticated tools like Google Scholar. Like other major technologies, Google's search functionality won't push the human intellect in one predetermined direction. It will reinforce certain dispositions in the end-user: stronger intellects will use Google as a creative tool, while others will let Google do the thinking for them." -- David Ellis, York University, Toronto

• "For people who are readers and who are willing to explore new sources and new arguments, we can only be made better by the kinds of searches we will be able to do. Of course, the kind of Googled future that I am concerned about is the one in which my every desire is anticipated, and my every fear avoided by my guardian Google. Even then, I might not be stupid, just not terribly interesting." -- Oscar Gandy, emeritus professor, University of Pennsylvania

• "I don't think having access to information can ever make anyone stupider. I don't think an adult's IQ can be influenced much either way by reading anything and I would guess that smart people will use the Internet for smart things and stupid people will use it for stupid things in the same way that smart people read literature and stupid people read crap fiction. On the whole, having easy access to more information will make society as a group smarter though." -- Sandra Kelly, market researcher, 3M Corporation

• "The story of humankind is that of work substitution and human enhancement. The Neolithic revolution brought the substitution of some human physical work by animal work. The Industrial revolution brought more substitution of human physical work by machine work. The Digital revolution is implying a significant substitution of human brain work by computers and ICTs in general. Whenever a substitution has taken place, men have been able to focus on more qualitative tasks, entering a virtuous cycle: the more qualitative the tasks, the more his intelligence develops; and the more intelligent he gets, more qualitative tasks he can perform.... As obesity might be the side-effect of physical work substitution by machines, mental laziness can become the watermark of mental work substitution by computers, thus having a negative effect instead of a positive one." -- Ismael Peña-Lopez, lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science

• "Well, of course, it depends on what one means by ‘stupid' -- I imagine that Google, and its as yet unimaginable new features and capabilities will both improve and decrease some of our human capabilities. Certainly it's much easier to find out stuff, including historical, accurate, and true stuff, as well as entertaining, ironic, and creative stuff. It's also making some folks lazier, less concerned about investing in the time and energy to arrive at conclusions, etc." -- Ron Rice, University of California, Santa Barbara

• "Nick [Carr] says, ‘Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.' Besides finding that a little hard to believe (I know Nick to be a deep diver, still), there is nothing about Google, or the Net, to keep anyone from diving -- and to depths that were not reachable before the Net came along."-- Doc Searls, co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto"

It's not Google's fault if users create stupid queries.

• "To be more precise, unthinking use of the Internet, and in particular untutored use of Google, has the ability to make us stupid, but that is not a foregone conclusion. More and more of us experience attention deficit, like Bruce Friedman in the Nicholas Carr article, but that alone does not stop us making good choices provided that the 'factoids' of information are sound that we use to make out decisions. The potential for stupidity comes where we rely on Google (or Yahoo, or Bing, or any engine) to provide relevant information in response to poorly constructed queries, frequently one-word queries, and then base decisions or conclusions on those returned items." -- Peter Griffiths, former Head of Information at the Home Office within the Office of the Chief Information Officer, United Kingdom

• "The problem isn't Google; it's what Google helps us find. For some, Google will let them find useless content that does not challenge their minds. But for others, Google will lead them to expect answers to questions, to explore the world, to see and think for themselves." -- Esther Dyson, longtime internet expert and investor

• "People are already using Google as an adjunct to their own memory. For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support, and Google comes through for me. Sometimes, I see I'm wrong, and I appreciate finding that out before I open my mouth." -- Craig Newmark, founder Craig's List

• "Google is a data access tool. Not all of that data is useful or correct. I suspect the amount of misleading data is increasing faster than the amount of correct data. There should also be a distinction made between data and information. Data is meaningless in the absence of an organizing context. That means that different people looking at the same data are likely to come to different conclusions. There is a big difference with what a world class artist can do with a paint brush as opposed to a monkey. In other words, the value of Google will depend on what the user brings to the game. The value of data is highly dependent on the quality of the question being asked." -- Robert Lunn, consultant, FocalPoint Analytics

The big struggle is over what kind of information Google and other search engines kick back to users. In the age of social media where users can be their own content creators it might get harder and harder to separate high-quality material from junk.

• "Access to more information isn't enough -- the information needs to be correct, timely, and presented in a manner that enables the reader to learn from it. The current network is full of inaccurate, misleading, and biased information that often crowds out the valid information. People have not learned that ‘popular' or ‘available' information is not necessarily valid."-- Gene Spafford, Purdue University CERIAS, Association for Computing Machinery U.S. Public Policy Council

• "If we take 'Google' to mean the complex social, economic and cultural phenomenon that is a massively interactive search and retrieval information system used by people and yet also using them to generate its data, I think Google will, at the very least, not make us smarter and probably will make us more stupid in the sense of being reliant on crude, generalised approximations of truth and information finding. Where the questions are easy, Google will therefore help; where the questions are complex, we will flounder." -- Matt Allen, former president of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Australia

• "The challenge is in separating that wheat from the chaff, as it always has been with any other source of mass information, which has been the case all the way back to ancient institutions like libraries. Those users (of Google, cable TV, or libraries) who can do so efficiently will beat the odds, becoming ‘smarter' and making better choices. However, the unfortunately majority will continue to remain, as Carr says, stupid." -- Christopher Saunders, managing editor, internetnews.com

• "The problem with Google that is lurking just under the clean design home page is the "tragedy of the commons": the link quality seems to go down every year. The link quality may actually not be going down but the signal to noise is getting worse as commercial schemes lead to more and more junk links." -- Glen Edens, former senior vice president and director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist Hewlett Packard

Literary intelligence is very much under threat.

