Justin Podur's blog

So, it looks like Musharraf got the message and resigned. The message, probably, having come from the US. Authoritarian regimes might be useful to imperial patrons, but individual dictators are usually dispensable. Because he is resigning, he will get off easy, not be tried for any crimes, and probably be allowed to leave the country. Tariq Ali argued in the Guardian that he can't stay in Pakistan because of the risk of assassination.

ISLAMABAD – The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is a women's organization that runs underground schools and other projects, educates Afghan girls, runs a periodic journal, and agitates politically for women's rights, human rights, secularism, and social justice in Afghanistan. From the 1979 Soviet invasion through to the 2006 closings of the camps, millions of Afghan refugees lived in Pakistan and many still do. While RAWA's operations were always based primarily in Afghanistan, they have also had a strong presence in the Pakistan refugee community.

They said they saw the piece in the Pakistan News on the US-Israel relationship, and were doing interviews with other bloggers. Linked here.

I am not the best person to commemorate the passing of Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine. Any poetry I have written is basically comedic, whether I intend it that way or not. My arabic is not good enough for me to appreciate him in the original, and even of his english translations I only have read or heard a handful of poems. But I do have some sense of what he means and has meant to Palestinians and to poetry.

I am back in Toronto. Also, I managed to get an op-ed into the Pakistan News, in the hopes of changing some common misconceptions about the nature of the US-Israel relationship. I'm reproducing it below.

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US-Israel relationship misconceptions
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Justin Podur

ABU DHABI (Airport, just passing through on the way back to Toronto) - I was in Islamabad for the 100-day mark of the elected government. It had fractured over the inability to make any clear move to deal with the situation on the border with Afghanistan, the inability to address the economic problem, and the indecisiveness over whether to reinstate the supreme court judges sacked by Musharraf.

PONKUNNAM, KERALA, INDIA - Sorry for not sharing much since the nuclear deal went through. It is partly because I was busy with non-political matters in Kerala, family visits and kalaripayatu (the martial art of southern India that I study as a hobby), partly because internet access was not quite as complete as it had been in Islamabad or Delhi. But partly there was a good reason, which is that I was actually doing some talks and events here.

KOZHIKODE, Kerala, India - In the event, the vote wasn't even that close. 275-256, a comfortable margin of 19 votes. Several opposition MPs defied party discipline to vote for the government. The BJP staged a disgraceful demonstration waving huge stacks of money and accusing congress of vote-buying. Now the BJP are guardians of political morality, evidently (not to casually dismiss the charges of corruption or vote-buying. Perhaps India could address this corruption problem by formalizing vote-buying through a more developed lobby system, like Western countries have?).

KOZHIKODE, Kerala, India July 21/08 - The news India is all centered on tomorrow's confidence vote, on which India's Congress-led coalition government, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has staked its rule. The confidence vote was necessary, as I said in my previous blog, because of the Indo-US nuclear deal. In between that blog entry and this one, I had a chance to look at a new document prepared by the Left parties, consisting of correspondence between the Left parties and the UPA over the nuclear deal.

On my way from Pakistan to Kerala, I stopped for a day in Delhi - I have a couple of hours left in this very interesting city. Thanks to friends I had an excellent 48 hours, though I could have stayed much longer and learned much more.