Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Pakistan: "Beyond Apathy"

2009-12-31T23:36:00-05:00

[Photo Courtesy: Reuters]

Maha Atal, for the Pulitzer Center

For Pakistan, the aughts did not go out quietly, marked by a suicide bombing in Muzzafarabad, capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, and several explosions in Karachi, culminating in a suicide attack on Monday that left fires raging for days. Both the Karachi and Muzzafarabad blasts were claimed by the TTP, or Pakistan Taliban. But that does precious little to clarify their significance:

The TTP is an umbrella group. Some branches are concerned with the imposition of a strict Islamist regime inside Pakistan and normally target civilian crowds. Others have expansionist ambitions that look westward and normally target the Pakistani military, with no particular concern for Islam. A third set are focused on the political conflict in Kashmir and normally target government presence inside the contested territory. [So fragmented are the groups that while one TTP branch claimed the Karachi attack, another denied it].

This week’s attacks, however, don’t fit neatly into any of these three categories. They occurred around or during the Shi’a commemoration of Ashura, at a time when sectarian violence between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims is commonplace. Indeed, for about 48 hours, local officials were responding to the blasts as an escalation of that age-old conflict.

Yet the Shi’a-Sunni flare-ups usually involve simpler bombs, more hand-to-hand violence and crucially, no suicide. The use of suicide bombers suggests a link to the Islamists or the regional expansionists. The civilian targets point towards the first. The military-grade chemical fires point towards the latter group, because they have historically had official ties and access to official arms.

If domestic Islamism is behind these blasts, why target religious processions? If regional expansionists are behind these blasts, why target civilians instead of military targets? Why do the groups who usually target the military have military-grade weapons in the first place? And which branch of the TTP is most likely to be targeting Karachi, a city far removed from the core havens in the Frontier, and home to economic, not political or military, power?

These questions remind us that the Pakistani Taliban does not have its eye on a concrete goal or purpose. Structurally, that makes them a weaker adversary than the Afghan Taliban, who are united behind the goal of an Islamist state in Kabul. But strategically, this paradoxical mix of interests makes the TTP harder to fight. In Afghanistan, the U.S. and its allies have at least been able to define victory as reclaiming Kabul and making it impossible for the Taliban to regain, even if the strategy for doing so leaves much to be desired. If victory is conclusively denying the enemy his goal, what constitutes a Pakistani victory over the TTP?

Talking over these paradoxes with some Karachi-ites (by phone, as I’ve left Karachi now), I am struck by the way confusion feeds into frustration and defeatism. “It could be any of the above,” says one clothing retailer, “or another party with an agenda we can’t imagine. There’s more than meets the eye, but there’s no logic. I am beyond apathy.”

That is why there’s a growing consensus that to restore a sense of purpose, security in Pakistan must be approached from something other than a military standpoint. There are those, like former commerce minister Zubair Khan, who say it’s best to tackle this as a “crisis of governance,” and to focus on provincial administration. There are others, like pop-star-turned-education-reformer Shehzad Roy, who label this a crisis of opportunity: “Fix the schools and the hospitals alone,” Roy boldly promised me, “and terrorism will vanish.” There is maverick politician Imran Khan, who sees a way out in a Third Way that can bring extremists into the process and neutralize their more radical claims. And there is a business community that insists trade with the region will liberalize Pakistani culture.

These are the developments I’ve been tracing and will continue to trace in the New Year. I’ll be writing from India for the next month, where the economic and security challenges are of a different, but not unrelated, nature. Stay tuned.

Learn more about this reporting project.

The world's most under-reported crises?

2009-12-30T12:58:14-05:00

Since January 2006, when the Pulitzer Center was founded, we have sponsored over 100 in-depth international reporting projects on critical issues that would have otherwise gone uncovered in the US media.

In 2010, we intend to continue our reporting on environmental challenges like water, food and climate change; on HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean and maternal mortality worldwide; on fragile states around the world; and on the implications of U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and beyond.

As we prepare for the new year, the Pulitzer Center wants your opinion on the most under-reported crises happening around the world. What are the stories that the world knows little to nothing about but that we desperately need to be aware of?

Post your comments.

Copenhagen's Most Important Display

2009-12-24T16:52:06-05:00

Jeffrey Barbee, for the Pulitzer Center

When I was in Copenhagen, I was watching the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) science on a sphere at the US pavilion. I saw a video made by Alaskan researcher Katey Walter from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. It shows methane bubbling out of a lake, and then how they returned there in the winter and lit the methane release on fire. They laugh in the video because they almost blew themselves up, but this is not a laughing matter.