• "If one defines -- or partially defines -- IQ as literary intelligence, the ability to sit with a piece of textual material and analyze it for complex meaning and retain derived knowledge, then we are indeed in trouble. Literary culture is in trouble.... We are spending less time reading books, but the amount of pure information that we produce as a civilization continues to expand exponentially. That these trends are linked, that the rise of the latter is causing the decline of the former, is not impossible.... One could draw reassurance from today's vibrant Web culture if the general surfing public, which is becoming more at home in this new medium, displayed a growing propensity for literate, critical thought. But take a careful look at the many blogs, post comments, Facebook pages, and online conversations that characterize today's Web 2.0 environment.... This type of content generation, this method of ‘writing,' is not only sub-literate, it may actually undermine the literary impulse.... Hours spent texting and e-mailing, according to this view, do not translate into improved writing or reading skills." -- Patrick Tucker, senior editor, The Futurist magazine

New literacies will be required to function in this world. In fact, the internet might change the very notion of what it means to be smart. Retrieval of good information will be prized. Maybe a race of "extreme Googlers" will come into being.

• "The critical uncertainty here is whether people will learn and be taught the essential literacies necessary for thriving in the current infosphere: attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection, and network awareness are the ones I'm concentrating on. I have no reason to believe that people will be any less credulous, gullible, lazy, or prejudiced in ten years, and am not optimistic about the rate of change in our education systems, but it is clear to me that people are not going to be smarter without learning the ropes." -- Howard Rheingold, author of several prominent books on technology, teacher at Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley

• "Google makes us simultaneously smarter and stupider. Got a question? With instant access to practically every piece of information ever known to humankind, we take for granted we're only a quick web search away from the answer. Of course, that doesn't mean we understand it. In the coming years we will have to continue to teach people to think critically so they can better understand the wealth of information available to them." -- Jeska Dzwigalski, Linden Lab

• "We might imagine that in ten years, our definition of intelligence will look very different. By then, we might agree on 'smart' as something like a 'networked' or 'distributed' intelligence where knowledge is our ability to piece together various and disparate bits of information into coherent and novel forms." -- Christine Greenhow, educational researcher, University of Minnesota and Yale Information and Society Project

• "Human intellect will shift from the ability to retain knowledge towards the skills to discover the information i.e. a race of extreme Googlers (or whatever discovery tools come next). The world of information technology will be dominated by the algorithm designers and their librarian cohorts. Of course, the information they're searching has to be right in the first place. And who decides that?" -- Sam Michel, founder Chinwag, community for digital media practitioners in the United Kingdom

One new "literacy" that might help is the capacity to build and use social networks to help people solve problems.

• "There's no doubt that the internet is an extension of human intelligence, both individual and collective. But the extent to which it's able to augment intelligence depends on how much people are able to make it conform to their needs. Being able to look up who starred in the 2nd season of the Tracey Ullman show on Wikipedia is the lowest form of intelligence augmentation; being able to build social networks and interactive software that helps you answer specific questions or enrich your intellectual life is much more powerful. This will matter even more as the internet becomes more pervasive. Already my iPhone functions as the external, silicon lobe of my brain. For it to help me become even smarter, it will need to be even more effective and flexible than it already is. What worries me is that device manufacturers and internet developers are more concerned with lock-in than they are with making people smarter. That means it will be a constant struggle for individuals to reclaim their intelligence from the networks they increasingly depend upon." -- Dylan Tweney, senior editor, Wired magazine

Nothing can be bad that delivers more information to people, more efficiently. It might be that some people lose their way in this world, but overall, societies will be substantially smarter.

• "The Internet has facilitated orders of magnitude improvements in access to information. People now answer questions in a few moments that a couple of decades back they would not have bothered to ask, since getting the answer would have been impossibly difficult." -- John Pike, Director, globalsecurity.org

• "Google is simply one step, albeit a major one, in the continuing continuum of how technology changes our generation and use of data, information, and knowledge that has been evolving for decades. As the data and information goes digital and new information is created, which is at an ever increasing rate, the resultant ability to evaluate, distill, coordinate, collaborate, problem solve only increases along a similar line. Where it may appear a ‘dumbing down' has occurred on one hand, it is offset (I believe in multiples) by how we learn in new ways to learn, generate new knowledge, problem solve, and innovate." -- Mario Morino, Chairman, Venture Philanthropy Partners

Google itself and other search technologies will get better over time and that will help solve problems created by too-much-information and too-much-distraction.

