The orange road

The road back from Abbottabad yesterday afternoon, just outside Haripur, was flanked by little stalls selling oranges. Not just one or two stalls, but probably about 30 or so. This after all is orange season.

The chap at this stall cut one into quarters for me to try. Which I did. Leaving me with juice running down to my elbows. I bought a sack of 80 or so for about four quid. A bargain.

Then, presumably spotting a rich Westerner getting sentimental about small-time farmers and seasonal fruit the stallholder quickly cut me a piece of grapefruit too, but I managed to refrain from further citrus-based purchases.

But this is one of the joys of Pakistan – or anywhere else where they remember that fruit comes in seasons. I think next come mangoes in the summer, then pomegranates for the last couple of months. (I’ll assume the Brussel sprouts they had at Christmas in Khosar Market were imported for sad expats like me.)

And I swear that orange at the side of the road was the best orange I’ve ever tasted.

Whose conference was it anyway? Somalia meeting disappoints

And so we have another commitment from world leaders to help rebuild Somalia and assist its transition to a moderate democracy. Apparently this means a pirate taskforce (link is here but behind a paywall). Perhaps when you hold a conference so far away from Somalia then discussion is not about Somalia’s problems, but about our problems… UK security, the piracy threat to trade and so on. In this dispatch from Tabda, Jeffrey Gettleman points out the flaw:

“Another conference?” asked Ahmed Madobe, an Islamist warlord who is the de facto power in this area. “Every day you call a conference, and what’s been done? You need to involve the people on the ground, those who have suffered, to rebuild this country from scratch.”

You don’t need to know much about Somalia to know that just as its complex clan structure has made for years of conflict. When solutions are found they will undoubtedly be “bottom-up” fixes. And while that may have been one of the buzz phrases of the London conference, it’s difficult to see how that influenced any of its thinking.

Anyway, this Storyful takedown sums up the general disappointment, tempered perhaps only by the fact that David Cameron wore a tie in “Somali blue”.

Recent reading on drones

Drones – not just for assassinating Jihadi suspects when you really don’t want to have to go to the trouble of detaining them and sending them to Gitmo, because you once promised to shut it down… Here’s what I’ve been reading on the subject (organised more prettily here – and fleshed out into a sort of argument here):

• Drones for Human Rights – NYTimes.com: Genocide intervention network on use of drones to monitor bloodshed
• A drone plane spots a river of blood flowing from the back of a Dallas meat pack… What about for environmentalism activism?
• Drones are Becoming Eyes in the Sky for Real Estate Agents | NBC Los Angeles Good lord
• Surveillance Drone, Maiden Flight | Francis Fukuyama: Francis Fukuyama on building a drone
• Drone Journalism: Could journalists make use of drone technology?
• Drones With an Eye on the Public Cleared to Fly – NYTimes.com: Drones to be used by law enforcement agencies in the US
• Draganflyer X8 Eight Rotor UAV Helicopter Aerial Video Platform: Get your drones here
• Drone and nuclear deals to dominate Cameron-Sarkozy summit | Politics | The Guar…: It’s a subject that even the French and Brits can agree on

Drone Wars

Francis Fukuyama has been building his own surveillance drone. His post makes for a rather interesting read full of techy details, before he goes on to make a rather important point:

I want to have my drone before the government makes them illegal.  The US has been fighting such low-tech enemies lately that we haven’t thought through the nature of a world in which lots of people have sophisticated drones, not just other countries but private individuals.  One somewhat worrying thing is that virtually all of this equipment comes from China or Taiwan.

Let’s leave aside the China paranoia for now. You don’t need to be a futurist or to be living in Pakistan to know that drones are big business – and getting bigger. The UK govt has already pumped £40m into BAE’s attack drone development programme.

But so far we have barely begun to think about the ethical and legal issues surrounding their use. Even anti-genocide campaigners have so far failed to make much of a case for their use preventing human rights abuses.

Railways, rabid wolves and man-eating lions

Don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for a railway story. And nowhere are they richer or more symbolic than South Asia. Built by the Brits and nationalised at independence, Pakistan’s railways are now mired in economic failure – an inefficient, publicly-owned service that has struggled with landslides and bombs, and which today caters only to the poorest travellers.

But for once this was a good news story. As you may have already read, the new, recently refurbished Business Express offers a much more civilised way of travelling between Pakistan’s two biggest cities, Lahore and Karachi. It is the first public-private service of its kind. Other services are already scheduled and private companies are apparently queuing up to get a slice of the action.

Anyway, I was reminded of a story I write in Kenya more than five years ago (now sadly behind a paywall). It began:

THROUGH the window of the Lunatic Express, scorched desert gives way to the scenic splendour of the Great Rift Valley. From Mombasa, in Kenya, one of the most famous routes of the British Empire follows the singe track to Lake Victoria and on towards Kampala, the Ugandan capital.

This railway, once the British pride of East Africa, was given its nickname by sceptics who thought it expensive folly to build a line through such difficult and empty terrain.

Now it might better describe the passengers willing to put up with last-minute cancellations, 13-hour delays and thieves at the windows. But that could be about to change.

Next month a South African consortium is to take over the railway, charged with reversing its decline. It plans to slash the 9,000-strong workforce by two thirds and invest more than £150 million to restore past glory to the line credited with opening up the continent.

