The truth is that Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Pakistan are just different fronts in the same war. The core problem is that the Arab-Muslim world in too many places has been failing at modernity, and were it not for $120-a-barrel oil, that failure would be even more obvious. For far too long, this region has been dominated by authoritarian politics, massive youth unemployment, outdated education systems, a religious establishment resisting reform and now a death cult that glorifies young people committing suicide, often against other Muslims.

The humiliation this cocktail produces is the real source of terrorism. Saddam exploited it. Al Qaeda exploits it. Pakistan’s intelligence services exploit it. Hezbollah exploits it. The Taliban exploit it.

The only way to address it is by changing the politics. Producing islands of decent and consensual government in Baghdad or Kabul or Islamabad would be a much more meaningful and lasting contribution to the war on terrorism than even killing bin Laden in his cave. But it needs local partners. The reason the surge helped in Iraq is because Iraqis took the lead in confronting their own extremists — the Shiites in their areas, the Sunnis in theirs. That is very good news — although it is still not clear that they can come together in a single functioning government.

The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want. [Emphasis added.]

There you have it: the Afghanis are just being mean and recalcitrant in refusing to die for what the Americans desire. Friedman outdoes himself. (Thanks Jayant for the link.)

Charge: The worst of all creatures in the political opinion jungle: a cretin who thinks he’s a genius. Friedman’s intolerable knack for converting irreducibly complex geopolitical/socioeconomic situations into simplistic, tin-eared insta-clichés makes him one of the most dangerous people on the planet, arming people even stupider than him with the illusion of knowledge in the form of a crude vocabulary of badly mixed metaphors and ill-conceived flashcard images, thereby having a negative net effect on the nation’s intellect. India and China are “like a bottle of champagne” which someone has been “shaking for 40 years;” the modern economy dictates that “you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex;” and the threat of terrorism is a “bubble” that threatens to “undermine” open society. Friedman’s disorienting literary ineptitude is nearly enough to distract us from the indisputable fact that he has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. For this dolt-friendly parlor trick and a slavish devotion to globalization and technology as abstract, almost mystical tenets, Friedman has achieved iconic status. Exhibits the easy smile and benevolent smugness of an unjustly celebrated man who has never thought very deeply or rigorously about anything at all.

Exhibit A: Despite his constant exaltation of the internet as some kind of global cure-all, Friedman had to actually fly to London to discover that European newspapers were having misgivings about Guantanamo Bay.

Sentence: Column outsourced to Bangalore, where there is some difficulty in finding a peasant ignorant and ineloquent enough to please his audience. Compelled at gunpoint to write a 500-page retraction of his recent best-seller, called “No, Actually the World is Round.”

Speaking of war: I cheered the invasion of Iraq and kept applauding for a long time afterward. I lauded the war effort as glorious and noble — and, on the last day of November 2003, I even likened the U.S. occupation of Iraq to the magnanimity of the Marshall Plan.

And if U.S. troops had been able to kill enough Iraqi troublemakers early enough to quell the resistance, I would have remained an avid booster of the war. There’s no business like war business — that’s why I recycled my clever slogan “Give war a chance” from the 1999 air war on Yugoslavia to the 2001 military assault on Afghanistan.

But I like winning. That’s why I kept praising Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he looked like a winner, and now I keep deploring him because he looks like a loser.

Overall, I get to boil down the world to metaphors of my own choosing. If I were one of the anti-corporate-globalization people and I used the same kind of simplistic metaphors, I’d be the object of derision and scorn. But I’m not — so get used to it!

Never let it be said that leading U.S. pundit Thomas Friedman has to live with the consequences of his punditry. I think great thoughts, and I’m seriously glib about them, and that should be more than enough if the world is smart enough to grasp the opportunities that are low-hanging fruit of the digital age. I can’t expect everyone to get it, but at the very least they should try.