• "I'm optimistic that Google will get smarter by 2020 or will be replaced by a utility that is far better than Google. That tool will allow queries to trigger chains of high-quality information -- much closer to knowledge than flood. Humans who are able to access these chains in high-speed, immersive ways will have more patters available to them that will aid decision-making. All of this optimism will only work out if the battle for the soul of the Internet is won by the right people -- the people who believe that open, fast, networks are good for all of us." -- Susan Crawford, former member of President Obama's National Economic Council, now on the law faculty at the University of Michigan

• "If I am using Google to find an answer, it is very likely the answer I find will be on a message board in which other humans are collaboratively debating answers to questions. I will have to choose between the answer I like the best. Or it will force me to do more research to find more information. Google never breeds passivity or stupidity in me: It catalyzes me to explore further. And along the way I bump into more humans, more ideas and more answers." -- Joshua Fouts, Senior Fellow for Digital Media & Public Policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency

The more we use the internet and search, the more dependent on it we will become.

• "As the Internet gets more sophisticated it will enable a greater sense of empowerment among users. We will not be more stupid, but we will probably be more dependent upon it." -- Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

Even in little ways, including in dinner table chitchat, Google can make people smarter.

• "[Family dinner conversations] have changed markedly because we can now look things up at will. That's just one small piece of evidence I see that having Google at hand is great for civilization." -- Jerry Michalski, president, Sociate

‘We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy.'

• "The answer is really: both. Google has already made us smarter, able to make faster choices from more information. Children, to say nothing of adults, scientists and professionals in virtually every field, can seek and discover knowledge in ways and with scope and scale that was unfathomable before Google. Google has undoubtedly expanded our access to knowledge that can be experienced on a screen, or even processed through algorithms, or mapped. Yet Google has also made us careless too, or stupid when, for instance, Google driving directions don't get us to the right place. It has confused and overwhelmed us with choices, and with sources that are not easily differentiated or verified. Perhaps it's even alienated us from the physical world itself -- from knowledge and intelligence that comes from seeing, touching, hearing, breathing and tasting life. From looking into someone's eyes and having them look back into ours. Perhaps it's made us impatient, or shortened our attention spans, or diminished our ability to understand long thoughts. It's enlightened anxiety. We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy." -- Andrew Nachison, co-founder, We Media

A final thought: Maybe Google won't make us more stupid, but it should make us more modest.

• "There is and will be lots more to think about, and a lot more are thinking. No, not more stupid. Maybe more humble." -- Sheizaf Rafaeli, Center for the Study of the Information Society, University of Haifa

Read more about responses to other "tension pairs" tested in the survey as well as a more complete description of the survey methodology and respondents at pewinternet.org.

Also view detailed results from the first three "Future of the Internet" surveys.

Head Count

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will be taking a census of the entire country in the coming months. This will be the fourth census taken since 1974. The last census which was in 2004 revealed the population of the country to be 22 million, comprised of about 73% Saudi nationals (about 16.5 million), and the rest were expatriates from other countries. In the entire Gulf Coast region, Saudi Arabia is the largest country both in land area and in population, making up a good 60-65% of the populous of the region.

The Kingdom has employed and trained about 40,000 workers to conduct the census. The Saudi government has called upon all Saudi citizens and foreigners to cooperate in providing accurate information to the various questions concerning the demographics, economic and social makeup of all people living here. The census form consists of 59 questions and supposedly takes about 15 minutes to complete. The entire Gulf region is working together to take a joint census in all of the Gulf countries.

I can't really speak for the other Gulf area countries, but I can only imagine what a difficult and challenging task this must be to undertake in a place like Saudi Arabia, especially considering how this society is set up. First of all, I would doubt that there would be any female census takers since women cannot drive and it wouldn't be acceptable for a woman to come calling to a stranger's home, even if she would be on official state business. The working hours here are so irregular because of the five prayer times during each day, that I wonder how these census takers will manage to find men at home to talk to because if the man of the house is not at home when the census takers arrive, the women will not open the door or speak to a strange man. Many men work normally into the evening hours because the working day is chopped up so much to accommodate prayer times.

Another problem I see is that there are no street addresses here in Jeddah, and I think it's the same in the rest of the country. Many streets do not even have names. Logistically speaking, taking a census here must be a nightmare. What about the thousands of Bedouins who still roam the deserts here and don't really have one permanent abode? There are many who still live in tents and move frequently. How can anyone ensure that they will be counted? Yet another questionable issue is the fact that Saudi Arabia has so many poor and uneducated illegal aliens living here. Thousands have come to this country on the pretense of fulfilling their Hajj requirement in Islam and end up staying here permanently and illegally, in hopes of forging a better life than what they had in their own countries. Even though I read that these overstayers need not worry about being caught and sent back to their countries or thrown in jail, I'm sure that most of them will not get this message and would be fearful of answering questions like this. I just don't see how accurate a census can really be here.

I would just love to see the census form: Head of Household; Wife #1 and children; Wife #2 and children; etc. Number of people total in the household, including all wives and children, grandparents, maids, drivers, gatekeepers, nannies, cooks, etc. This could be really interesting...

