Isn’t it just time to quarantine Pakistan? Clearly, the country has not yet figured out what it wants to be and I don’t think the US can really have much effect on that process. Pakistan has the bomb, of course, which makes things more complicated — the world does not need a radical Islamic state armed with nuclear weapons — but I think the current meltdown actually offers the US an opportunity to take a hard look at reality. The Obama administration has shown a real willingness to make pragmatic policy decisions and perhaps they will take a good look at Pakistan and tell themselves the truth. I’m sitting in a hotel room in Hanoi Vietnam as I write this and I’m thinking how American history might have been different had Lyndon Johnson taken a cold-eyed look at the Indochina war and decided to step back. Barack Obama has an opportunity for making a clear-eyed judgment that the US cannot effectively intervene in Pakistan or Afghanistan; that the best we can do is set a fence around those who would do us injury. That fence can be both diplomatic and military — I am not a pacifist — but it must not involve the escalation of the number of American soldiers. The administration ought to let it be known that Pakistan must decide its own direction, but that if one light is turned on in a nuclear facility, it will be instantly destroyed. Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan must all be confronted with existential choices — their choices, not ours. Had the US taken such an existential position during Vietnam’s civil war — for that’s what it was until the US and the Soviets made it a proxy war — Vietnam would probably be a much more democratic place today. Had the US not backed French intervention in 1945, but instead had acceded to Ho Chi Minh’s pleas for a guarantee of Vietnamese sovereignty, Ho Chi Minh might never have turned to the Soviets, whom he distrusted even while admiring Lenin’s treatise on colonialism. If the US had not supported the French return to Indochina in 1945, the Vietnamese would have had to work out for themselves what their political destiny would be. I heard no less an authority than the old revolutionary and compatriot of Ho Chi Minh Huu Ngoc say just today in a lecture that had the French not been allowed back in — with the blessing of the US — that Vietnam would have taken a “capitalist,” Western route, that that was Ho Chi Minh’s preference. As it happens, I think there is a huge dose of revisionist history in that statement, but it is certain that things would not only have been different, but better, had Truman simply told the French to back off after World War II. Now the US needs to tell itself to back off, with the realization that there is literally nothing we can do to determine what sort of society the Pakistanis and the Afghans want to have. Morally it’s none of our business; practically, it’s a hopeless quagmire. All we can do is protect ourselves, which we ought to do vigorously, publicly, and transparently. The Vietnamese posed no threat to the US, except in out imaginations; the Afghans and the Pakistanis pose no threat, except in the case of the Pakistanis’ nuclear arsenal, which ought to stand under the constant threat of annihilation should it be activated.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
What Has Changed? (VN Diary No. 19)
When peope I meet — both Vietnamese and Westerners — hear that I have returned to Vietnam after eight years away, they invariably ask what has changed. Much has stayed the same. The essential character of Hanoi is the same, as does the ambience. Folks still spend a great deal of time out on the street because houses and apartments are small and the weather is hot; there are still boradcasts of irritating music and occasional propaganda broadcast over loudspeakes by the state, there are still many poor women who come in from the country every morning carrying two baskets on shoulder poles to sell vegitables, flowers, and other produce; there is still a fair amount of business activity specifically geared to expats and tourists. The traffic is worse, not so much in total volume, but because of the addition of many more cars to the million motorbikes; but it is somewhat better behaved because of the addition of a pretty effective system of traffic lights. It’s still chaotic, but perhaps a little more predictable. Another change is the almost total absence of touts and postcard boys in the center of town; there are still lots of guys lounging on Hondas who will offer to give you a ride — it’s called xe om, meaning hang on — but they are much less aggressive than they were before, asking once and then letting it go. At heart, though, Hanoi remains a cultured, friendly city in a developing country. That’s what I liked about it before and that’s what I still like about it.
Lunch (VN Diary No. 18)
I had lunch yesterday with my friends Giang and Long at the publishing house where I worked when I was here on a Fulbright in 2000 – 2001. We ate in the rooftop cafeteria at their office, where the food is wonderful, though quite unlike what you would find in a restaurant. More like home cooking. The greens at the top are water morning glory, or convolvulus, which tastes like a more bitter version of spinach; then there is a little ommelet, and another bit of egg cooked as a kind of pancake with herbs, then some chicken in a savory sauce at the bottom, and as condiments some peanust and pickled cucumber.
Naturally (VN Diary No. 17)
So, if you woke up with a head cold, what would be the first thing you would think to do? Well, naturally, you would go with your friend who is writing a language instruction book to a recording studio to help with the English on the accompanying CD. And after that, you would no doubt have lunch and then go to your Vietnamese teacher for what, in this language, amounts to a singing lesson. In both situations I sounded more like a croaking frog than a human being, but everyone was very gracious, which is the norm here. In Vietnamese, croaking frog would go something like this: kêu ?m ?p con ?ch. I put that in just to see if WordPress can handle the unicode keyboard driver I just got installed today. As you can see, Vietnamese uses the Roman alphabet modified with diacritical marks to indicate the extra vowels and the system of tones.
Update: I’ll have to do a little more work on displaying Vietnamese characters.
More Language Notes (VN Diary No. 16)
I learned something important about Vietnamese phonology yesterday. A couple of things, actually. First, each Vietnamese syllable can be analyzed into five parts: tone, initial consonant, semivowel, dipthong, and terminal consonant. Not every syllable has all the elements, but understnadin this can help understand pronunciation by a careful “sound out” practice and this is particularly important because Vietnamese, for me, is difficult to produce; that is, my mouth has not been trained to make the right shapes. Second, Vietnamese syllables that end in a consonant are not asperated whereas those that end with a vowel are. This is simply not something an Englsih speaker notices, so it too is a useful bit of information in learning the language.