Continue reading on the COP15 Dispatches blog

Week in Review

2009-12-23T13:24:07-05:00

Summer Marion, Pulitzer Center

(Editor's note: This is a new feature on Untold Stories, highlighting insightful, compelling, or just plain engaging, reporting that we've encountered as we search the Web. We hope to make the roundup a weekly feature -- and of course we welcome your comments and suggestions.)

COP15: Breakthrough or bust?

Picture of the Week: Five in the afternoon in downtown Copenhagen, by Jeffrey Barbee, a Pulitzer Center grantee

Debate on results of the Copenhagen climate change conference broke out just as the conference itself was winding down, in a flurry of charges and counter-charges that generated more heat than light. Friday evening's barrage of emotive speeches sparked by opposition from Cuba and Tuvalu generated reports that G77 countries rejected Obama's Copenhagen Accords one of the most common misportrayals in COP15 coverage according to Sam Hummel of It's Getting Hot in Here.

The conference generated an impressive breadth of media coverage, spawned by the climate campaign's evolution into a popular movement. Orville Schell of Yale Environment 360 provides insight into the limits of and possible alternatives to greening foreign aid; Michael Davidson offers a glimpse into COP15's agrarian implications for rural China in The Green Leap Forward; and Climate Feedback's Olive Heffernan caught snippets from celebrity attendees like author Tom Friedman and Radiohead's Thom Yorke.

Pointing to concessions by India and China, hopeful analysts like Grist's Daniel Weiss call the conference a diplomatic stepping stone, paving the way for the passage of domestic climate change legislation in the U.S. Hardcore environmentalists like DeSmogBlog's Kevin Grandia assert that the absence of enforcement mechanisms or a concrete timeline suggest yet another instance of passing the buck in global environmental governance, Hopenhagen, as the accompanying climate change petition was dubbed, just may live up to its name.

Danish Wind Energy

2009-12-22T23:08:24-05:00

By Dan Grossman, for the Pulitzer Center

On a tour of the Middelgrunden offshore wind farm off the coast of Copenhagen, Anja Pedersen, an adviser to the Danish Wind Industry Association, describes the scale, benefits and public attitude toward wind energy in Denmark. Denmark produces more than one-fifth of all its electricity with about 5,000 windmills. The country produces by far the largest share of its electrical power with wind of any country in the world, enough wind power to supply every Danish house at the period of peak demand on a windy day. Middelgrunden, an arc of 20 turbines about 2 miles long, was the largest wind farm in the world when it was built in 2000.

Continue reading and see the video on the COP15 Dispatches blog

Nir Rosen responds to critics

2009-12-22T17:28:53-05:00

A special forum on Afghanistan on BostonReview.com

In his Boston Review article, "Something from Nothing: U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan," Pulitzer Center journalist Nir Rosen argues that counterinsurgency doesn’t make sense. It asks soldiers, concerned primarily with survival, to be Wyatt Earp and Mother Theresa. This forum, unveiled over the next several days, showcases critiques of the piece and Rosen's response. Among the six participating critics are Helena Cobban, asserting that Rosen's analysis neglects to account for U.S. domestic politics, and Andrew Exum, arguing that the Central Asian conflict likely marks the end of an era of counterinsurgency as a form of warfare.

View the forum as it appears on BostonReview.com.

Learn more about Nir Rosen's reporting.

No Viable Offspring, But Many Chance Encounters

2009-12-20T15:27:01-05:00

Jeffrey Barbee, for the Pulitzer Center

The Korean vegetarians were a lighthearted group welcoming delegates to the convention, but in the heavy handed police tactics later in the week they all but disappeared.

A brief bird-like gathering of seasonal reproduction has produced no viable offspring. Like migrating bird species, journalists, climate campaigners and governments all gathered together for an orgy of chatter and Scandinavian food, and have now dispersed back to their respective countries.

The back-chatter from pundits and agents provocateurs has not diminished. I hate being right when I am pessimistic, but there was never a feeling that a deal was imminent in Copenhagen. After reading through the drafts that were created at the conference, there is no deal, on anything.

I am happy to invite all readers to look through the draft documents put forward by the working groups and the language of the "agreement." They can all be found on the UNFCCC webpage.

If anything good can be said of the talks and and event, it is that politicians seem to be taking the issue seriously, even if they cannot seem to agree on virtually anything.

Continue reading "No Viable Offspring, But Many Chance Encounters" on the COP15 Dispatches blog

Pakistan: Conceptualizing Corruption

2009-12-20T13:20:00-05:00

Maha Atal, for the Pulitzer Center

As I’ve written previously, the Pakistani government has been taking some heat. On Wednesday night, the controversy finally came to a full boil, and officials are still scrambling to keep the pot from bubbling over.