Jinnah And Urdu-Bengali Controversy

By Yasser Latif Hamdani

This is a quick blog to correct a historical fallacy. A false impression persists – thanks to people like Amar Jaleel and the like who in the right royal Urdu press fashion have a hard time sticking to the facts- that Jinnah- who according to Jaleel was drugged or cornered into making the speech in question- somehow told Bengalis to outlaw Bengali language when he declared Urdu to be the state language of Pakistan. This is historically inaccurate. This blog is not to discuss whether Jinnah’s declaration was politically suave or naïve but to set the record straight about what it was that Jinnah said which laid foundations for the Urdu-Bengali discord in Pakistan and led to Pakistan ultimately declaring both Urdu and Bengali the “national languages” of Pakistan. Ironically Jinnah did not even use the term “national language”, drawing the very valid distinction between a state language or lingua franca and a national language.

The two speeches that are at the center of controversy were made on 21^st and 24^th of March, 1948 at a public meeting and then at Dacca University convention. In both speeches Jinnah took a consistent stand:

1. The people of Bengal were free to choose Bengali as the official language of the Bengal province. This he said very clearly and unambiguously on both occasions and the premier of Bengal – Khawaja Nazimuddin also reaffirmed this.
2. Urdu alone would be the state language and the lingua franca of the Pakistan state.
3. Bengali – like other provincial languages- could be the official language of the East Bengal province but not the Pakistan state and the Pakistan center (Jinnah’s words).

(See Pages 150 and 158 of “Jinnah Speeches And Statements 1947-1948” Millennium edition Oxford University Press- he said “Realizing, however, that the statement that your Prime Minister made on the language controversy, left no room for agitation, in so far as it conceded the right of the people of this province to choose Bengali as their official language if they so wished, they changed their tactics. They started demanding that Bengali should be the state language of the Pakistan centre, and since they could not overlook the obvious claims of Urdu as the official language of a Muslim state, they proceeded to demand that both Bengali and Urdu should be the state languages of Pakistan. Make no mistake about it. There can only be one state language if the component parts of this state are to march forward in unison, and in my opinion, that can only be Urdu”)

It may be remembered that in this - wrong or right- Jinnah’s policy was identical to India’s policy of constitutionally elevating Hindi and English. Jinnah did not go even that far and described in the proper constitutional manner Urdu as the state language not a national one. Urdu was to be - in the real sense of the word- a lingua franca for the diverse people of Pakistan.

The problem with Amar Jaleel – who recently appeared on Vussatullah’s show on Dawn News Urdu Service- is that in his zeal for an otherwise good cause, he liberally twists the facts. For example in the show in question he declared amongst other things – as obiter dicta – that Gandhi had fasted in his last days to have wheat exported to Pakistan. Frankly I don’t know where he got this from. In reality however Pakistan connection in Gandhi’s fast was purported to be vis a vis Indian government’s refusal to give Pakistan its share of the treasury. However what was hilarious was his claim that Jinnah was cornered by people to make this statement.

Amar Jaleel’s cause is righteous. All Pakistani languages must be equally respected and given an equal status in the republic as languages of the people of Pakistan. However should he murder history and discredit himself by repeating this lie or does he believe that the longer it goes unnoticed, it might one day be taken up as the truth?

I have always felt that the writers of the Urdu press are given to exaggeration and embellishment, even if they are not right-wingers and pro-Jamaat-e-Islami fanatics but even self styled champions of leftists, liberals and ethno-nationalists. In this respect at least one hopes that Dawn News Urdu Service will bring some balance to the force.

The Problem With "My name is KHAN"

By Yasser Latif Hamdani

Warning: SPOILERS

Late last week I attended a packed show of “My Name Is Khan” in Lahore’s DHA Cinema and while I went through all the emotions the film maker wanted to evoke, I found the film entirely misplaced and misdirected. The film itself was well made 70 percent of the way. It began to go downhill from the time our hero returned to Georgia to find it stuck in the Civil War era and by the time President Elect Obama made his appearance the film which is essentially Khuda Ke Liye meets Forest Gump meets Rainman meets Milk was completely over the top.

My objections however have nothing to do with Karan Johar’s Masala mix which was to be expected from a Bollywood film. After all Karan Johar is no Shoaib Mansoor and for Karan Johar this is not a life-long undertaking. Instead my issues arise from the point of view of someone who is self conscious and self styled as a secular-minded modernist of Muslim background who wants to see the Muslim world re-join the world in its march of human progress. To me the message that MNIK gives is entirely wrong and dogmatic but I’ll come to that in a minute.

In the subcontinent, secularism is understood primarily in three ways. The first is the point of view of the small but very Islamist sections who feel that secularism means not just an indifference towards but outright persecution of religion to drive it out not just from the public space but from personal as well. This view equates secularism to irreligiosity or even inherently anti-religion positions. The second point of view is that the state should ensure equality of citizenship, freedom of religion and an impartiality towards all faiths. This second view is more in line with modern state secularism and seeks to ensure that everyone is free to go about their own business so long as it does not turn into a brawl. The third point of view is one which interprets secularism as harmony between religious minded of every religion. This third point of view is sadly the cause of much heartbreak for good natured people who foolishly ascribe to it.