I was changing planes at the new airport in Jakarta the other day, on the way to Stockholm from Vladivostok. Three young Bangladeshi boys sat in the passenger lounge, watching The Power Rangers on satellite TV. Their mother–garbed in the traditional sari–talked to her cousin, a migrant worker who sold German-designed Walkman knockoffs in Hong Kong, on a shiny new Samsung cell phone. Sitting to one side of them was a young Chinese émigré on his way to Toronto to work for a software company, and on the other a business-suited Rastafarian making a connection to Bratislava. Meanwhile, a couple of Tuareg tribesmen sat cross-legged in front of the ticket counter, cooking yams over a flaming mound of ticket stubs.

What’s my point? I don’t actually have one–but opening my columns with strings of clichéd cultural juxtapositions really cuts down my workload. . .

Brilliant stuff from Freetrademan. He concludes with

Anyway, the world out there is changing fast. We have to change with it–whether we are ready or not. But imagine the world as it could be if we finally tore down those walls. We could have a computer in every home, an Internet connection in every classroom, a Big Mac in every stomach, tortured metaphors in every paragraph–and a brilliant, free-trading, celebrity foreign affairs columnist in every newspaper.

Reading the commentaries on Tom Friedman is definitely more entertaining and edifying than reading Tom himself.

The Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) does not prohibit the sharing of civilian nuclear technology with India, contrary to Thomas Friedman’s insinuation.

Here’s a bit more.

In fact, the NPT encourages nuclear technology’s peaceful use, and embracing India in this regard will actually advance the NPT’s objectives.

President Bush’s and Prime Minister Singh’s landmark agreement promotes peaceful use of civilian nuclear technology, while preventing diversion of civilian technology to military use. This explains Nobel laureate Mohammed El-Baradei’s unequivocal support of the U.S.-India civilian nuclear initiative.

For the record, the United States has a civilian nuclear sharing agreement with nuclear-armed China. Mr. Friedman fails to explain why India, with a spotless non-proliferation record and strategic partner of the United States, should be treated less favorably than China. Moreover, unlike Iran or North Korea, India has never violated the NPT. . . .

Tom Friedman flat out wrong? I am shocked and thunderstruck. Shocked, I say, I am SHOCKED. {End sarcasm.}

Post Script: I think there is a law in the universe which maintains a balance between good and bad. How else can one explain the puzzle why Tom Friedman has a column in the NY Times? It must be to balance the sane, thoughtful, incisive analysis of Paul Krugman on the pages of NY Times.

To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman “had Lufthansa business class.” When he reaches India—Bangalore to be specific—he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: “Gigabites of Taste.” Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: “No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas.”

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

Read the entire article but be warned: it is funny. Thanks Prashant. It is the wonders of internet that gives one access to the writings of far off people from the comforts of one’s home.

I grant you that Friedman writes bestsellers and some of my best friends are huge fans of his. And I think that globalization—the integration of the world’s markets—is not merely a good thing overall but is inevitable and monotonic. In any market integration, there are winners and losers, be it labor market integration or the market for lemons. Be that as it may, what I want to do someday is to write a book called The World is Mad.

“What!?” you would exclaim upon reading the title, “I thought the world was sane. Thanks Atanu, you are a bloody genius.” And then you would proceed to read the book and figure out that indeed the world is mad and that I do not fall into the hasty generalization trap unlike some others I could mention.

Madness suffuses the world around us. Why don’t we perceive it? Because physiologically we have evolved to tune out any background information. We stop taking notice of something that is all-pervasive. The madness I am talking about is so commonplace so as to be taken as normal.

The globalization of madness, like the globalization of trade and stuff, did not begin recently. It has been going on for a bit. I am talking about the 800-pound gorilla in the room which practically everyone is ignoring: the Weapons of Mass Destruction Industry.

The US leads in the globalization of madness just as it leads on practically all other bits of globalization. Check out Ben (of Ben and Jerry’s) on the US nuclear stockpile. It costs $17.6 billion every year to merely maintain it. Let me spell that out: $17,600,000,000. And that is just to keep the stock in readiness. The stockpile of 53,000 nuclear weapons costs much more to build.

