So, here it is:

Another new recruit that’s given pause is former Intelligence Bureau chief Masood Sharif Khattak who contested the 2002 elections in KPK against Imran as a PPP candidate. Khattak was part of the PPP central committee for nearly a decade before resigning in 2007 over Benazir Bhutto’s deal with Pervez Musharraf about the NRO. So, perhaps the concern may be unwarranted, but his admission into the PTI has raised eyebrows among many already suspicious about the PTI’s links with the establishment.

The bulk of the people now entering Imran’s party are career politicians, a far cry from the urban professionals he has so long touted as his strength. In Imran’s terms, these are exactly the sort of people who need politics. Khwaja Khan Hoti is a career politician from KPK who served terms as federal minister and provincial minister with the PPP; at other times in his career, he served in senior position within the ranks of the secular, Pashtun, Awami National Party (ANP). As with so many others, politics is a family business for the Hotis: Hoti’s son, Omar Farooq, preceded his father’s entry into the PTI. The younger Hoti is expected to the ticket from Mardan.

Another politician whose addition to PTI has caused a stir is Sardar Faiz Tamman, from Punjab. Tamman, a careerist who appears to care for little else than ascending the political ladder, has drifted from one party to another throughout his time in politics. He shifted from the PPP to join a PPP split group, the PPP-Patriot, earlier in his career, but was elected to the National Assembly in 2002 as an Independent. Then, he was admitted to Musharraf’s PML-Q but resigned in 2008, later joining the PML-N. In 2010, Tamman had to resign from his seat when it turned out that he had had faked his college degrees.

Another dubious figure is Mian Mohammad Azhar who has been active in Lahore’s politics for nearly three decades. During Zia ul-Haq’s era, Mian Azhar served as mayor of Lahore under Nawaz Sharif’s governorship. In 1988, after Zia—quite literally, exploded—Azhar’s closeness to the Sharifs earned him a ticket from Gujranwala in Punjab, and by 1990, he had become governor of the province. He left the office in 1992 reportedly over differences with the Sharifs. He was back by 1997, this time as an elected member of the National Assembly. He moved on from the PML-N, however, going on to become head of Musharraf’s PML-Q. He has the dubious recognition of being a politician who lost his seat in the 2002 elections, even though it’s widely alleged that there was massive rigging electorally that year in favor of the PML-Q.  Clearly as with Tamman, Mian Azhar, too views the PTI strategically as a chance to revitalize his political fortunes.

The most significant addition to date is Shah Mahmood Qureshi, the former foreign minister of Pakistan who lost his post during the current PPP-led government after taking a stand on the Raymond Davis affair. Qureshi maintained that Davis’ documents did not show that the contractor who murdered two people in the streets of Lahore—a third was also killed after he was mowed down by a consular vehicle rushing to Davis’ rescue— held any diplomatic immunity. After being courted by the PTI as well as the PML-N, Qureshi joined Imran’s party in late November. He received the position of Senior Vice Chairman within the party.

Whatever the intentions of the leadership, the changes are causing unease within the party. Qureshi’s immediate ascension to senior ranks, for instance, created murmurs of dissension within PTI’s ranks among longtime loyal members who felt shafted. According to a local analyst in Swat, PTI’s members are deeply unhappy with the new additions. A columnist for the Urdu daily Aaj reported that PTI’s chairman for the party’s local district coordination council, Fazal Rabbi, had suspended the local cabinet early December saying that the party’s leadership was responsible for creating discord in the ranks.

Dr. Mazari, too, is now considering quitting the party. She’s reportedly upset the Imran may be softening his stance on drones and the US. And, the influx of new politicians who have checkered political careers may be another reason. A press release by the party denied the reports maintaining PTI’s position on drones and the “war on terror” remains the same. The press release also said that PTI’s central committee will vet applicants for election tickets to protect the party from “the opportunist remnants of the Musharraf era and Zardari regime now scrambling to enter the PTI fold.” Interestingly, that entire phrase was left out of the Urdu version of the release.

(ps: Leave comments! But, please note: the comments section works, but needs fixing. Working on it. Stay tuned.)

Around the time of the release of Granta 112, I came across an interview with the magazine’s new editor, John Freeman, about the Pakistan issue. I hoped I would find some plausible rationale for the linguistic chauvinism of the issue, but I was disappointed. When asked why so few translations were included, Freeman responded, “…we got loads of submissions, a lot of them translations from Urdu, which we especially asked for, but it was very hard to find something contemporary that made sense.” This idea of what ‘makes sense’ troubled me. Was the writing bad, were the translations poor? What does it mean for a piece of writing to ‘make sense’ in this context? Did they not talk about Islamism or militarisation? Were they not keyed into global conversations?