Sadly MNIK’s message has to do more with position 3 and that minimizes its message. Towards the end, Rizwan Khan’s Bhabi- played by our very own Sonia Jehan, the granddaughter of the immortal Nur Jehan- dons the Hijab proudly and makes an emotional point about it. Hijab is a dogmatic Muslim position which is highly controversial and many Muslim women don’t consider it part of the faith. That in of itself would not be the problem but the fact is that the dogma of Hijab derives itself from the same rigid straitjacket that frowns on pluralism and modernity. Therefore the pluralistic ethos which seems to underpin MNIK thus sits quite uneasy with the kind of ”Muslimness” it purports to champion simultaneously. It reminds me of the poignant criticism that Mahatma Gandhi failed to take into account in his own attempts to reconcile orthodox Islam with Hinduism. Achyuth Patwardhan wrote:

‘It is, however, useful to recognise our share of this error of misdirection. To begin with, I am convinced that looking back upon the course of development of the freedom movement, THE ‘HIMALAYAN ERROR’ of Gandhiji’s leadership was the support he extended on behalf of the Congress and the Indian people to the Khilafat Movement at the end of the World War I. This has proved to be a disastrous error which has brought in its wake a series of harmful consequences. On merits, it was a thoroughly reactionary step. The Khilafat was totally unworthy of support of the Progressive Muslims. Kemel Pasha established this solid fact by abolition of the Khilafat. The abolition of the Khilafat was widely welcomed by enlightened Muslim opinion the world over and Kemel was an undoubted hero of all young Muslims straining against Imperialist domination. But apart from the fact that Khilafat was an unworthy reactionary cause, Mahatma Gandhi had to align himself with a sectarian revivalist Muslim Leadership of clerics and maulvis. He was thus unwittingly responsible for jettisoning sane, secular, modernist leadership among the Muslims of India and foisting upon the Indian Muslims a theocratic orthodoxy of the Maulvis. Maulana Mohammed Ali’s speeches read today appear strangely incoherent and out of tune with the spirit of secular political freedom. The Congress Movement which released the forces of religious liberalism and reform among the Hindus, and evoked a rational scientific outlook, placed the Muslims of India under the spell of orthodoxy and religious superstition by their support to the Khilafat leadership. Rationalist leaders like Jinnah were rebuffed by this attitude of Congress and Gandhi. This is the background of the psychological rift between Congress and the Muslim League’

By championing the cause of the fundamentalist and orthodox Muslims in the name of pluralism, MNIK greatly weakens its own praiseworthy humanist message. Furthermore, MNIK seems fall into the same pitfalls of Paki-bashing when it presents the clean shaven Dr. Faisal Rahman, a medical doctor of South Asian descent, as a terrorist-recruiter. This is wrong on two counts – 1. most extremism in mosques is preached not by medical doctors, especially of South Asian origin, but by clerics funded and educated by Saudi sponsored Salafi groups and are mostly of Arab origin. 2. Most Muslim doctors of South Asian descent in the US are Pakistani. Therefore the angle was mala fide and wrong. As a general rule, most Pakistani doctors I have come across in the US are voices of reason and moderation and when – if at times- they form part of mosque groups, they tend to act as bridge builders between the community and the society outside.

For these reasons and more, despite being thoroughly moved by Shahrukh Khan’s remarkable performance as an autistic man, I am very disappointed by the film because it will only strengthen extremists and only give American Muslims another reason to remain illiberal in their approach to Islam and America. In comparison Shoaib Mansoor’s brilliant Pakistani film, Khuda Ke Liye, is not preachy and it does not purport to present Islam as what it is not. What it does is document the struggle and travails of moderate Muslims stuck between the Mullah and American wrath. It too champions identity, but in contrast to Sonya Jehan’s Hijab-donning ritual, Khuda Ke Liye has a young man in jeans and baseball cap from the burger class laying an equal claim to faith to that of a Mullah.

Pakistani Reports Capture of a Taliban Leader

By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH and DEXTER FILKINS

Published: February 22, 2010

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — In another blow to the Taliban senior leadership, Pakistani authorities have captured Mullah Abdul Kabir, a member of the group’s inner circle and a leading military commander against American forces in eastern Afghanistan, according to a Pakistani intelligence official.

American officials in the region and in Washington said they had received some indications of Mullah Kabir’s detention but that they could not confirm it.

Mullah Kabir was detained several days ago in Nowshera, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, the Pakistani official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Mullah Kabir is a member of the Quetta Shura, the small group of leaders who direct the Taliban’s operations and who report to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the group’s founder. The group is named for the Pakistani city where many of the Taliban’s leaders are thought to be hiding.

Mullah Kabir is the second member of the Quetta Shura to be captured in Pakistan in recent weeks. Last month, American and Pakistani intelligence agents captured Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s top military commander and the head of the Quetta Shura. He was hiding in Karachi.

The capture of Mullah Kabir appeared to be a strictly Pakistani operation, and Pakistani officials appeared to be keeping Mullah Kabir’s arrest a closely held secret, even from their American allies.

