Don’t ignore the saner voices of moderate Muslims

SA Aiyar in The Times of India

There is much in common between those who hit Paris last week and Mumbai on 26/11. Let nobody pretend, like elements of the left, that Paris was just revenge against Western imperialism. ISIS aims to become the biggest imperialist of all, re-creating the ancient Islamic empire from Portugal to China. The Ottoman caliphate once came close to conquering the whole of Europe, and ISIS would like to finish the job. It claims a divine right to kill those who come in the way — Arabs, Jews, Americans, Europeans, Indians or anyone else.

UP home minister Azam Khan outraged many by making excuses for the Paris killings. He said this was a reaction to the actions of global superpowers like America and Russia. “History will decide who is the terrorist. Killing innocents whether in Syria or Paris is a highly deplorable act… But if you created such a situation, you have to face the backlash too.”

This determination to justify the attack, while grudgingly condemning it, is hypocritical communalism. It has parallels with the grudging criticism by BJP leaders of the lynching of the Dadri Muslim accused of eating beef. Tarun Vijay wrote that the lynching would indeed be terrible if it turned out that he had only eaten mutton. Culture minister Mahesh Sharma claims it was just “an accident.” Former MLA Nawab Singh Nagar said those who dared hurt the feelings of the dominant Thakurs should realize the consequences, and claimed that the murderous mob consisted of “innocent children” below 15 years of age. Srichand Sharma said violence was inevitable if Muslims disrespected Hindu sentiments.

The inability of these BJP leaders to condemn the lynching outright is matched by Azam Khan’s inability to condemn the Paris attackers outright. Communalists cherry-pick events from history to claim they are victims, with the right to vengeful retribution. Sorry, but groups across the world have been both attackers and victims. Through history, imperial conquest, killing and loot was considered great (hence Alexander the Great, or Peter the Great). Modern notions of civil rights, secularism and nationhood did not exist. Might was right, indeed greatness.

And so there were Muslims who conquered and plundered, and other Muslims who were at the receiving end. Christian conquerors created large empires by the sword, and were in turn subjugated by others. Hindu, Chinese, Mongol, Arab and African kings killed and looted for personal aggrandizement, and in turn were killed and looted.

Communalists harp on events in which they were victims, ignoring others where they were victimizers. ISIS and Azam Khan repeat the victimhood theme of Muslims in the 20th century, complaining of being bombed and dominated by the West, and claiming that revenge is both justifiable and inevitable. They are unable to see themselves also as victimizers who slaughtered and looted for centuries, from Portugal to China. Nor will they accept that victims from Portugal to China have a right to revenge.

Right message: Last week’s fatwa against ISIS signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis deserved more coverage

A sane, safe society is not possible if every community wants to avenge events of the past. Every community needs to accept that it has been both a victimizer and victim, and leave the past behind. Some communities have succeeded in doing this — notably Germany after World War II — and that has been the basis for civilized progress. The contrast with ISIS could not be greater.

While the media has rightly focused on Azam Khan, they have ignored the much saner response of moderate Muslims. It’s wrong to constantly highlight communal Muslims and downplay nationalist ones.

TOI last Wednesday reported “the biggest fatwa ever” against ISIS, signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis. The fatwa, which condemned ISIS categorically as “inhuman” and “un-lslamic”, has been forwarded by Abdur Rahman Anjaria of the Islamic Defence Cybercell to the UN, several foreign governments and the Prime Minister’s Office. Anjaria says the fatwa is the biggest ever initiative by Indian ulema to reject the dangerous ideology of ISIS, which “has disgraced the name of Allah and the Prophet….It is the duty of every Muslim to join the fight to defeat it.”

I think this news should have been on page one in every newspaper. Instead it was hidden in the inside pages of the Times of India. So was another small report on a protest meeting in Delhi by the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, to condemn the strikes in Paris, Turkey and Lebanon in the name of Islam. Without naming Azam Khan, its general secretary, Maulana Madani, said “We completely dismiss the action-reaction theory propounded by some persons.”

