Eric Schmidt's thoughts about Pakistan

Were the Troubles a conflict waged between the Scots and the English?

The claim that the perpetrators of 9/11 were only "what the West sees as terror networks" is breathtakingly disingenuous.

I hear that Bin Laden died in Abbottabad. I'm no Pakistan expert, but on my map that is not in FATA. It is a short commute from the capital of the country. The house was right next to a top military academy.

If openly supporting the perpetrators of 9/11 is what Pakistan needs to do in order to 'ensure that these areas don't radicalise more' then I wonder for whose benefit Pakistan is doing this wonderful thing. Certainly not New York's... probably just the government of Pakistan, actually. What do I care, if that government also would like me to die, whether it considers some villagers to be radical?

Lese-majeste sucks, but seriously - buying Thai parts through Japanese companies is hardly comparable to harboring and feeding intelligence to the perpetrators of 9/11 in order to maintain the upper hand in the conflict with India.

This alludes to it:

> The press are generally hyper-critical of the United States policies in the region and take the view that the India-US relationship is driving much of our countries behavior.

It's put in diplomatic terms, but anyone from a western country will recognise it as saying that the public discourse about India (and the US) is far from rational. Your other comments are a lot more precise, so thanks.

I think you raise valid points. One difficult problem is (and I have faced this myself for the longest time and it is evident the Eric Schmidt is suffering from it as well) is that one tends to appraise a country along a line that mirrors one's own priors of what a country typically is. Such priors usually mirrors ones own country.

Pakistan's position is really very unique and it takes time to understand it. The usual labels take very different meanings. For instance what the western world calls "middle class" almost doesn't exist in the form that they expect it to. Even if it did, it has nowhere the clout or the purchase. The country is deeply, and I do mean deeply, feudal. "Middle class" either means of a feudal family decent or of military lineage. Feudal land holdings and military are the two, and pretty much the only two centers that drives the economy and are locked in their desire to keep their privileges intact. If you are interested in this topic, do take time to find out what percentage these two forces account for.

And then you have the significantly large radicalized population. And even here it is very different. You would think radical groups are fringe groups, but not quite so in Pakistan and this has been cultivated by deliberate intent over several decades. The identity of a victimized population that the world has been unfair to because of their religion gets ingrained very early in the education system. Such a belief of persecution is rampant even in the mainstream, sometimes given a modicum of a veneer. Its difficult to catch these undertones unless one is familiar with the language and reads the same newspapers that the Pakistanis read, or watch the same TV shows that Pakistanis watch. Find out about Zaid Hamid and then consider the fact that there he is as main stream as vanila ice-cream.

Next word: army. It is very different from an army one would expect to see. It is a cross between a rich political party that has an unprecedentedly militarized cadre and a mafia house doling out favors (in the form of jobs and other privileges) to keep the population in control. On one hand it controls what you would call the civic life and on the other it also controls albeit at a very decentralized way the different Jihadi outfits which are again smaller mafia houses as entrenched in an economic endeavor as much as a religious one. Its common to dismiss these radical outfits as religious whackos, but you would get a better understanding if you also follow the money and see how the business side of it works.

Entwined with the feudal system is a deep ethnic undercurrent and you would often find the different parties locked in a perverse game theoretic equilibrium trying to gain control. All this goes unreported in the western media, or well in their own country as well. To see what I am talking about, dig up statistics of violence related civilian (police personnel included) deaths in Karachi in the past year, and Karachi is the most liberal city there.

The funniest comment by Eric Schmidt was about freedom of the press. That does not exist. Unless you have some seat of power guarding your life you cant say what you want to say at least not while residing in Pakistan.

If you have interest you can follow this sarcastic blog of a faux major http://majorlyprofound.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/prospects-fo... but you have to read between the lines because beneath the sarcasm there lies a lot of deliberate thought.

> so, all in all, you have no fucking clue what you're posting about.

Your response would have been better without this.