A bit of background: in 2007, a weakened Pervez Musharraf tried to curry favor with officials by suspending their many corruption cases in exchange for political support. The contraversial National Reconciliation Ordinance was upheld after legal battle in early 2008. But since Musharraf had already canned the nation’s Chief Justice and instituted a new set of judges who swore loyalty directly to the President, the N.R.O. was part of an “extra-constitutional” system, whose legal status, according to Anil Kalhan, is ambiguous now that the martial regime is gone.

Rather than addressing the thorny legal question (the constitutional position of the Pakistani state from October 2007 to August 2008), the Chief Justice has acted politically: he simply struck down the most unpopular piece of extra-constitutional law, the N.R.O. Moreover, the judge extended his N.R.O. decision to cover charges against President Zardari, whose cases were tabled long before Musharraf’s rule. Zardari still retains unequivocal presidential immunity from prosecution, but the Chief Justice’s move puts political pressure on the president to informally relinquish powers or to formally step down. Indeed, many Pakistanis I have interviewed express concern that the Chief Justice, widely championed as the face of resistance to Musharraf and symbol of the rule of law, is just another political aspirant who uses the judicial pulpit to endear himself to the voting public.

What strikes me about the N.R.O. verdict is that the Chief Justice saw populist value in a crackdown on corruption to begin with. When he left his post as South Asia correspondent fifteen years ago, Washington Post reporter Steve Coll wrote of South Asians’ perplexing enthusiasm for rishwat. Elected officials took bribes from constituents in exchange for a share of the goodies they proceeded to embezzle from the national coffers. And far from condemning the practice, locals seemed to take pride in the system. After several years in the region, Coll came to understand why: When a society’s primary loyalties are local and clannish, rather than national, robbing the nation to serve the clan is normal, even honorable.

The takeaway from the public outrage over corruption today is that local ties are giving way to a national consciousness, the kind of consciousness than can and will be offended by the theft or manipulation of its resources. The kind of consciousness that can conceive of conflicts over resources and balancing of interests rather than simply existential fights over identity. Whatever happens to President Zardari, this is a positive sign. Unfortunately, one local lawyer told me, “we’ve only just started learning to be a nation. It will take us three generations to start behaving like one.”

The other change since Steve Coll left Pakistan is even less rosy. Then too, there was a profound gap between rich and poor, but during the latest economic boom, the poor actively lost ground despite rapid growth. In that atmosphere, the failures of national leaders acquired new significance, especially when (as with corruption) those failures could be given a rupee value.

But anger has limitations. The new concern for national solidarity and cleaner politics is bound up with a newfound affection for democratic systems. While I think it's safe to predict the resignation of key ministers, and perhaps, the rise of opposition and dissident members to fill their place, the full collapse of the two-year-old government seems a bridge too far.

Learn more about this reporting project.

Haiti: Rural Development (and the Perils of Videojournalism)

2009-12-19T16:56:46-05:00

By Kira Kay and Jason Maloney, for the Pulitzer Center

Video frame grab of USAID project sign, the only image salvaged from our day-long shoot on agricultural development

In the realm of the video news reporter, if you don’t have it on tape, it didn’t happen. OK, it’s not always so extreme, you can narrate the occurrence of an event and use vaguely relevant or generic images -- say a compression shot of people walking on the street -- to cover that narration. But if the element is highly specific, then no video equals no event.

Many, many times on a shoot we'll glimpse an incredible image out the window of our car, but know immediately that by the time we stop, get the camera set up and rolling, the moment will be gone. And often, all it takes is for the camera itself to appear and be seen, to irrevocably change the moment.

So, very little can be as heartbreaking as when everything appears to be just right for filming: the event is unfolding, the camera is rolling, the subjects are doing their thing, you’re getting great material… and then you later learn that due to some rare technical malfunction, the wonderful images you thought you’d recorded, the event you thought you’d documented, was gone for good (or for your purposes, never existed)!

This happens rarely, but we sadly had such a circumstance on our recent shoot in Haiti. We are covering what is being heralded as “Haiti’s moment of hope”, the confluence of security and investment interest that has people optimistic about the Caribbean nation for the first time in years. And last month, while Americans were lining up outside shopping malls all across the US, waiting for those Black Friday sales to begin, our team was heading out into the Haitian countryside to document a vital aspect to this nascent hope: agricultural development.

Most of the investment interest in Haiti has centered around either the garment industry -- the assembly of tee shirts and simply constructed clothing like medical scrubs -- or tourism. We’d already covered the visit of a South Korean delegation looking to set up garment assembly facilities in Port au Prince, and we’d filmed a training program to get Haitians up to speed on sewing machines to staff those factories. We were going to miss the big tourism event by a week (the arrival of the world’s biggest ocean liner, the Oasis of the Seas, to a dock in Northern Haiti) but we knew we could cover the tourism angle through some footage of President Clinton’s visit to the country the previous month. But the agriculture part of the story was a big one, and we worked hard to find the right program to film that would make the points of 1) the need for jobs to be developed outside city limits and 2) the great potential of Haiti’s troubled but naturally-blessed rural areas.