Prime Minister Modi needs to highlight and cite such moderate views. It’s not enough to say India needs social harmony. It’s also necessary to give kudos to those who promote that moderation.

Misbah breaks it down

Osman Samiuddin in Cricinfo


The Pakistan captain talks about the many observations, plots and decisions that go into the game's most important task: taking wickets


Keep calm or Misbah will get you © Associated Press



Two sharp short balls, slightly misdirected either side of Stuart Broad's body, sandwiched a yorker in the 102nd over of England's second innings in Dubai. In total, that meant that five of the last six balls Wahab Riaz had bowled to Broad were short. A couple were genuinely hairy, but all were good enough to keep him rooted deep in the crease. Who knows what Broad was expecting fourth ball of that over, but could it have been anything other than a bouncer or a yorker?

Who knows, indeed, what Wahab would have bowled to him - in the end he went with the suggestion of Misbah-ul-Haq. The captain already had a conventional forward short leg in place. He decided to place another - another "silly", he said - in, but finer. He was standing at square leg himself and he told Wahab to bowl a yorker, but a slower one.

"We were attacking him with the bouncer and the yorker, so he was prepared for both," Misbah said a few days later. "His weight was moving back a little and he was prepared for the full yorker. So I felt, if he gets a slower one here, he will get time and his weight will still be on the back foot."

Sitting down, Misbah illustrated the movement he intended to elicit from Broad - a jerky, panicked jab down to the ball, the aim still to prevent it from hitting his toes or stumps but now scrambled by the lack of pace and flight.

"With that weight going back, if you go to play a slower ball inevitably you loft the shot in the air. I took two sillys on that side, one fine, one normal, and the plan was that he would lob to either."

Wahab bowled it just right, the slower ball not looping so much but dipping at Broad's toes with the lazy menace of a paper plane in descent. Broad did exactly as Misbah predicted, half-hopping while hurrying the bat down and lobbing the ball away. It went, with uncanny precision, between the two "sillys", flirting boldly with both, not committing to either.

Because he is a captain who understands so well the angles of the game, and the consequences of tweaking them to tiny degrees, his handling of spinners has mostly suggested he was born for it

Misbah's gambit did not come off, though in the way of unrequited love it was no less powerful for its failure.

****

Misbah-ul-Haq has stood between Pakistan and extinction. He has taken Pakistan by the collar and shaken some calm into them. He is a man of quiet integrity and dignity, of exceedingly stable temperament, and it is in this image that he has built his Pakistan side.

Five years after he became captain, a year after becoming their most successful captain (in terms of Test match wins), and now closer to an exit than ever before, these, bafflingly, remain the popular and intangible ways in which Misbah is spoken about - that is, we speak of his leadership as man, which in its example of him is ample. We hardly talk of his captaincy as cricketer, which is a different thing altogether (see Miandad, J), and when we do, it has swiftly escalated into fractious and tiresome ideological debates about the effect of his batting on his team in ODIs.

Which is odd in one sense because, by most accounts, Misbah is a cricket tragic, nerdily wired into the intricacies of the game. This revelation to Hassan Cheema in a recent profile , for example, from a producer when Misbah was working as a TV analyst:


"For him, every ball was something he needed to see. The only time he stopped watching was when he had to pray, but even then, after he was finished praying he would ask me or someone about every ball: who played the shot, what happened, was it a slower ball - he wanted to know everything. He knew about everyone too, and he read the mind of the fielding captains to perfection. Even as Netherlands were bowling their seventh over he would know who would bowl their 15th over, for example, and he would nearly always be proven right."


The details of that Broad set-up, in fact, Misbah had voluntarily divulged, and in typical Misbah fashion. At the post-win press conference, he had first put on his Misbah face (find wall, stare at wall, answer wall) and spoken in the generalised way about the game that these interactions require. Then, as often happens, he exited the stage, to be encircled by a group of journalists. It is here, usually, that he talks with surprising candidness and more specifically about the game. I asked him about another dismissal that day, which he talked us through, before he asked whether we had noticed the slower ball to Broad.



