A better shorthand for the Afghan war B4
B KLMNO
by Mohsin Hamid in lahore
T
he United States is struggling to implement a strategy for Af- ghanistan that will improve the lives of the Afghan people and allow U.S. troops to go
home. Part of what makes it so difficult is the way Washington views the conflict: through the lens of what officials have dubbed “AfPak,” a war in the southern part of Afghanistan and the adjoining border areas of Pakistan. Though the ac- ronym is falling out of official favor, the AfPak mind-set remains. A different shorthand for the war might help. “AfPInd” may be less catchy, but it is far more useful. Peace in AfPInd requires not U.S. troops on the ground, but a concerted effort to bring India and Pakistan to the negotiating table, where under the watchful eyes of the interna- tional community they can end their hy- dra-headed confrontation over Kashmir. But that’s not how the United States sees this conflict. Mutual mistrust has bedeviled the U.S.-Pakistani alliance since the Afghan war began in 2001. Cer- tain suspicions surfaced again recently in military documents revealed by Wiki- Leaks alleging that members of the Paki- stani intelligence agency collaborated with militant groups fighting the United States in Afghanistan. Both Pakistani and U.S. officials have said that the infor- mation is old, unreliable and not true to the situation on the ground. Yet the re- criminations and controversy have a “here we go again” feel. After all, we’ve seen this pattern before. In 1947, when Hindu-majority India
and Muslim-majority Pakistan were parti- tioned into two countries, the status of the region of Kashmir, with a Muslim- majority population and a Hindu prince,
was unresolved. The United Nations said Kashmiris should hold a referendum, but both India and Pakistan seized parts of the territory, and since then the two coun- tries have been at each other’s throats. Enter the United States — not once, but three times. In the 1950s and 1960s, Pakistan and
the United States were allies. The United States gave Pakistan weapons and $2 bil- lion in economic aid; it thought that the Pakistani military would be a bulwark against communism. The Pakistani mili- tary thought the United States would help it against a much larger and hostile India. Then India and Pakistan went to war in 1965. American leaders castigated Pa- kistan for using U.S.-supplied weapons and terminated the alliance. Fast forward to the 1980s, and Pakistan and the United States once again were al- lies. The United States gave Pakistan weapons and $3 billion in economic aid; it thought that the Pakistani military would be a bulwark against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Pakistani mili- tary thought the United States would help it against a much larger and hostile India. Then the Soviets were defeated. The
United States castigated Pakistan for de- veloping nuclear weapons (to counter In- dia) and terminated the alliance. Today, Pakistan and the United States are allies for a third time. Over the past decade, the United States has given Paki- stan weapons and $4 billion (and count- ing) in economic aid; it hopes that the Pakistani military will be a bulwark against terrorist groups in the region. The Pakistani military hopes the United States will help it against a much larger and hostile India. Then . . . By now, the recurring failure in the Pa- kistan-U.S. alliance should be obvious: The Pakistani military views it primarily as a means of reducing the threat from India, and the United States does not.
But perhaps the United States should. The reason the Pakistani military con- tinued to back jihadist groups, jointly set up with the CIA in the 1980s, after the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghani- stan was that it believed the same tactics could be used in Kashmir against India. And the reason the Pakistani military re- mains obsessed with shaping events in Afghanistan is because that country is the site of a power struggle between Pa- kistan and India — what commentators in Pakistan go so far as to call a “proxy war.” It is what Ashfaq Kayani, the Paki- stan army chief, means when he speaks of Pakistan’s desire for “strategic depth” in Afghanistan. Fighting terrorists or fighting the Tali- ban — or indeed, fighting in Afghanistan at all — addresses symptoms rather than the disease in South Asia: the horrific, wasteful, tragic and dangerous six-dec- ade confrontation between India and Pa- kistan over Kashmir. This confrontation ravages Afghani- stan, where the Northern Alliance, which was organized to fight the Taliban, is backed by money and weapons from In- dia, and militant groups among the southern Pashtuns are backed by Paki- stan. It is a big part of why peace eludes the country, even though the Soviets left a generation ago. Ignore Kashmir, as the United States does, and the conflict seems incompre- hensible. Include Kashmir in the picture, and it all makes sense. At the moment, the Pakistani military uses militant groups to put pressure on India to negotiate, and India uses terror- ism as an excuse not to negotiate. By so doing, both sides harm themselves great- ly. The vast majority of people in South Asia, who like myself desire peace built on compromise, find our hopes held hos- tage by security hawks. The situation is not improving. India’s
AF P KRISTIN LENZ
stance toward Pakistan has hardened since attacks by Pakistan-based militants on Mumbai killed 173 people in 2008. And here in Pakistan, militants are kill- ing even more civilians, police officers and soldiers every month — more than 3,000 Pakistanis in 2009. Some of the preschools I’m considering for my daughter now have snipers on their roofs and steel barricades at their gates. Meanwhile, the United States has placed 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, where they can do little to eliminate the single biggest problem that nation faces: being made into a battleground by its
neighbors. The United States still sets much of the global agenda. If it hopes to salvage any remotely positive outcome from its mas- sive, nine-year-old war in Afghanistan, then it should move a resolution over Kashmir up on its list of priorities. Peace in AfPak is failing because the term itself is a willful illusion. Peace in AfPInd will not be easy, but the term rings true, and that at least offers a start.
