By Mustafa Malik What was my take on “our growing relations with America?” asked Birendra Nath Basu. I met him on a passenger car to Karimganj town in the northeast Indian state of Assam. Basu had a master’s degree in business administration and was returning from a job interview in Guwahati, the state capital. I...
By Mustafa Malik SYLHET, Bangladesh — Aunt Salima Khatun, my mother’s sister, barged in to see me here in the Bangladeshi town of Sylhet. I spend part of my Bangladesh vacations in Sylhet, known for its tea gardens, cane furniture and the shrine of the famed Muslim saint Hazrat Shah Jalal. Behind Aunt Salima was...
(Published in the Daily Star, Lebanon, September 14, 2011; Dawn, Pakistan, September 13, 2011) By Mustafa Malik POLASHPUR, Bangladesh – Since September 11, 2001, I visited my mother four other times here in the village of Polashpur in northeastern Bangladesh. She is 92 and lives in my ancestral home, surrounded by three fish ponds and...
Book Review: Middle East Policy, Washington, D.C.; Fall 2011 By Mustafa Malik THE QUESTION once again: Is Pakistan a ‘failed state’ that’s going to bite the dust? Anatol Lieven is among the latest authors to try an answer. His book Pakistan: A Hard Country is a broad and detailed survey of the security, economic, social,...
(Published in the Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2011) By Mustafa Malik Democratization of Arab societies “would be a disaster” for the West, warns Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis. Yet he predicts that Islamic political parties are “very likely to win … genuinely fair and free elections” in the Arab world. One of the West’s best-known...
By Mustafa Malik President Obama always makes good speeches, and he gave an excellent one defending his administration’s participation in NATO’s military intervention in Libya. The coalition bombing has averted, as the president pointed out, a “brutal repression and looming humanitarian crisis” brought on by Muammar Qadhafi’s forces. Even though the Qadhafi forces have halted...
By Mustafa Malik (Published in the Austin-American Statesman, March 20; Columbus Dispatch, March 16, 2011) WASHINGTON – Rep. Peter T. King had said his congressional hearing on Muslim radicalization would investigate the causes of the problem. It didn’t. I have long been calling, in my newspaper columns and at public forums, for a serious investigation...
By Mustafa Malik For the United States, the Bahraini uprising is more worrisome than most others now swirling in the Middle East and North Africa. America’s stakes in Bahrain was underscored to me this past Jan. 13 by a researcher in Manama, the Bahraini capital. “The Al Khalifa rulers are sitting on a volcano,” said...
By Mustafa Malik (Published in the San Francisco Chronicle, February 20, 2011) Admiral Mike Mullen recently visited Jordan. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff assured King Abdullah II of America’s commitment to the security of his kingdom. As Jordan has a peace treaty with Israel, it doesn’t really have an external security...