Mullah Kabir is a longtime associate of Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s founder. He was the governor of Nangarhar Province, in eastern Afghanistan, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Since then, he has overseen military operations in eastern Afghanistan, including those in Kunar, Nangarhar, Nuristan and Laghman Provinces.

The immediate impact of Mullah Kabir’s arrest remains to be seen. The Quetta Shura is thought to have roughly 20 people. A number have been killed or captured over the years, but the shura, and the Taliban, have gone on.

The Pakistani intelligence official also confirmed the arrest of another Taliban official: Mullah Mohammed Yunis, the Taliban’s shadow governor of Zabul Province. The official gave no details of Mullah Yunis’s arrest. He is the third Taliban governor to be detained in Pakistan in recent weeks.

Together, the arrest of Mullah Kabir, Mullah Baradar and the others appeared to mark a shift in Pakistani behavior. Although the motive remains unclear, the change is significant.

“This indicates Baradar was not a one off or an accident but a turning point in Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow of Brookings Institution and a former C.I.A. official. “We still need to see how far it goes, but for Obama and NATO this is the best possible news. If the safe haven is closing then the Taliban are in trouble.”

For years, Pakistani military and intelligence leaders have supported the Taliban, and allowed their leaders to carry on unmolested inside Pakistan, even as Pakistan’s leaders claimed to be allies of the United States.

The Pakistani interest in the Taliban has always been as a means to influence events inside Afghanistan, particularly if the Americans leave.

Also on Monday, Hajji Zaman Ghamsharik, an Afghan warlord accused of helping Osama bin Laden escape from the Americans at Tora Bora, was assassinated by a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest. The bomber killed him and 14 others as they gathered at a ceremony to distribute land to returning refugees at a village in his tribal stomping grounds near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

He had so many enemies that his assassination was not particularly surprising. There was a blood feud between him and the family of another warlord, which blamed Hajji Zaman for his assassination in 2002. There were rivals to his large and powerful Khugiani tribe in Nangarhar Province, and rivals within the tribe. And there were furious American Special Forces and C.I.A. operatives who believed that he was a mercenary who took money to join the fight against Al Qaeda, but then helped arrange Mr. bin Laden’s escape.

Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan are usually quick to take responsibility for suicide bombings. Not in this case; when asked about Hajji Zaman’s killing, the usually garrulous Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said he did not know who did it.

The police in Nangarhar Province said the bombing took place in the village of Dasht-e-Chamtala, about 10 miles west of Jalalabad, during a ceremony for local residents lured by land grants to return from camps for the displaced, according to a police official, Gen. Mohammad Ayob Salangi. In addition to the 15 killed, 20 people were wounded, many of them critically, the general said.

“He was a warlord, and he was fighting since 1980,” Mirwais Yasini, a member of the Afghan Parliament from Nangarhar, said of Hajji Zaman. “He was bitterly disliked by very many people. And then there were business interests, too.”

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Hajji Zaman was a mujahedeen leader, and later fought both for and against the Taliban. When the Taliban regime collapsed, President Hamid Karzai appointed him military commander of Jalalabad and a large part of eastern Afghanistan, including Tora Bora.

That put him at odds with another warlord in the area, Hajji Qadir, who later ousted him in Jalalabad. When Mr. bin Laden and his Qaeda followers took refuge in the Tora Bora mountains south of Jalalabad in late 2001, Hajji Zaman and another warlord, Hazrat Ali, offered the services of their armed followers to help the Americans flush them out.

Instead, Mr. bin Laden and his group escaped. Many American officials were convinced they could not have done so without collusion from the Afghan warlords.

The uproar over Mr. bin Laden’s escape led to Hajji Zaman’s flight and exile to France and Pakistan for most of the next eight years. During that time, he was accused of engineering the assassination in Kabul of Hajji Qadir, who by then had become a vice president in Mr. Karzai’s government. Hajji Zaman’s brother was detained in connection with the case for several years but never convicted.

Finally Hajji Zaman announced that he would return last year to take part in the election campaign as a Karzai supporter. When he crossed the Torkhum border from Pakistan, a huge motorcade and throngs of cheering supporters greeted him. Many were from his Khugiani tribe, whose support Mr. Karzai was courting.

“He came back just a few months ago; it’s really tragic,” said Anwar al-Haq Ahadi, a former finance minister in Mr. Karzai’s government. “He was going to play quite a larger role in the future.”

Pir Zubair Shah reported from Islamabad, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan. Rod Nordland contributed reporting from Kabul, an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and Mark Landler from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 24, 2010
An article on Tuesday about the reported capture in Pakistan of Mullah Abdul Kabir, a senior Taliban military commander, misspelled the name of the city in North-West Frontier Province where a senior Pakistani intelligence official said Mullah Kabir had been detained. It is Nowshera, not Nawshera.

Afghan Offensive Is New War Model

News Analysis

David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

U.S. Marines sat at their firing positions outside Marja in Afghanistan’s Helmand province on Friday.

By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: February 12, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan — For all the fighting that lies ahead over the next several days, no one doubts that the American and Afghan troops swarming into the Taliban redoubt of Marja will ultimately clear it of insurgents.