Thousands of billions of dollars to build the whole military apparatus, all with the one single objective: kill people. What is worse, this military apparatus kills people whether these weapons are used or not. How? They export part of their obsolete weapons of mass destruction to Third World countries which pay billions of dollars to acquire them. These Third World countries starve their people in order to extract sufficient resources to pay for the weapons. And the madness is so acute that some people in the Third World countries actually rejoice that their governments are acquiring these weapons. I regularly keep getting emails congratulating me that the Indian government is almost surely going to finally get a huge batch of F-16s from the US! To me that is depressing beyond words. It is like someone happily reporting the thrilling news, “Congratulations! Your country will continue to see millions of deaths through starvation and disease over the next 10 years—guaranteed.”

Just because it is all-pervasive madness does not make it sanity. We continue to go about our daily business without paying much attention to this madness. We are in the business of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic even as the ship is sinking. I have to remind myself that we don’t necessarily have to be smart; we just have to stop being so stupid. There is one thing that India needs to do if it wants to develop and it has nothing to do with IT this or internet kiosk that: it has to stop spending money on weapons of mass destruction. And that goes with equal force on the other impoverished overpopulated illiterate countries around India.

PS: There is a followup to this post here.

How did India, in 15 years, go from being a synonym for massive poverty to the brainy country that is going to
take all our best jobs? Answer: good timing, hard work, talent and luck.

I would have asked a slightly different question:

How did India, in 15 years, go from being perceived as a country of massive poverty to being perceived as the brainy country that is going to take all our best jobs? Answer: Spin, racist zenophobia, and ignorance.

Let’s take the last one: ignorance. People are generally ignorant of the fact that there are two distinct Indias. Sharad Joshi distinguised them by calling the urban, rich, educated one India and the rural, poor, uneducated one Bharat. I will borrow that nomenclature. India is small, say about 100 million people at most. India has programmers and BPO call centers and cars and Baristas and McDonalds. Indians get educated at IITs and IIMs and travel abroad and talk to each other in Hindi sentences such as, “mera sleep bahut disturbed ho raha hai these days.”

In contrast to that, Bharat is a huge country of about 900 million, most of whom live in rural areas. They are largely illiterate, poor, have little education, don’t speak in English, do manual labor in farms, wouldn’t know what to do with a computer even if one came and bit them on their skinny behinds, have no illusions about anything shining and are generally ignorant about feeling good.

Ignorance about the existence of Bharat is widespread in India. Examine any magazine published in India and you would learn that the most pressing problems in India include what to do about a waist-line, which car to buy, where the hottest shopping spots are in the world, which movie star is sleeping with whom, and how India is shining.

How foreigners perceive India depends on what they have been fed by the news media. Sometimes the news media concentrates on Bharat and the focus is therefore on poverty and hunger. Then for some reason, Bharat is ignored and India comes into the limelight. The focus is then on the IT industry and all BPO and call center and job loss to brainy Indians. The reality is pretty much what it was before.

The other two factors — spin and racist zenophobia — I may take up later or leave it as an exercise for the interested reader.

A nice chatty piece as usual from Tom. He argues against putting up protectionist walls with folk wisdom as his major tool. The bit of folk wisdom which goes what goes around, comes around. It boils down to argument by anecdotes, really.

Argument by anecdotes is great expect for the fact that your adversary could also use the same tactics and then it can only end in a shouting match with the winner being the one who can shout the loudest. Demagogues — that tribe which Tom has a special disdain for — use anecdotes all the time.

I am not saying that Friedman should have written an academic paper citing published sources on the costs and benefits of outsourcing for the US economy. It is just that he starts off by admitting that the matter of outsourcing is a complex issue and that it requires reference to reality for one to comprehend it. Then he descends into a trap that he himself cautions others about. My gripe is that his reference to reality is too selective, the sample size too small for the conclusion that he wishes to support.

For instance, many other commentators stand on the other side of the issue and support their position by re-telling heart-wrenching tales of yuppy programmers in the Silicon Valley being unable to make their SUV payments because their jobs have been stolen by Indian programmers making less than $3 an hour.

Folk wisdom: one swallow does not a summer make. Or as we sophisticated people like to call it: the logical fallacy of the hasty generalization.