Longer piece will run tomorrow or Tuesday, but until then, a few thoughts on this constitutional crisis: Uh, post-Iftar, that is. Ramzan Mubarak 🌙

The idea that Partition and Pakistan led to a radical India – thus hardly vindicating Jinnah – is an interesting one, as is the idea that things would have been different otherwise.

But this sidesteps the lived reality of both places for a weak counterfactual. Short thread: The theory is an old one, but is often used to externalize India’s internal tensions. Congress, in dazed retreat since 2014, uses it to justify its own electoral decline. ‘If Pakistan had not been created,’ Shashi Tharoor says, ‘could India become what it is today?'

I demonstrate that a 19-year-long occupation that's tried everything and won nothing must stay until it achieves something. We need more war until there is more peace, hence more war. Not leaving forever is not the same thing as staying forever.

In this essay I will-

https://twitter.com/MadihaAfzal/status/1316066593609265152

The trademark thing about the Bush-Cheney wars was using circular, bureaucratic language to finesse acts of war and death.

'Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.'
'Unknown knowns: things you know that you did not.'

Both Rumsfeld gems, harder to fall for in 2020.

Pakistan's new hope of the month seems to be Joe Biden, vice-president to an administration that slaughtered the single largest number of Pakistanis in history.

Native informants already urge him to support civil liberties here (which he used to do with Hellfire missiles). Drone fans reframe this by calling out Pakistanis' (i.e. their own) complicity.

But Musharraf & Co. was a rentier regime that opened up airbases, pointed at maps, and collected 'bounty money' for the citizens it handed over to Bush's black sites.

Pakistanis never wanted this.

It's heartening to see less and less acceptance of old 9/11 era tropes for Pakistan. Think-tanks abroad sadly continue to encourage its study through three prisms: Af-Pak, civ-mil, and the Bomb, with a perverse sliding scale for 'democracy', in use since the Bush days. Back then, democracy was whatever suited the neocon consensus: rentier land links (Pakistan), sectarian militias (Iraq), even narco-states (Karzai's Afghanistan).

It also magically excluded Pax Americana's elected enemies, like Hamas in Palestine or the Brotherhood in Egypt.

Cover of the weekly Nusrat from 12 January 1969, featuring Malik Meraj Khalid.

This is from the late Marghoob Raza's wonderful collection of left-leaning magazines from the late '60s and '70s, preserved by the generous Mansoor Raza.

This edition brings to mind a few thoughts. The debate being had right now is whether or not ethno-separatist terrorists – the ones that spend most of their time shooting up buses and killing schoolteachers – deserve the same space as genuine, disenfranchised leftists. It also shows how debased that debate has become.

What drives a historian, one as thoughtful as Guha, to keep crying wolf about an imaginary Pakistan, even as Modi's dollar store Nazis rip apart his own country?

Some thoughts.

https://twitter.com/Ram_Guha/status/1202472418972852224

To save everyone time, Professor @Le_Sabre54 summed it up best here (besides being the genesis of 'dollar store Nazis').

https://twitter.com/Le_Sabre54/status/1202836131534065665?s=20