For much of the past eight years, American and NATO forces have mounted other large military operations to clear towns and cities of Taliban insurgents. And then, almost invariably, they have cleared out, never leaving behind enough soldiers or police officers to hold the place on their own.

And so, almost always, the Taliban returned — and, after a time, so did the American and NATO troops, to clear the place all over again.

“Mowing the grass,” the soldiers and Marines derisively call it.

This time, in Marja, the largest Taliban stronghold, American and Afghan commanders say they will do something they have never done before: bring in an Afghan government and police force behind them. American and British troops will stay on to support them. “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander here.

Indeed, Marja is intended to serve as a prototype for a new type of military operation, based on the counterinsurgency thinking propounded by General McChrystal in the prelude to President Obama’s decision in December to increase the number of American troops here to nearly 100,000.

More than at any time since 2001, American and NATO soldiers will focus less on killing Taliban insurgents than on sparing Afghan civilians and building an Afghan state.

“The population is not the enemy,” Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the commander of the Marines in southern Afghanistan, told a group of troops this week. “The population is the prize — they are why we are going in.”

To realize their goals, the Americans and their allies want to capture the area with a minimum amount of violence. American commanders say the attack on Marja is intended to be nothing like the similar size assault on the city of Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004. In that case, Falluja, under the control of hundreds of insurgents, was largely destroyed. The Americans killed plenty of guerrillas, but they did not make any friends.

“We don’t want Falluja,” General McChrystal said in an interview this week. “Falluja is not the model.”

Sparing civilian life may not be easy, especially in the close-quarters combat that lies ahead. Hundreds of Taliban fighters are believed to be in the area. And the American-led force may yet get bogged down — by the network of irrigation canals, built by the United States in the 1950s, or by the hundreds of homemade bombs that Taliban fighters have planted in the roads and trails.

The chief worry among both American and Afghan commanders is that if a large number of civilians are killed, the Afghan government — including its sometimes erratic president, Hamid Karzai — could withdraw its support.

The Americans are hoping, too, that the largely Afghan composition of the invading force — about 60 percent of the total — will give Mr. Karzai’s government sufficient cover if anything goes wrong.

But at some point the operation will end, and when it does General McChrystal has set goals for the Americans and the Afghans that are less dramatic, but far more ambitious, than fighting.

For the first time, NATO and Afghan officials have assembled a large team of Afghan administrators and an Afghan governor that will move into Marja the moment the shooting stops. More than 1,900 police are standing by.

Setting up a government in this impoverished country is no small task. Across Afghanistan, the Afghan government and its police are reviled for their inefficiency and corruption.

“We want to show people that we can deliver police, and services, and development,” said Lt. Gen. Mohammed Karimi, the deputy chief of staff of the Afghan Army. “We want to convince the Afghans that the government is for them.”

At a broader level, the attack on Marja is the first move in an ambitious effort to break the Taliban in their heartland. Over the next several months, the Americans are hoping to secure a 200-mile long horseshoe-shaped string of cities that runs along the Helmand River, through Kandahar and then on to the Pakistani border. The ribbon holds 85 percent of the population of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, the Taliban’s base of support. In the next several months, the Americans and Afghans are planning to pour thousands of troops into that area.

“We are trying to take away any hope of victory,” General McChrystal said.

That would set the stage for a political settlement that General McChrystal believes is the only way the war will end.

The risks in the strategy are obvious enough. Eight years after being expelled from Kabul, the Taliban are fighting more vigorously, and operating in more places, than at any point since the American-led war began here in 2001. The Taliban have “shadow governors” in every province but Kabul itself. Twice the number of American soldiers were killed last year as the year before.

And there is some chance, even after the offensive, that the insurgents will simply flee to another part of the country. They have done it before; many of the fighters now inside Marja once operated in other Helmand towns.

Finally, there is only so much the Americans and their NATO partners can do. The rest is up to the Afghans themselves. Despite years of work, the Afghan Army cannot sustain itself in the field, the police are loathed in nearly every place they work, and the government of Mr. Karzai has only a few serious worldwide rivals in corruption and graft.

In a conversation this week, a senior American official in Kabul said that his greatest worry was not the Taliban, or even that the Marja operation would fail. “What do I worry about?” he said, “Dependency.” That is, the fear that Afghanistan’s leaders and people will not, in the end, stand up for themselves.

In that sense, who emerges as the victor in Marja may not be clear for many months.

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Helmand Province.

By Cyril Almeida
Friday, 12 Feb, 2010

Kayani may be winning plaudits for his battlefield victories in Bajaur, Swat and South Waziristan but it was his predecessor, Musharraf, who let the threat build up. - File photo

OUR boys in uniform have a spring in their step again. Domestically, they have taken on two enemies and appear to be winning: the civilian government has been reduced to parroting the army’s line on security issues, while the TTP is a significantly degraded force.

Regionally, they can barely suppress their grins. In a few short weeks, the Americans have gone from threatening a ‘Pakistan first’ option in the war against Al Qaeda and associated movements to desperately seeking someone in Islamabad, or more accurately Pindi, who can put them in touch with the Taliban’s so-called ‘reconcilable’ elements.

