Mumbai's urban infrastructure -- "like new" equals broken

This is how roads are “upgraded” under the World Bank-funded Mumbai Urban Infrastructure Project (MUIP). Note that this picture is an “after” picture, not a “before” one. This is the arterial Swami Vivekanand Road in suburban Mumbai. The paving is a couple of years old at most. The day I took this photo (Thursday, November 27, 2008), the broken curb was visible because there wasn't a car parked on it.

Mumbai's roads routinely get dug up by utility and phone companies for laying or fixing broken cables -- companies with no expertise to dig or rebuild a dug road. But then the Mumbai municipal authorities don't seem to know their head from their ass either. Result: senior citizens are under virtual house arrest (because the streets are too tough an obstacle course for arthritic knees and because curbs are non-existent or intermittent at best), and people who must walk/drive to go about their lives die when the road caves in. It's happened before, and it's going to happen again.

Is the civic-mindedness of Parsis overrated?

Probably not - they're still better-than-average citizens as far as I can see. But you know that Bombay / Mumbai has gone to the dogs when even Parsis start behaving like this:

Mumbai's streets are filthy, filthy, filthy, lined with unspeakable and unidentifiable things. That stuff gets on your shoes. Someone is going to sit on the seat where this commuter has put her shoes. She knows it. There are trilingual signs on the walls of commuter trains, particularly in the first class compartments (which this is), saying, “Please do not put your feet on the seat”. I took this woman's picture from the neighboring compartment. Later I heard her talk on her cell phone, and which is how I knew she was Parsi. Parsis have long been considered Bombay's most civic-minded citizens, and yet here she is, embodying much that is wrong with this city and its people.

Racism is alive and well in the age of Obama

Image: Gillian Laub for The New York Times

From today's NYT:

Racially segregated proms...are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change. When the actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea was quickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of white parents, who held a competing “private” prom. (The effort is the subject of a documentary, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” which will be shown on HBO in July.) The senior proms held by Montgomery County High School students — referred to by many students as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom” — are organized outside school through student committees with the help of parents. All students are welcome at the black prom, though generally few if any white students show up. The white prom, students say, remains governed by a largely unspoken set of rules about who may come. Black members of the student council say they have asked school administrators about holding a single school-sponsored prom, but that, along with efforts to collaborate with white prom planners, has failed.

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Taliban unhappy with its own court's verdict

Image source: BBC Online

BBC reports that a farmer appealed to one of these new Sharia courts in Swat because the Taliban wanted to build a dirt road through his farm. The court ruled in his favor, and now the Taliban are pissed off. Isn't it amazing how people who demand a system nearly always assume it's going to work for them, and never seem to seriously think how it may work against what they envisioned?

For some reason that I haven't time to fathom right now, I'm reminded of an old book on Muslim endowments in 19th c. India. In it, the author, Gregory Kozlowski, shows how vastly differently the colonial court system worked from adjudication of disputes by Qazis or other Islamic officials. In Kozlowski's assessment, the Qazis preferred to get both sides to compromise, because they acted with a view to the best possible formula for the coexistence of the disputing parties, and also because they themselves were very much a part of the community in which they arbitrated. On the other hand, colonial courts tended to treat a dispute as having a losing side and a winning side, and verdicts created a welter of new problems with regard to authority, property ownership and other issues.

Obama's Guantánamo decision: is there any alternative?

So the "problem" is that President Obama has ordered the closure of this blot on America's soul, and at the same time NYT has reported that Said Ali al-Shihri, a Saudi and former Guantánamo detainee, has emerged an Al Qaeda leader in Yemen. Therefore, many (especially Republicans, who seem determined not to learn anything from anything, and whose imagination has become bankrupt of everything but fear) argue, if we release the remaining 245 detainees, they may go and do the same thing.

It appears that the al-Shihri involved in bombing the US embassy in Sana'a, Yemen, in September 2008 is the same al-Shihri who was released from Guantánamo in 2007 and passed through a rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia with (other) jihadis, and who may or may not have been a jihadi before his internment at Guantánamo. The Pentagon says al-Shihri trained in urban warfare in Kabul. He says he traveled to Afghanistan via Bahrain and Pakistan two weeks after 9/11 to do "relief work", was wounded in an airstrike and spent a month in hospital in Pakistan. He was detained because he was allegedly channeling "extremists" from Iran to Afghanistan, and planning to kill a writer against whom a fatwa had been declared. His release documents say he was let go because he had gone to Iran to buy carpets for his store in Saudi Arabia, and because he denied knowledge of terrorist activities. He said if he was released, he would go back to his family in Saudi Arabia, and work at his family's store. So he was released to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia claims no one who has been through its rehab program has returned to jihad, but a Saudi official says al-Shihri disappeared from the country after completing the program. However ineffective the Saudi program may be, the US is likely to have problems developing a similar program in Yemen, because the US has complained of serious security lapses in Yemen's counterterrorism measures. And why does Yemen matter? Because 100 detainees at Guantánamo are Yemeni.

If we assume the worst about al-Shihri, he was a jihadi, detained, released, rehabilitated, and returned to jihad. If we assume the best, he was a furniture dealer who wanted to buy carpets in Iran and/or undertake relief work in Afghanistan, was detained, released, rehabilitated, and joined the jihad.

Whichever way we look at it, al-Shihri's case seems like a compelling argument in favor of closing Guantánamo, not keeping it open. Going by the worst-case assumption about al-Shihri, Guantánamo has been an utter failure: despite all that the Bush regime "invested" in the "war on terror", it could not effectively prosecute the jihadi al-Shihri, nor establish with certainty that it was safe to release him or any other detainee. Meanwhile, Guantánamo's constant pissing off of Yemen and other Arab nations was a certainty, and precluded their sincere cooperation in counterterrorism operations. And going by the best-case assumption, i.e. giving al-Shihri the benefit of the doubt, it appears Guantánamo spurred him to join the jihad.

Guantánamo is like Pandora's box -- easily opened, caused a huge mess, not so easy to close (notably, among the things that came out of that box of troubles was also hope). I think it's safe to assume Obama and his administration don't think that all it takes to close Guantánamo is to give all the detainees one-way tickets home and drop them off at the airport. Detainees will have to be put through due process either in US courts or through a UN mechanism. It will be good to have the US process these people lawfully.

Critics of this decision of Obama's should set aside childish things and recognize that there is no easy way out of Guantánamo, and that Bush created a monster that can't be ignored, for even a while. Whenever Guantánamo has to be closed, it's going to be as difficult and complicated as it is now. Bush cited that reason to keep Guantánamo open, but it's also the reason to shut it down. Some people will probably end up being released who should have remained behind bars -- as in the case of al-Shihri. But governments and ordinary people worldwide will probably start trusting America again -- and supporting it. For as long as Guantánamo is staying open, it's simply not achieving what it's intended to achieve, and it's pissing off much of the world (not just Muslims, either). There is no point in its continued existence. The sooner that prison is closed, the better.