Rockwell holds a PhD in Hindi literature, but has returned to painting. Read it here.

Growing anarchy has made access to information dependent on the will of the military and the militants. Both have shown little tolerance in allowing reporters to work independently. In threatening circumstances, journalists feel little hesitation in toeing the line, which has made journalism subservient to military strategies. More importantly, it has provided journalists with an excuse to justify anything in the name of insecurity, making professional dishonesty the norm in war reporting.

Ethically, any defensive measure is justified if it helps reporters keep safe. In the local context, however, this provisional compromise is of little help in ensuring their security. Meanwhile, it has killed in them the spirit of initiative. There is a growing realisation that journalism in a hostile situation is mainly about serving the combatants. This has caused complacency in war reporters. They take pride in their relationship with militants, who often invite them to cover terror at the source.

This should give pause to think tanks which regularly use this reporting to build arguments for or against drones and more generally, the ‘war on terror.’

Full article here.

The work of the historian and the journalist converge: both are involved in reproducing national narratives, retelling the past and the present to legitimize particular identities and ideas at the expense of others. So, on ZAB’s death anniversary, I think it’s important to recall the alternative histories buried under heavy doses of propaganda and mythification. Here he is calling Bengalis “sons of swine,” for failing to accept the rule of West Pakistan even though East Pakistan–now Bangladesh–had won the electoral majority:

And here’s Bilawal Bhutto, the latest in the dynastic line, delivering a speech in fairly accented Urdu to a group of workers in a conference room. It looks silly–actually downright ridiculous–but let’s not forget: his mother started out the same way.

If one could think of the life of this discipline within the university — composed of classrooms, courses, examinations, seminars, conferences, journals, and so on — as its “cloistered life,” as it were, then by its “public life” one could mean the connections that such a discipline might forge with institutions and practices outside the university and official bureaucracy. Can this discipline have a public life in my sense of the term when the public actually debates the past?

And this, is a great piece from the London Review of Books, somewhat older, but one of the best book reviews I’ve read: Eliot Weinberger doing a Foucauldian reading of George Bush’s Decision Points:

In the late 1960s, George Bush Jr was at Yale, branding the asses of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the Societé française de philosophie, considering the question, ‘What is an author?’

Full article here.

Finally, on the question of authorship and language in the Pakistani context, here’s a wonderful column by a young writer, Bilal Tanweer. It’s called “Who Do We Write for When We Write in English?“

If:

Central to the changes has been the deepening of an unresolved tension as to whether writers and intellectuals can ever be what is called non-political or not, and if so, obviously, how and in what measure. The difficulty of the tension for the individual writer and intellectual has been paradoxically that the realm of the political and public has expanded so much as to be virtually without borders. We might well ask whether a non-political intellectual or writer is a notion that has much content to it.

Then:

The intellectual’s role is first to present alternative narratives and other perspectives on history than those provided by combatants on behalf of official memory and national identity, who tend to work in terms of falsified unities, the manipulation of demonized or distorted representations of undesirable and/or excluded populations, and the propagation of heroic anthems sung in order to sweep all before them.

Said discusses the rather sudden reconfiguration of the “imagined community” aided by virtual space and the consequent changes in imagining an audience.

For whom then does one write, if it is difficult to specify the audience with any sort of precision? Most people, I think, focus on the actual outlet that has commissioned the piece, or for the putative readers we would like to address. The idea of an imagined community has suddenly acquired a very literal, if virtual, dimension.

Who do we write for as journalists? And, if the role of the field is intricately tied to the functioning of a democratic-state, how does the fact that our interlocutors may be outside those boundaries reshape our role?

Christopher Rogers writing about CIVIC’s study on civilian casualties in Pakistan. Includes drone issue. Civilian Harm and Conflict in Northwest Pakistan

Bill Roggio and Alexander Mayer’s data and assessment for the Long War Journal.

David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum’s op-ed. Death from Above, Outrage Down Below

Jeremy Scahill discussing Christine Fair’s assessment.

Jane Mayer for the New Yorker.  The Predator War

Graeme Smith for Globe and Mail. Pakistan’s Deadly Robots in the Sky