It’s not quite a wave of triumphalism that is sweeping over the army but there definitely is a widely shared sense of validation. And that should worry the rest of us.

Here’s why. To hear the generals tell it, they have fought a threat — the TTP — that has managed to inflict more damage on this country than all the damage caused by all the terrorists in the rest of the world put together.

Grimly, they show you the statistics by means of elegant charts and the human cost by means of disturbing photos. Look at what we fought, they seem to say, no one else in the world has done this in recent times.

All true. But they ignore one crucial question: why did we have to fight this fight in the first place? If violence spiked in 2006 and has been sustained by the militants at meteoric levels since, what were we doing between 2001 and then, and even before?There’s no glory in winning a war for a country if the war was never inevitable in the first place. On whose watch did the TTP grow into a monstrous force? Kayani may be winning plaudits for his battlefield victories in Bajaur, Swat and South Waziristan but it was his predecessor, Musharraf, who let the threat build up.

And since the army never fails to tell us that it is an ‘institution’ first and foremost, should it not apologise to the nation for its institutional mistakes? Forget the apology, should it not show more humility in claiming credit for what amounts to cleaning up a mess after creating it in the first place?

I wish this were only an issue about form and not substance. Such are the ways of the world and states that apologies and demonstrations of humility can often be beside the point. What’s done is done and the country needs to move on — but can it if the army, the self-appointed custodian of the country’s security policy, continues to live in denial?

Here’s the problem: there has long been a suspicion that the Pakistan Army lets tactics drive strategy, and the victories against the TTP may actually reinforce that disastrous approach.

The best explanation for what the army has done over the last year has been labelled, for want of a better name, the ‘prioritisation approach’. Crudely, it amounts to this: you attack me repeatedly and viciously and I will destroy you. Exhibit A: the militants in Swat and Baitullah/Hakeemullah’s TTP went on the rampage against the state, so they were made to pay the price.

But this approach suffers from two flaws: one, it tends to treat militant groups more as distinct entities than as an unholy cocktail; and two, it discounts the long-term role of ideology. Essentially, if Group A isn’t attacking us today, it doesn’t mean that it won’t tomorrow. In fact, if you connect the dots as objectively as possible, you will probably reach the conclusion that it will in some way.

The army has leapt at the possibility of reconciling/reintegrating the Afghan Taliban (not least because they ask, what’s the alternative?) but should you and me, the average Pakistani, be anything but scared of the possibility of a return to power of those men in our backyard, regionally speaking?

The last time it took them just a few short years to make a catastrophic misjudgement and allow Osama to let his imagination run murderously wild. Why should we expect them to behave any more responsibly after defeating the world’s only superpower? After all, in some ways that would be an even greater victory than the original mujahideen’s; the originals at least had the support of another superpower.

More problematically, the army’s ‘Taliban solution’ in Afghanistan will continue our disastrous policy of focusing on the Pakhtun population to the exclusion of other groups, and that too through the alternating lenses of Pakhtun nationalism and dogmatic religiosity.

In short, the Pakistan Army seems to have come through the crucible of the last decade with exactly the same ‘strategic’ thinking as it had going into the decade. Given the price this country has paid in that period, that should be an absurd proposition. Yet, the rough outlines increasingly appear to be the same.

Which is why we should be worried about that spring in the army’s step. The generals are so pleased about their ‘success’ in recovering the security situation inside Pakistan and the possibility of a big say in the future of Afghanistan that they seem to have skipped right past the bit about introspection over why we are where we are today.

It’s not that the generals needs to parade around the country in sackcloth and ashes and beg the people’s forgiveness — though the possibility would certainly delight some — but denial has never led to great policy or strategy or tactics anywhere.

A related point can help illustrate the problem. The army has come up with a response to why it did not launch a full-fledged counter-insurgency against the TTP earlier. The reason, the generals say, is that the state/army’s ‘centre of gravity’ was the local population and the wider public.

Until the public was convinced that the TTP was the enemy and had to be defeated, there was never the possibility of military success: locally, the population could have shielded the militants; nationally, the public could have pressured the government to halt the fighting.

Look, though, at the history of the country over the last 30 years and ask yourself this: who has sided with the Islamists and militants the most? Would not generals Zia and Musharraf top that list?

(Don’t scoff at the Musharraf claim: after all, the Islamist parties controlled two provinces and had their largest share in parliament in history on his watch.)

So it’s all well and good for the generals to claim that ‘public support’ to fight the militants wasn’t always there — but then they should also be honest and explain the army’s role in eliminating the possibility of that support existing earlier.

Yes, the reality is that the Pakistan Army will need to be at the forefront of the effort to defeat militancy in this country. But don’t confuse needing them with believing them. They may have earned our gratitude for fighting recently; trust, though, is a separate matter altogether.

cyril.a@gmail.com

Ancient India

http://books.google.ae/books?id=XNxiN5tzKOgC&lpg=PP1&ots=ILcWlvhLWt&dq=ancient%20india%20r%20c%20majumdar&hl=en&pg=PR5#v=onepage&q=&f=false