That journey was great fun too. Although rather soured by the fact that I eventually clambered off some 50 miles short of Mombasa and already about 12 hours late (impressive for a scheduled 13-hour journey).

Construction of the Lunatic Express was famously held up for months by a pair of man-eating lions. So I was particularly tickled to learn that the builders of the Karachi to Lahore line faced similar challenges in the form of rabid wolves.

John Brunton, the chief engineer, described in his memoir the challenges of buying off hostile princes and the day a rabid wolf ran through his camp outside Karachi.

“In India a record is kept of all fatalities arising from attacks of wild beasts, snakes etc – and on this occasion the return gave 12 men bitten, of whom 10 died, and a large number of cattle,” he wrote.

“The brute was hunted down and killed by the natives, the day after our interview with him.”

John Brunton’s Book is a fascinating record of his exploits in the interior of Sindh. Well worth seeking out if you share my fascination with the oddballs and genuises that built Britain’s empire.

Debunking the "original sin" of online newspapers

Reblogged from GigaOM:

• 

Whenever newspaper executives get together to bemoan the fate of their industry, someone inevitably brings up the so-called "original sin" of the online news business -- namely, a failure to charge for content when the web was new. One of the latest manifestations of this idea appears in an upcoming e-book called "Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future," from former…

Read more… 977 more words

This is an interesting post. As a journalist, I still have a massive problem with content being given away for free and the way in which consumers now assume it should be free. However, it also spells out what I think is the fundamental problem: the newspapers have been run for 200 years on the same business model, in which the biggest innovation might have been to launch a Sunday paper. As a result, they haven't been very fleet of foot in response to the challenge of the Internet

Darfur diplomacy row

On the road with Unamid

Ibrahim Gambari is head of Unamid, the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur. He’s a diplomat. And one of the things about being a diplomat is that you go to things when you are invited. That’s the diplomatic thing to do. And so it was that he turned up at a wedding do in Khartoum. Of course it wasn’t any old wedding. It was the marriage of Chad’s president Idriss Deby to a daughter of the infamous Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal. And guess who was there? Omar al Bashir, president of Sudan who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on several counts of crimes against humanity.

Unpleasant and distasteful the company may have been. But then few diplomats in the region would get very far if they avoided unpleasant and distasteful company. But look what happened next:

New York-based Human Rights Watch protested in a letter last week to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon over the meeting, in which a Reuters photograph showed Ibrahim Gambari talking to President Omar Hassan al-Bashir at the wedding in Khartoum.

“Mr. Gambari’s attention has been drawn to the letter and to the need to avoid such encounters in future, however unintentional this particular encounter may have been,” U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters.

In an ideal world, of course Mr Gambari should not be consorting with suspects such as Mr Bashir or his Janjaweed lieutenant. But then again, we don’t live in an ideal world. As Simon Allison points out, that is rather why we have diplomats:

This is a conflict in which there aren’t any good guys, only men of varying levels of disrepute. Bashir is among the worst, but he is also the most important. Knowing this, and given the parlous state of Darfuri politics does it not make some kind of sense that Gambari should seize whatever opportunities he can to speak with Bashir and his lieutenants?

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I turn up at an office in my tie with tape recorder in hand then everyone’s guard goes up. Instead I get some of my best work done, contacts made and titbits collected at social occasions. And the same goes for diplomacy.

The human rights analysis has proved an effective tool for raising awareness of so much suffering around the world. But sometimes we have to remember it isn’t the only game in town.

In the end, Mr Gambari has a better chance of making a difference in Darfur than a bloke with a megaphone laying down the law from New York.

(And if you like this argument – or disagree so much that you want to throttle me – there’s more of the same in my book, Saving Darfur.)

Pakistan: A hard country to write about

Anatol Lieven, author of Pakistan: A Hard Country, is in the country ahead of an appearance at the Karachi Literary Festival next weekend. His critics – who think he is too soft on Pakistan’s military dictators – won’t be surprised to hear that on Saturday he was defending Zia ul-Haq against charges he helped the religious right to prominence. More interesting to me though was his trouble finding a publisher…

The author also discussed the barriers present in trying to publish a nuanced view of the country’s problems and politics. Lieven recalled how the Penguin publishers told him that they thought the book would be about the Taliban, to which he’d retorted: “It’s about Pakistan”. He received the response, “But isn’t that the same thing?” Lieven was subsequently rejected by Penguin.

Five Months in Kano, and an Abrupt Return

Reblogged from Sahel Blog:

Regular readers probably noticed a drop-off in posting around September; daily posting did not resume until last week. During the interval I was in Kano, Northern Nigeria, doing my dissertation fieldwork. My dissertation is not about Boko Haram - rather it is about Muslims from Northern Nigeria who have studied in Arab universities and returned home, and indeed none of Boko Haram's leaders seem to fall into this category, being instead locally educated - but Boko Haram certainly cast a shadow over my time there.

Read more… 821 more words

If you've been wondering where Sahel Blog has been, well here is the answer. He found himself in the eye of the Boko Haram storm in northern Nigeria, and for very sensible security and research ethicy reasons went dark for a bit. But his reflections provide interesting context to what's happening in a poorly understood part of the world...