(Published in the San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 2012) It was a reprehensible crime. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. diplomatic staff members were nurturing excellent U.S.-Libyan relations until they were murdered by a Muslim mob in Benghazi. Many Libyans will fondly remember Stevens’ hard work to implement the U.S. policy to facilitate...
A Republican activist I had met last month at a Middle East Policy Council seminar in Washington called over the weekend. She asked what I thought about President Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C., before getting to the reason for her call. Did I know if “Obama is really a Muslim”? The...
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” These were the words of a young antiwar activist named John Kerry, testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Forty-one years later Kerry, now chairman of the same Senate committee, was defending the Afghan war, in which the last man has probably yet to die.
“The revolution goes on,” said Mohammed Mursi, on being declared president of Egypt in its first-ever democratic election. He ran for president as the head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party. The transnational Brotherhood has been the world’s oldest Islamist movement. The president-elect has called for national unity. Mursi wouldn’t,...
By Mustafa Malik POLASHPUR, Bangladesh – A casualty of your trip to Bangladesh (and many other Muslim countries) could be the belief, or illusion, that Islam and modernity are conflicting value systems. A college classmate’s visit to my ancestral home here in Polashpur village reminded me of this illusion, which is I see widely shared...
By Mustafa Malik SYLHET, Bangladesh – Paralyzing general strikes, known here as hartal, remain a common and effective tool of democratic politics in Bangladesh. A local opposition politician has been kidnapped from a highway, which the opposition says was arranged by the ruling Awami League party. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), to which the abducted...
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,...
By Mustafa Malik EVER SINCE THE U.S. NAVY SEALS killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the Obama administration is being urged by some progressives and conservatives to “declare victory and come home” from Afghanistan. The Taliban apparently have different ideas. They have ratcheted up their attacks on U.S. and NATO forces. The 30 deaths from...