Give Hashim Amla "a doosra from middle and leg" © Getty Images


A few days later, on the second evening of the Sharjah Test, we sat down to discuss this and the other granules that make up the real substance of a captaincy. England were establishing a loose - and ultimately brief - sense of control over the game and it had been a long day. Misbah looked a little more haggard than usual. He had hemmed and hawed when I first mentioned the idea of the interview, worrying whether, in the middle of a Test, he would be able to summon enough such instances from such a long tenure. But he had agreed to meet and as it turned out, remembering was not a problem. Most of what he recalled was recent but had there been more time, I can imagine him remembering decisions he made in the tape-ball games of his youth.


****

The Bairstow wrong'un

On the same day as the Broad near-miss, Yasir Shah bowled Jonny Bairstow with a googly and ran straight to Misbah to celebrate, acknowledging his captain's role. Until then, Bairstow had played Shah securely, including three full overs late on the fourth day. On the fifth he again looked fairly confident, both in leaving and playing him with the bat. Shah came at him from both sides, and especially when he was over the wicket, Bairstow was recognising and leaving legbreaks pitched outside off so well, each leave carried the force of a firm-intentioned stroke. The googly was observing purdah.

The guiding force of Misbah's on-field captaincy is a deep grasp of the mechanics of batsmanship. It is an acuity that the greatest are sometimes unable to articulate; perhaps because Misbah operates so resolutely within his limitations, he recognises the boundaries within which opposing batsmen operate in different circumstances, as well as, of course, the overarching fragility of batting as a task.

"What was happening, actually, the legbreak that was coming on middle he was playing pretty easily. The one outside off, he had clearly made a plan that he was going to stretch out far forward and then leave it. He was leaving it well.
"Sometimes you see when a batsman is set on a plan, you want to mess with his mind a little. You see patterns, so you want to make him play differently, when there are chances of mistakes"

"As a batsman when I am doing this, if suddenly from the same line from where I am leaving I get a googly, even if I know it is a googly, the chances of my making a mistake are high. Even if you recognise it, because the intention from that line is to not play it - mentally you have planned you are going to leave it. Suddenly from there when it is a googly, you decide to try and play, you can still miss it. I said to Yasir, 'Bowl him two to three googlies in a row so that the intention he has to leave the legbreak from that line [is affected].'"

Shah bowled him the first googly that day and from how Bairstow shaped to play it he had clearly picked it. But having gotten used to leaving, or just defending, suddenly another option of scoring through the vacant midwicket - Misbah had a gully instead - affected the execution. That it happened off the very first googly was a bonus.

Tying up Hashim Amla

In the field, all captains work to one end: wickets. It's just that their approach to the cost of getting them - runs - is different. Some, like Michael Clarke, are willing to give up a few more. To Misbah, runs are gold dust. He hates conceding them, whatever the situation. He plans for wickets by not giving away runs, not by setting unusual fields or asking his bowlers to do anything fancy or cute.

It is an instinct that served him well in what he says is the one moment of captaincy he will never forget. It came at the death of an ODI in Port Elizabeth in 2013. South Africa, with Hashim Amla and JP Duminy at the crease, needed less than a run a ball from the last two overs (11 off 12). Misbah had Saeed Ajmal and Junaid Khan and it was the penultimate over from Ajmal that won it.

He remembers every detail because he talked Ajmal through the entire piece, but not exactly in its right place: he was off on the chronology of the over.

"Amla was on 97, Saeed was round the stumps. He asked me, 'What should I do?' I said, 'First ball, a little outside off, he will wait for the ball, push to covers and take one.' Back foot he will go to play there. So I said to him, make sure you finish on off stump, your offbreak, don't bowl the doosra. Don't bowl to middle and leg, bowl the offbreak on off so that if he moves to play it there, if it is a little slow, he will not get pace and he'll be waiting for the doosra. There is a chance that he does not get a single there. He wants a single, so try not to give him anything on his legs, or outside off."