And so we set out that morning with Maxwell Marcelin, the local representative of the USAID-funded WINNER Program. WINNER stands for “Watershed Initiative for National Natural Environmental Resources”; a fancy name to make a good acronym, perhaps, but upon visiting the program, it became clear that this was indeed one that could have some real impact on the lives of local residents.

The WINNER program is working in the Cul de Sac Watershed about an hour outside Port au Prince, to channel waters from the flood plains, in order to redirect them for farming, and to dredge and put back into use a series of canals built in the 1930s but buried in mud for the last several decades. (There is a second similar project underway in the Gonaives Watershed region of the country.)

The floodplains were an awesome sight: miles of windswept boulders with an occasional trickle of water winding through, which one could easily imagine turning into a raging flood after a decent rain. Bulldozers were building some restraining walls there to redirect such floodwaters towards the canal system (and away from local homes, which are regularly washed away in Haiti’s periodic disasters).

But it was the scene around the bend, as the canal system became revealed, that was the best video of all: a group of about 20 local farmers, each with a shovel, each helping to dredge the canal that would soon feed their crops. They get paid for their shoveling work, but they are also part of a collective that will one day soon both farm the land and actually run the maintenance on the canal – a way of keeping the farmers invested in the success of the project and creating sustainable impact. The original canal had been covered in almost 18 feet of dirt and jungle growth, deep enough to bury some bridges that were now once again being revealed. Once the canal is fully dredged, the walls will be cemented to keep the nearby fast-growing banana plants from once again claiming the waterways.

One of the farmers, Augustin Orilus, said he thought he was about 80 years old; he was too old to do the digging, but was intently watching the progress, a sugar-cane cutting machete in his hand. Orilus told us that this was a life-changing moment for him and his neighbors: that Haiti’s land had for years been “unlivable” but that now a potential for sweet potatoes, beans and other late season produce might help them all scrape together a better existence. WINNER spokesman Maxwell Marcelin says the program hopes to double the farmers’ outputs within the year.

If all television could be so rich with visuals, quotes and overall optimism! The entire crew agreed that the Orilus interview had been one of the most heartfelt and moving we’d filmed anywhere.

But then, the sobering reality upon return to New York that of the 17 hours of footage shot during our Haiti trip, the single tape we shot with the WINNER program was irreparably damaged, perhaps by a speck of dust from the dry flood plain that had slipped between the recording heads of the camera and the tape that we thought was capturing our images. Even Sony’s brilliant technicians at their special videotape facility in Dothan, Alabama couldn’t save us. As of now, the tape sits on our shelf, a reminder of our day in Haiti’s countryside – one that we thought would be a big part of our overall story but that now is only a painful reminder of the occasional difficulties of television production.

For more on this reporting project, and to see the video we DID manage to record, visit the Fragile States Gateway.

Learn more about Fragile States: Haiti.

A Geologist's Obsession with the Past

2009-12-19T11:37:02-05:00

Dan Grossman, for the Pulitzer Center

The Rockefeller complex of Copenhagen’s Neils Bohr Institute—a golden-hued brick building—would fit well in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Geology professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen works there in a small office by a gable, under the building’s steeply sloped tile roof. Here in Copenhagen she’s dressed fashionably, in matching black skirt, blouse and jacket. She has a pageboy haircut and wears a string of pearls and a tiny, round COP15 lapel pin. I last saw Dahl-Jensen in July 2003, on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Back then, standing on a mountain of ice nearly two miles thick, she wore utilitarian heavyweight fleece and a windproof shell. It was snowing lightly. Tendrils of windblown hair brushed her face. At that time she was chief scientist of the pan-European ice-drilling team that had just obtained a sample of the most ancient ice ever cut from a glacier in the Northern Hemisphere—about 120,000 years old. There had been a water pocket at the very bottom of the hole. When the drill bit had reached the liquid—pressurized by the massive weight of the ice sheet—a muddy geyser had shot about 100 into the shaft and had frozen to the cold drilling tools, coating some the equipment with a brown deposit. Dahl-Jensen still stores ice from that hole in a walk-in freezer near her office. Today she is chief scientist of a research team seeking samples that are more ancient still. They see ice that formed from snow that fell in Greenland thousands of years before the last ice age began—during Earth’s previous warm period prior the current warm spell during which civilization formed—the past epoch geologists call the Eemian.

Continue reading on the COP15 Dispatches blog

This story was reported for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting as part of the Copenhagen News Collaborative, a cooperative project of several independent news organizations. Check out the constantly updated feed here from Mother Jones, the Pulitzer Center's special Heat of the Moment climate change portal here and the Center's Copenhagen Dispatches blog here.