Pakistan, Poverty, and Power

A fascinating article by a journalist who once accompanied Charlie Wilson on a trip to Pakistan. Excerpts:

...The ensuing week, which took us to the edge of the border with Afghanistan, left me puzzling over a disturbing question: If the United States was helping the country’s freedom fighters to reestablish the “native Islamic culture”—the exact phrase that a government employee I met on the trip used—why was I detecting so much hostility? Why did U.S. Embassy employees have to work in a fortress, and why did women need a quartet of Marines to escort them when they left the building?

One clue, I later came to believe, was the special dinner I got to attend with Charlie, which the Pakistani president hosted in the lawmaker’s honor. The drive to the affair made me feel the yawning chasm between the First and Third Worlds. Through the car window unfolded scenes from a life untouched by modernity. There were primitive houses made of what appeared to be mud. There were wagons pulled by oxen. There were bright-eyed little girls whom I was tempted to stow in my bag because of the societal segregation awaiting them.

Crossing the threshold into the house where the president was hosting his dinner, however, found us in a different world. My Westerner’s sense of superior fortune swiftly slipped away as the female guests doffed their dull outerwear to reveal dazzling clothes, jewels, and makeup. (Having naively followed all of the State Department’s wardrobe and grooming recommendations to avoid offending local Islamic sensibilities, I was woefully underdressed and underdone.)

Nor was there any way I could enter the conversation, an ultra-worldly affair sprinkled with references to places and people that made it clear I was in a crowd of jet-setters whose neighborhood was the globe. I was, as they say in the sports world, out of my league.


But if I was, how much more were the people just outside the walls of the house where we were dining? Suddenly, the chasm that yawned widest for me was not the one between the First and the Third Worlds but the one between the people at the dinner and the people just outside the door.

Inside was an international elite for whom the local mores seemed not to apply. The well-educated women and the sophisticated men who were conversing with them appeared to be perfectly content with the hypocritical system that allowed them to live privileged existences while their fellow citizens outside the walls were relegated to straitened, outmoded lives. And so did we Americans, their partners at dinner and in foreign policy...