To Jonathan Trott, "bowl short of length and either cramp him, or just outside off" © Associated Press



Misbah mistakenly remembers the first four balls as dots. Amla tucked the first ball, on middle and leg, to midwicket for a single. What Misbah remembers as the last ball of the over, to Duminy, was actually the second ball, though in instruction to Ajmal he was correct: "Last ball Duminy was there. Saeed said, give him a deep midwicket as he will sweep it, so I will bowl off stump. I said, he will sweep from outside off. Midwicket is up, just bowl him a straight offbreak, a bit quicker. If it stays straight he could be leg-before, if he hits it, he hits it." He tried to sweep and missed it, a dot ball.

Duminy got a single off the next, bringing Amla back on strike, on 98, three balls left in the over. The fourth was a dot, Ajmal following Amla's movement as he backed away. The fifth was the original plan, though probably a little wider than intended. Amla still couldn't get it away.

"He panicked a little, nine needed and it was ball to ball, the panic button was on. Saeed can also panic, of course. So I said to him, if I was a batsman at this stage, I would not be looking for a single, I will look for a boundary, a big shot. Because nine runs off eight [actually seven], however big a batsman, he is under pressure now.

"Now he will not try to hit over cover, he will go for a big shot. So I said, now you have to give him a doosra from middle and leg, because now he will hit it. He bowled it and Amla skied it straight up [to be caught halfway to the boundary]."

Pakistan won eventually by a run, sealing a first ODI series win in South Africa and the first by a subcontinent side in the country.

Fast, slow?

No Pakistani captain has relied as heavily on spin as Misbah, not even Miandad, who, usually in Imran's absence and at home, was happy to rely on them. Fifty-nine per cent of the wickets taken under Misbah have been by spin; 58% of the overs bowled by spinners. In that, he is an outlier among Pakistan's major captains. Corresponding percentages for Abdul Kardar, Imran and Miandad are, in order: 23% of wickets and 33% of overs; 29% of wickets and 36% of overs; 46% of wickets and 48% of overs.


Sitting down, Misbah illustrated the movement he intended to elicit from Broad, a jerky, panicked jab down to the ball, the aim being to prevent it from hitting his toes or stumps but now scrambled by the lack of pace and flight


To a degree it has been thrust upon him by circumstance: as much by the attack that was left to him once he took over as by the surfaces on which Pakistan played "home" Tests. Had he the Mohammads, Amir and Asif, who knows how his captaincy would have played out. But because he is a captain who understands so well the angles to which the game is played, and the consequences of tweaking them to tiny degrees, his handling of spinners has mostly suggested he was born for it.

He insisted he is as comfortable with fast bowlers, though he let slip a perhaps natural caution in expanding: "If a guy is bowling with control and he knows where the ball is going and how much it is swinging, then it becomes easy. It becomes difficult when the ball is not being controlled, or it is swinging both ways too much, or if he is struggling with line and length."

Control - not conceding runs - is vital to Misbah and it is his spinners who have always given him utmost control. Consequently, in the absence of Asif and Amir, and other than in a few phases, Misbah has sometimes come across as intrinsically untrusting of fast bowlers. He was, for instance, so despondent at the prospect of playing three fast bowlers in the first Test against England last month (Shah was injured, with no back-up) that it felt as if he had conceded the Test before it even began.

He has had his moments with them, though. He remembered the dismissal of Dinesh Chandimal in the second innings of the famous Sharjah Test last year. Mohammad Talha had bowled especially well on what was basically a strip of quicksand, and was brought into the attack with a 38-over-old ball. Misbah, at mid-off, had been watching Chandimal grow in confidence and told Talha to bowl a bouncer into his body. Talha did and Chandimal awkwardly ducked under it. He bowled a length ball outswinger next, which Chandimal left.

