For those who had forgotten, The New Yorker‘s most recent issue has reminded us once again that it is America’s best magazine. You’ve got Anthony Lane visiting Pixar, Malcolm Gladwell revising the revisionist history of Xerox PARC, and a raft of top writers riffing on Pakistan/Afghanistan, among other stories.
You have to read The New Yorker strategically. A thorough treatment each week qualifies as a part-time job. First you hit the comic caption contest in the back. Then the table of contents. Choose articles ruthlessly and ignore all others. Read the opening comment, skip the second story (almost always very NYC-specific and, to those of us in the hinterlands, meaningless). Read Shouts & Murmurs. Fail to do so and, 45 minutes later, you’ll find yourself at the end of a piece about some rising Soho artist whose name you will forget when you close the magazine.
Two pieces in this edition triggered this post. Lawrence Wright’s withering story on Pakistan and Jon Lee Anderson’s “Letter from Khost,” about Afghanistan. Anderson is a phenomenal war writer. In the previous issue, he did a fascinating, and ultimately heartbreaking, piece on the Libyan rebels.
You can’t really read these stories without concluding two things. First, the best we’ll be able to do in Afghanistan is keep it from becoming a terrorist haven again; and second, that we need to sharply curtail the billions we’re giving to Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment.
The big fear with doing the latter, which Wright touches upon, is that militant Islamists will topple Pakistan’s government and start lobbing nukes at Western cities. But is this a real risk? Think about it. Terrorists are successful precisely because they’re non-state actors. You can’t find the bastards half the time, much less retaliate. For the Pakistani nuclear arsenal to fall into militant hands, Islamic radicals have to become state actors. Once you’re a state, the rules of statecraft apply, and you have another cold war, which we’re pretty good at.
This ignores the risks of nuclear proliferation. But it’s hard to argue that the current Pakistani state has a firm grip on their warheads anyway. A.Q. Khan has already done huge damage.
Finally, a precondition for a radicalized Pakistan is that the Pakistani public (and military) welcomes/tolerates Islamic radicals’ rise to power. Whatever the Arab Spring means, it hasn’t involved protesters calling for religious rather than dictatorial oppression.