Mohsin Hamid is a writer based in Pakistan. His most recent novel is “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”
SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010
THE DIRTY THE CLEAN
T e old-school, resource-extracting, energy-intensive American industrialists are giving way to a new breed of eco-friendly “clean rich.” T e annual Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the country shows a clear evolution in the sources of wealth.
SOURCES: Data from Forbes.; calculations by David Callahan
Sources of wealth among the Forbes 400 2006
1982
Who’s worth what? T e wealthiest Americans and their industries $
17.billion5
CHARLES KOCH Manufacturing, energy
$
17.billion5
DAVID KOCH Manufacturing, energy
$12 billion
DONALD BREN Real estate
$10 billion
GEORGE KAISER Oil & gas, banking
$5.5 billion
HAROLD HAMM Energy
$53 billion BILL GATES, Soſt ware
$28 billion
LARRY ELLISON Soſt ware
SOURCE: “T e World’s Billionaires,” Forbes, 2010
$18 billion
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG Information services
$17.5 billion
SERGEY BRIN Internet
$17.5 billion
LARRY PAGE Internet
Clean, green, money-making machines dirty rich continued from B1
Of course, the dirty rich still have enough juice on Capitol Hill to kill bills they don’t like, or to neuter the federal watchdogs who oversee deepwater dril- ling in the Gulf of Mexico and coal min- ing in West Virginia. ExxonMobil, for example, is not just the second-largest American corporation; it also has the some of the deepest pockets for lobbying, spending $27.4 million on such activities in 2009, more than any other company. But the larger transition is clear: America is witnessing the twilight of the dirty rich and the inexorable move of economic power to the clean rich. What’s more, environmental values are spread- ing fast through affluent America, with more super-wealthy individuals putting their money behind green causes and more upscale voters expecting govern- ment action to protect the planet. Cli- mate legislation may be dead for now, but if big money really talks in America, the long-term prospects for tougher envi- ronmental rules would seem quite good. It is hard to understate how dramat- ically the sources of business wealth have shifted in the past half-century. Of the top 20 companies on the Fortune 500 list in 1960, 16 were engaged in heavy indus- try, such as U.S. Steel and DuPont, or re- source extraction, such as Texaco and Mobil. This year’s list includes just six such companies in the top 20. And two of them, GM and Ford, have been in decline for years. Meanwhile, the dirty rich are fading from the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest individuals. When the list was first pub- lished in 1982, 38 percent of its members had made their fortunes in oil and manu- facturing, and 12 percent in finance and technology. By 2006, those ratios had nearly flipped: 36 percent of the richest Americans made their wealth from fi- nance and tech, while 17 percent earned it from manufacturing and oil. The dirty-rich billionaires on the
Forbes list are mostly on the older side — such as industrialists David and Charles
Koch, both in their 70s. In March, one of the nation’s richest oilmen, pipeline magnate Dan Duncan, died at the age of 77. Among recent newcomers to the list, few have been from dirty industries. More typical is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who made the list in 2008 at age 24. Even Texas doesn’t have as many dirty rich as it used to. Fewer than half of the state’s billionaires made their money in oil or energy, a major departure from ear- lier patterns. The two wealthiest Texans today are not oilmen; they are Alice Wal- ton, an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune, fol- lowed by Michael Dell, a computer entre- preneur. Dell doesn’t live in either of the traditional oil-money cities, Houston and Dallas; he resides in Austin, which has grown more influential in the state’s cultural and political life as it has be- come home to numerous high-tech entrepreneurs. Dallas still has plenty of conservative oil money, but the city’s economy is now powered by tech, finance and services. If the primetime soap opera “Dallas” were remade today, J.R. Ewing would probably be a telecom magnate. The same pattern holds elsewhere.