"Now he says, next ball I will bowl another outswinger. I said, 'Outswing and bouncer he is ready to leave. So from some way out, bring the ball in a little to get him to play a forward defensive.' It was reversing a little. I thought because of the bouncer, his weight will stay back a little. He will not come forward properly or fully. If you land it on a good spot, even if there is a tiny gap, he's gone."

It went as Misbah said, though it was helped by the size of the gap Chandimal left. (It is worth noting the degree to which Misbah can be involved in constructing overs, ball by ball, with his bowlers.)



Fifty-nine per cent of the wickets taken under Misbah have been by spin © AFP


A bigger tapestry to draw upon is Pakistan's working over of Jonathan Trott in the UAE. In a Test series marked by the control Pakistan's spinners exerted over England's batting, Trott being dismissed by pace in three innings out of six was almost anomalous (and more so than for anyone else in the top seven). Sure, at one-down he was always likelier to face fast bowlers than others but there was an undeniable pattern to the dismissals. Misbah and Pakistan had picked up on an imbalance in the Trott shuffle.

"He plays on the move lots and the shuffle was always towards off stump and a little moving forward. The back foot does not go back and across, it moves up a little. It is a different shuffle, so the ball that is pulled wide a little, he tries to drive it, he tries to get close to it.

"Whenever you bowl outside off to him, short-of-a-length ball, he will be on the move, weight going forward, and that gives you a chance. If you give him one towards his body [motions at his ribs], he will be playing that. Sometimes when he moved forward to try and play to leg, he would be a leg-before shout, and he hit so many through midwicket. So we noticed and thought that because he walks towards off, we bowl short of length and either cramp him [at his body], or just outside off. Only the odd ball towards pads. But however much he walks out, you pull him even further so that he plays on the move. We knew spin was our strength, but with him we thought, he will chase a ball outside off, or even a short ball past his ribs."

Trott's three dismissals to pace: the first, moving across and strangled down the leg side to a short ball; the second, chasing a short-of-length delivery far outside off; and the last, leg-before to one swinging into his pads. Trott's technical troubles with the short ball came to wider attention in 2013, in encounters with Mitchell Johnson, and it ended his career. But in the relative anonymity of Dubai, long before, Pakistan had already worked him out.



****


After a while Misbah was recalling all kinds of little plans and plots without prompting. Each time there was a conversational pause, on the verge of blossoming into an awkward silence, he thought of another, like the two dismissals of Alastair Cook in the second Test in Dubai.

To Misbah, runs are gold dust. He plans for wickets by not giving away runs, not by setting unusual fields or asking his bowlers to do anything fancy or cute

As with the Bairstow googly, they revealed Misbah's understanding of batsmanship but also a mental nimbleness. The plan was for Shah to attack the rough from round the wicket to Cook, with a man at 45 for the sweep. But Misbah sensed at one point that Cook was well set - "paka hua hai" - so he brought in a leg slip and Shah went over. Cook was gone almost immediately, caught there by Ahmed Shehzad.

In the second innings, he reversed it. Shah began at Cook from over the wicket. But during the drinks break before his next over, Misbah asked him to switch, to what was their original first-innings plan. "I said, 'Bowl to him from round, where he plays well.' Yasir said, 'No, this is our plan, this is what we stick to.' My thinking was that the sweep is his pet shot, he has confidence in it. But this is a fourth-day pitch, the rough is greater, he will hit but he might top-edge. As soon as he went there, he top-edged.

"Sometimes you see when a batsman is set on a plan, you want to mess with his mind a little. You see patterns, so you want to make him play differently, when there are chances of mistakes."

One of the more striking descriptions he used was for the body position he wanted to force David Warner into, in the second innings of the Dubai Test last year. Warner scored a hundred in the first and was playing well in the second. Misbah told Zulfiqar Babar, with a relatively new ball, to go round the wicket, convincing him to leave cover vacant. "From this angle if you bowl middle, you'll get drift and baazoo nahin khulenge [his shoulders won't open fully, or move freely] while trying to force a shot. He tried to do exactly that, to force one through covers, missed it - ball went with the angle straight past him and he got stumped."



