Faisal Shahzad: actually, Pakistan is a great ally on the war on terror

So another guy with a Muslim name, this time a Pakistani name, recently attempted to attack an American target. I’ve been watching the Daily Show about it, along with the other news channels of equal gravitas – Dawn News, CNN, FOX, whatever – and the joy Jon Stewart has taken in Faisal Shahzad’s ineptitude is a joy I share.

If for no other reason than because it has elicited from Hilary Clinton a stern warning that further terrorist ties to Pakistan are going to be met with severity, and I find that strangely vindicating. Or because at least now, when young Pakistani men, of whatever citizenship (it doesn’t matter anymore) get frisked, prodded, harassed and humiliated, it will by a disdainful and derisive officer of the law, and not an angry vengeful one.

My friend Shandana’s Facebook status reads: “Faisal Shahzad, may the lice of a 1000 camels infest your ass and may you then proceed to rot in hell.” Shandana feels this way because every time a Pakistani of any stripe is implicated in a plot to bomb something, the rest of us are that much more ginger about our aspirations to go to the States and gamble in Atlantic City or visit Disney Land or our sick grandmother. Or do that land-of-opportunity thing that the TV shows tell us America is all about. That many more young Pakistani men are going to get poked and prodded and stopped at the airport and searched and intimidated and harangued and humiliated.

The decades-old standby: foreign mein ja kar zindagi banaengay – we’ll go make our lives abroad – is fast becoming less viable.

Because the State of Pakistan, as ever, is not interested in providing employment, education, opportunity or any of the raw materials of a good, successful life to anyone. Those that can, choose to leave, to be doctors or cab drivers, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes even those who can’t leave, choose it, and find themselves in impossible situations, endangered by trafficking rings and indenturement contracts masquerading as attractive job offers.

When I first read in the local paper that Hilary Clinton was, as people have been saying here, “a bit upset with us”, I thought, great! Another warning that America could come bomb a little more of our country to get those terrorists. But then it occurred to me that, no, actually, that’s just noise.

Pakistan is a fantastic ally on this war on terror. We bomb our own citizens with such enthusiasm because we haven’t made the arrangements to provide them with any inalienable rights in the first place. The rights of Pakistanis are very alienable, evidenced from the repeated suspension of and mangling of the Constitution. Hilary Clinton’s bluster is not going to make a difference. She’s going to threaten us with dire consequences? Would that be for fostering a militia the US wanted us to foster or losing control of its consequences right alongside the US? How much more dire than randomly occurring suicide attacks in the “peaceful” cities and an all-out war in the, you know, war-torn cities are those dire consequences likely to be?

I mean, it was fantastic to read over the weekend that “Pakistan arrests relatives of NY bomb suspect” on Dawn.com, the major English language news source in Pakistan. Arrests, mind you, not “picks up for questioning” or “questions” or “investigates”. They have apparently been arrested for being related to a suspected terrorist. We should be shocked and horrified: but we know from the case of Aafia Siddiqui, who was disappeared along with her children in 2003, and the “Salt Pit” death of Gul Rahman, who was killed in 2002 in a CIA prison without anyone notifying his family for years years, that this is peanuts. Once you are labelled a combatant in the War on Terror, nothing else about you matters. Your life is forfeit, your family irrelevant, and your body evidence of someone else’s power.

And that is what makes a difference: other people, agents of state and private citizens alike, who feel justified in their racism, self-righteous about their Islamophobia, get a bit more comfortable resurrecting the slur “paki”, because one f%@kwit didn’t have the civic sense to tie his own incompetent shoe-laces together, stumble into manhole and get eaten by sewer rats instead of making a bomb. Stateswomen can shake their fists and flash their eyes; civil servants in the foreign office can assure Pakistan’s fullest cooperation; they can shake hands and decide to be better warriors against terror togehter: it doesn’t matter. Regular people are really quite incidental to the whole thing.