The great fortunes of Colorado used to be made from oil or mining, and the state’s politicians were often creatures of these industries and unfriendly to environ- mentalists. Now the state’s super-rich are a very different breed, including satellite TV mogul Charles Ergen and Quark founder Tim Gill. In the early 1980s, the only Forbes 400 member from the Pacific Northwest was a timber baron. Today a half-dozen billionaires live in the region, and most made their money in technol- ogy. California’s Santa Clara County, which covers Silicon Valley, now has more millionaires than Manhattan. This seismic shift in who gets rich is fast changing where politicians get their money and whom they listen to. A tor- rent of new cash has flowed into politics from the finance, tech and entertain- ment industries, and especially from the legal profession, which gave twice as much to national candidates in 2008 as any other sector. Dirty industries that
once wielded enormous clout on Capitol Hill — such as autos, steel and mining — aren’t the players they once were. Politi- cal contributions from the entire coal in- dustry amounted to $3.5 million in 2008, while Microsoft employees contributed $3.3 million. In 2008, John McCain far outraised Obama among employees of energy and natural resources companies, pulling in $4 million from this group. Not bad, ex- cept that Obama bested McCain in the communications and electronics sector five to one, raising $25.5 million. Until the 2002 election, the oil and gas indus- try — long a deep well of GOP cash— was consistently among the top 10 sources of money for federal candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2008, it ranked 16th. That same year, the entire energy and natural resources sec- tor gave $77 million in campaign dona- tions — compared with $234 million giv- en by lawyers. The picture looks quite different when it comes to money for lobbying, with dirty industries still among the biggest spenders in Washington. But the winds may be shifting in this area as well: The once-feared automotive industry is now so weak that Detroit could barely swing a bailout last year and watched helplessly in late 2008 as its greatest champion in Congress, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), was ousted from a powerful chairman- ship by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), a strong environmentalist. Of course, new-economy giants such
as Hewlett-Packard have faced withering criticism of their environmental records, and the pollution from high-tech prod- ucts can certainly be serious. The differ- ence, however, is scale. While Google’s servers gobble up vast amounts of en- ergy, its products exist mainly as pixels on a screen. BlackBerrys and iPhones are pocket-size, and desktop computers, which are among the larger products of the Information Age, weigh a few hun- dred times less than an automobile. Other knowledge industries, such as the legal profession, are about monetiz- ing cognitive skills and have little to do
with the old-economy model of convert- ing natural resources into wealth. So some of the fastest-growing and richest parts of the economy aren’t much affect- ed by environmental laws — which is why a growing slice of America’s busi- ness elite has little incentive to battle them. What’s more, an ever-larger contin-
gent of clean-tech entrepreneurs and in- vestors will score big if Congress acts to push up the price of carbon. Last year, George Soros pledged to make $1 billion in renewable-energy investments. Other billionaires, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, are also placing major bets in this sector. Apart from self-interest, many of the clean rich care about the environment. They tend to be highly educated, and quite a few have scientific training. They understand that climate change is real and must be addressed now. Google, which is run by three computer scien- tists, set out to be carbon-neutral several years ago and says it has achieved that goal. The company even helps employees to buy hybrid vehicles. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore— a chemist by training— is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to help preserve fragile ecosystems. But the roots of the clean rich go deep-
er. The modern environmental move- ment emerged in the 1960s, fueled in large part by the spread of affluence and education. There is a logic to that link: Once your material needs are met, you can turn your attention to other con- cerns, whether saving polar bears or the Amazon. “Postmodern values give priori- ty to environmental protection and cul- tural issues,” University of Michigan po- litical scientist Ronald Inglehart has written, “even when these goals conflict with maximizing economic growth.” Inglehart bases this conclusion on dec- ades of research through the World Val- ues Survey, which has tracked changing attitudes in 97 countries. His findings consistently show that rising incomes and more wealth lead to environmental- ism. That certainly seemed the case in 2006, when Californians voted on Propo-
sition 87, which would have taxed oil companies to fund alternative fuels. The initiative, which failed overall, passed in higher-income counties, such as Marin and Alameda, while losing by huge mar- gins in some of the state’s poorest coun- ties. In Modoc County, a rural area with the one of the lowest household income levels in California, only 24 percent of voters supported the initiative, com- pared with 72 percent in prosperous San Francisco County. It is hardly news that affluent liberals
often fret more about the environment than working-class voters. But this class divide is poised to have a larger political impact. One reason the Republican Party can blithely block attempts to address climate change, one of the gravest threats facing humanity, is that its political base is heavily weighted with less-educated and less affluent voters who live in rural areas and small towns — and who aren’t keen on government activism to protect the planet. A poll last year by the Pew Re- search Center for the People and the Press, for instance, found that support for legislation to limit carbon emissions was 16 points higher among college grad- uates than those with a high school di- ploma or less. Yet if the GOP is to build a durable ma-
jority, it will have to move beyond this constituency. Even if Republicans take control of the House this fall, that won’t change the fact that the Palin and Lim- baugh wing of the party has badly hurt GOP fortunes by alienating affluent and educated donors and voters — as wit- nessed most dramatically by Obama’s crushing fundraising edge over McCain. Wooing back these natural allies, espe- cially the clean rich, will require tacking to the center. And climate change, an is- sue driven by scientific evidence and with appeal in this newly influential community, is a great candidate for a softened stance. Its time will come soon — and could come even faster if a few far- sighted Republicans recognize their plight and decide to hasten that trans- formation.
dcallahan@demos.org
Oil Manufacturing Finance Technology
Finance Technology
Oil Manufacturing
22.3% 15.3% 9% 3% 24.5% 11.8%
8.5% 8.5%
IND
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