Shoulder-charged: in Dubai last year David Warner was stumped from a delivery bowled round the wicket and pitched on middle stump © Getty Images


None of this is to paint Misbah as a unique and extraordinarily innovative tactician. Captaincy doesn't work to such simple descriptions. His reading of batsmen is notable, but most captains would - or could - make some of these moves. And any captain still has to have the bowlers to succeed.

If anything, an alternative (and not incorrect) interpretation would be that Misbah is extremely fortunate in having the bowlers he has had. Nor is he a solitary decision-maker. Ideas come from unexpected places. In Pallekele this summer, Misbah pointed out, it was Shan Masood who suggested bowling Azhar Ali at Dimuth Karunaratne in the second innings, because his googly would trouble him. Azhar had Karunaratne stumped - off the googly - and he took another wicket next ball, fortuitously, for good measure.

But Misbah is rare in the tradition of Pakistan captains, in that very few will recall and then want to talk about such details. Miandad, maybe Mushtaq Mohammad; and Miandad will segue effortlessly into a list of all the injustices enacted upon him. And also, it is worth reminding ourselves that being calm and equanimous doesn't win matches, not directly anyway. It doesn't make you your country's most successful captain. It is these moves, made every few overs, sometimes every few deliveries, that are the real debris of a captaincy.

Enough PhD’s, thank you

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

When Freeman Dyson suggested we have lunch together at the Princeton University cafeteria on my next visit, I almost fell off my chair. To be invited by this legendary physicist, now 90-plus but sharp as ever, meant more than a banquet especially arranged for me by the Queen of England. Countless kings, queens, and generals have come and gone but only a tiny number of visionaries, Dyson included, actually make history.

Overwhelmed, I was about to blurt “thank you, Dr Dyson” but stopped in time. Else this would have violated an unstated protocol. We theoretical physicists address colleagues by their first name. And so I simply thanked him as Freeman. This avoided a still more serious error. Freeman Dyson does not have a PhD and has never sought or needed one.

Three books and biographies have been written on this PhD-less scientific genius. But, were he to apply to a Pakistani university, at best he might become an assistant professor. I thought of this while suffering through some lectures last week at an international physics conference in Islamabad.

Sadly, the presentations by most Pakistani PhD’s were uninteresting, others were wrong. One was even laughably wrong. Probably the worst was by a professor who was not just a ‘doctor’ but a ‘professor doctor’. This terrible pomposity, borrowed from some German tradition, is now routinely augmented with ‘distinguished professor’, ‘national professor’ and what-not. Like cartoon generals who have won no wars but have medals stuck to oversized chests, Pakistan now has legions of highly paid ignoramus cartoon professors.

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Pakistan now has legions of highly paid ignoramus cartoon professors.

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But wait, am I not being terribly unfair? Our professors are publishing huge numbers of research papers these days, almost 10 times more than a decade ago. Some produce as many as 40-60 every year (Dyson’s lifetime total is a mere 50). These appear in so-called international journals with high-impact factors, are well-cited, and seeming fulfil all requirements of high quality. The authors rake in cash prizes, national awards, and the Higher Education Commission (HEC) screams about the post-2002 ‘revolution’ at every opportunity.

But the truth forlornly begs to be heard: there is no actual research behind most of these so-called research papers. The internet has placed at an author’s fingertip vast amounts of literature from which to freely cut and paste, invent data, and plagiarise ideas. Although software checks like Turn-It-In exist, they are next to useless. True, the ideal journal referee is supposed to be a know-all. But in fact he is too hard-pressed to check everything, or may even be complicit. Publishing in fly-by-night journals, or arranging for your paper to be cited, is now a finely developed art form.

Crime in Pakistani academia has overtaken even the legendary bribery of our police departments or the easy corruption of income tax authorities. But dealing with academic heist, now organised and systematised, won’t be easy. Here’s why.

First, knowledge is increasingly specialised and to detect cheating isn’t easy. A molecular biologist might not fairly judge the work of an ethologist, or a plasma physicist that of a string theorist. In principle any academic community must police itself rather than be policed from outside. But the small number of genuine academics in Pakistan means that there are precious few policemen.

