SVSU professor travels to Pakistan in wake of Bhutto's death

The Bay City Times
Friday, January 11, 2008
By Ryan J. Stanton
rstanton@bc-times.com | 894-9645

James R. Johnson doesn’t hesitate given the chance to visit a country in
crisis. In fact, it’s as if he’s intrinsically drawn to nations fraught
with inner conflict.

“You should not let the risk of what’s going on out there stop you,”
says Johnson, a political science instructor at Saginaw Valley State
University. “The one thing I try to tell my students is, the only way I
know you’re certain to lose your life is to refuse to live it.”

Johnson, an Auburn attorney, is back home this week after a two-week
visit to Pakistan, a nation in turmoil over the assassination of its
former prime minister, and Afghanistan, a country with its own share of
challenges.

Johnson, who teaches world politics, traveled abroad expecting to follow
Pakistan’s elections, but the riots that ensued following Benazir
Bhutto’s death changed the course of his trip. He leased a hotel room in
Rawalpindi, the old capital of Pakistan, and from there found a native
driver willing to taxi him past chaos to various locales.

This is only the latest adventure for Johnson, who has studied politics
abroad in Tibet, Nepal, India, Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Israel,
the Philippines and Southeast Asia. His trips are self-funded, with the
help of an undisclosed private source, but he says it’s well worth the
cost to experience these nations firsthand.

Q: Why did you choose to go to Pakistan and Afghanistan?

A: Over the last 18 months I’ve been focusing on countries in crisis,
from the 34-Day War in the Middle East in July and August of ’06, to
Nepal and the civil war there in February and March of this past year,
and the southern Mindanao Island in the Philippines in August of this
past year. I try to identify countries that are on the brink of some
form of crisis, and Pakistan was on the to-do list. This past fall, with
the political developments there, with the Musharraf government
especially, and Bhutto, it just really passed everything else and came
to the forefront.

Q: What was the primary purpose of your trip to Pakistan?

A: The national elections were scheduled to be held as I was there. And
in all of these places I go, I look at the institutions of Democracy,
such as free and fair elections, and as we saw in Kenya while I was
gone, too, an election as an element of Democracy doesn’t necessarily
mean peace. It certainly was clear that these elections were not going
to bring peace in Pakistan.

Q: How did you take in the news of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination?

A: When I stepped off the British Airways flight from the states in
London, on the screen in terminal four there was a picture of Bhutto and
I knew obviously something had happened. And at that point she had been
shot. From the time I walked from there to the British Airways service
desk, she had already died. And I spent the next couple of hours just
trying to get as much information as I could from the BBC.

Q: How did that shift the focus of your trip?

A: The likelihood of the elections being held as scheduled was suddenly
gone, and it also was really clear before our flight left that the place
had descended, once again, into chaos. We didn’t know whether (Pakistani
President Pervez) Musharraf had suspended the constitution again or not.
But the last word we had was that he had declared a state of emergency
and had given police and the military orders to shoot and kill, and
there were riots.

Q: Did you fear stepping foot into a country where terrorism is a part
of everyday life?

A: 2007 had already been the worst year on record for Pakistan in terms
of suicide bombings and death in the country. Are you scared?
Absolutely. But are you going to let your concerns keep you from what
you want to accomplish? No.

Q: What areas did you visit?

A: That did change because of the rioting. My plan always was to fly
into Islamabad, which is the new capital, and spend time there, and make
one foray into the North West Frontier Province and tribal areas,
another one possibly to Lahore in the other direction and then one trip
down to Karachi. The Karachi trip, ideally, was going to be first, but
that became the most problematic because the train travel was suspended,
because trains were being attacked and burned. And the main highway
between Rawalpindi and Karachi was closed for days because they were
attacking cars and burning trucks.

Q: How does violence like this compare to the crime we have in the
United States?

A: It’s a different kind of violence. We typically don’t have suicide
bombers in our ghettos and if you can have a logical reason for crime,
it exists in ghettos here: Drugs, robbery. It doesn’t make them right,
but it makes them somewhat more predictable. With a suicide bomber,
there’s just no way to tell.

Q: Why is it important for America to understand the political dynamics
of these other nations?

A: Our administration says that our goal is to spread Democracy to the
four corners of the globe. Whether we do that or not, we have a strange
way of going about it. There are certain spots in the world that I’ve
seen, where our governmental policies specifically have made things
worse. That also is now translating into making things worse for the
United States and our security. Americans seem to have this idea that
Democracy and capitalism somehow are intrinsic to people and they just
automatically know how to do it, and they don’t.

Q: Why should Americans care about what’s happening in Pakistan?

A: Pakistan is a nuclear country. Depending upon the estimate you listen
to, they have either 35 to 60 warheads. The cover story on Time magazine
this week was on why Pakistan matters. We’ve given Musharraf, since
9/11, $11 billion of U.S. money. That was under the aegis of the war on
terrorism, to help fight Al-Qaeda along the frontier borders and the
tribal areas. Even our own governmental estimates are that he has spent
well over half of that on enhancing his nuclear capability against their
arch-nemesis India. The waste, fraud and abuse has just been enormous. I
truly am convinced that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are in a position,
given the political chaos right now in Pakistan, to destabilize that
government and the last thing we want is to have 35 to 60 nuclear
weapons in the hands of radical Islamic extremists.

Q: What did you learn that you’ll bring back to your students at SVSU?

A: Pakistan, the way it’s portrayed in the mass media, isn’t exactly
accurate. The real issue we need to be addressing is poverty. What makes
the Taliban and some of the sects appealing to people in Pakistan and
Afghanistan is they address, head on, the fact that there’s this
bifurcation of wealth – there are a few people who are doing very, very
well and there are the 90-some percent of the people who are suffering,
and that gap between rich and poor continues to grow. While Musharraf
and everybody within his military circle do well, and businessmen that
he endorses and has paid off do well, the rest of the country is
suffering wheat shortages and flour shortages, electricity is not on 24
hours a day, drinkable water is not available all over the country,
tribal warfare is rampant, and it’s poverty. What makes these radical
sects appealing to folks is they stir up this sense of commonality that
everybody else in this country is getting rich except us.

The Rawalpindi/Islamabad area is under a "high alert" with reoving armoured police vans on the streets. Apparently, Pakistani Intelligence Agencies have determined that several suicide bombers have entered the cities are are on the streets... later this afternoon "Friday," I was walking on a street here in Rawapindi when a firefight broke out... from experience, you usually do not try to figure out who is fighting whom... you just try to get "infinately flat"... I caught the last few minutes on tape. About 1/2 mile from my room I would estimate...

Just back from the Northwest Frontier Province region along the Afghan border.. hundreds of photos... no way to send then yet on this 166 megahertz dial up.

The Taliban are interesting to photograph but not much fun... am really looking forward to returning Tuesday night.

I will write as soon as I get the chance.. access to the Internet is more of a problem here than anywhere I have ever been in the world...

JRJ