Second, a thoughtless government policy that pays by the number of research papers and PhD’s produced allows cheats to get rich. Unable to tell good from bad, the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology actively encourages our professors to pillage public property.

The same dynamics applies to PhD production. The basic subject knowledge of PhD candidates is rarely tested and, if ever, only perfunctorily. Although the referees of a candidate’s thesis are supposed to be impartial, they are often chosen by a supervisor for being cooperative. Of course, the reports can be appropriately doctored when necessary.

Most PhD supervisors never get caught while doctoring. But if by rare chance someone does, he gets little more than a tap on the wrist. A colleague, a former professor of biology at Quaid-i-Azam University, then also the dean, was caught red-handed while faking referee reports for his PhD students. He admitted guilt but was not terminated and retained all retirement benefits. The administration and other colleagues shrugged off the incident; why be strict to one of your own kind? The man moved on to become dean at another university, and then emerged yet again as vice chancellor at still another university.

This ‘kindness’ has put the cancer of corruption into metastasis. Arresting further growth will require a harsh chemotherapy regime. As the very first step, rewarding authors of research papers with cash should be stopped. PCST, as well as other government organisations deliberately fuelling academic corruption, should be closed down and their directors charge-sheeted.

Transparency should be non-negotiable. While it cannot end abuse, it can discourage. So, before the author of a research paper gets any kind of credit, such as for promotion, he must give a presentation that anyone can freely attend. This should be video-recorded and archived for open access on HEC’s website. Whereas HEC’s present chairman privately agreed to my suggestion nearly two years ago, and then publicly on television a year later, I see no signs of implementation.

Still more radical therapy may be needed. As with a driving licence, all PhD degrees (including my own) should be de-recognised every 10 years, and re-recognised only after passing a literacy test in that particular discipline. Administered by some trustable overseas organisation, the written test should be at the level of an undergraduate examination equivalent to that taken by students after their first year of studies at a good foreign university. Will this reduce our current PhD population by 50 per cent? Eighty per cent?

No country becomes wealthy by printing a mountain of paper currency. And no university system becomes better by dishing out substandard PhD degrees, or by accepting vacuous research papers as valid. Instead, the way forward lies in adhering to strict ethical standards, cultivating excellence, rejecting mediocrity, and nurturing a spirit of inquiry and intellectual excitement.

We accept that Russian bombs can provoke a terror backlash. Ours can too

Mehdi Hasan in The Guardian


 

‘Isn’t it odd that in the case of Russia, western governments have been keen to link Vladimir Putin’s – and only Vladimir Putin’s – foreign policy to terrorist violence?’ Illustration: Sébastien Thibault



“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see,” wrote Ayn Rand in her novel The Fountainhead. That there is a link, a connection, between the west’s military interventions in the Middle East and terrorist attacks against the west, that violence begets violence, is “glaringly evident” to anyone with open eyes, if not open minds.

Yet over the past 14 years, too many of us have “decided not to see”. From New York to Madrid to London, any public utterance of the words “foreign” and “policy” in the aftermath of a terrorist attack has evoked paroxysms of outrage from politicians and pundits alike.

The response to the atrocities in Paris has followed the same pattern. Derided by a former Labour minister as “west-hating fury chimps”, the UK’s Stop the War coalition removed from its website a piece that blamed the rise of Islamic State (Isis) and the Paris attacks on “deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies”. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, scrapped a speech in which he was due to say that Britain’s “disastrous wars” have “increased, not diminished, the threats to our own national security”. Such arguments are verboten in our public discourse.

Isn’t it odd, then, that in the case of Russia, western governments have been keen to link Vladimir Putin’s – and only Vladimir Putin’s – foreign policy to terrorist violence? On 1 October the US government and its allies issued a joint statement declaring that the Russian president’s decision to intervene in Syria would “only fuel more extremism and radicalisation”. Yes, you heard them: it’ll “fuel” it.

Moscow’s bombing campaign will “lead to further radicalisation and increased terrorism”, claimed David Cameron on 4 October. Note the words “lead to”. Speaking at a Nato summit on 8 October the US defence secretary, Ashton Carter, warned of the “consequences for Russia itself, which is rightly fearful of attacks”. Got that? “Rightly fearful”.

And, in the days since the crash of the Russian Metrojet airliner in Egypt on 31 October, which killed 224 civilians, commentators have queued up to join the dots between Russia’s actions in Syria and this alleged terrorist attack by Isis. On a BBC panel discussion the Telegraph’s Janet Daley referred to the crash as “a direct consequence of [Russia’s] involvement in Syria”, adding: “[Putin] has perhaps incited this terrorist incident on Russian civilians.”

Compare and contrast Daley’s remarks on the downing of Flight 9268 with her reaction to the Paris attacks. Rather than accusing President Hollande of “inciting” terrorism against the people of France, or calling the carnage a “direct consequence” of French involvement in Syria, she took aim at anyone who might dare draw attention to the country’s military interventions in Muslim-majority countries such as Libya, Mali and, yes, Syria.

“If there is any need to argue about these matters, it should come at some other time,” she wrote, because “the French people did not deserve this”, and “it is wicked and irresponsible to suggest otherwise”. (To quote one of the leading foreign policy sages of our time, Phoebe Buffay of Friends: “Hello, kettle? This is pot. You’re black.”)

If Isis did bring down the Russian airliner, then of course it would be madness to pretend it wasn’t linked to Putin’s military campaign on behalf of the dictator of Damascus. Yet it would be equally insane to pretend that the horror in Paris had nothing at all to do with France’s recent military interventions in the Middle East and west Africa.

Yes, the attackers in the Bataclan concert hall chanted Allahu Akbar as they opened fire on the crowd, but they were also heard saying: “What you are doing in Syria? You are going to pay for it now.” Yes, Isis’s official statement of responsibility referred to Paris as “the capital of prostitution and obscenity”, but it also singled out the French government for leading a “Crusader campaign” and “striking the Muslims … with their planes”.

To understand political violence requires an understanding of political grievances; to blame terrorism only on religious ideology or medieval mindsets is short-sighted and self-serving. The inconvenient truth is that geopolitics is governed as much as is physics by Newton’s third law of motion: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The CIA, back in the 1950s, even coined a term – “blowback” – to describe the unintended negative consequences, for US civilians, of US military operations abroad.

Today, when it comes to Russia, an “official enemy”, we understand and embrace the concept of blowback. When it comes to our own countries, to the west, we become the child in the playground, sticking our fingers in our ears and singing “La la la, I can’t hear you.”

You can argue that French – or for that matter UK or US – military action in the Middle East is a legitimate and unavoidable response to the rise of a terrorist mini-state; but you can’t argue that actions don’t have consequences.

The former chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, told me in 2011 that “people are going to ... bomb us because they don’t like what we’ve done”. In an interview for al-Jazeera in July, the retired US general Michael Flynn, who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2013-15, admitted to me that “the more bombs we drop, that just … fuels the conflict”.

It is a view backed by the Pentagon’s Defence Science Board, which observed as long as ago as 1997: “Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.”

Let me be clear: to explain is not to excuse; explication is not justification. There is no grievance on earth that can justify the wanton slaughter of innocent men, women and children, in France or anywhere else.

The savagery of Isis is perhaps without parallel in the modern era. But the point is that it did not emerge from nowhere: as the US president himself has conceded,Isis “grew out of our invasion” of Iraq.

Yet we avert our gaze from the “glaringly evident” and pretend that “they” – the Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese – are attacked for their policies while “we” –Europe, the west, the liberal democracies – are attacked only for our principles. This is the simplistic fantasy, the geopolitical fairytale, that we tell ourselves. It gives us solace and strength in the wake of terrorist atrocities. But it does nothing to stop the next attack.