Monthly Archives: December 2006

Natural enemies?

This one’s been haunting me ever since I found the negative (yesterday) and digitized it:
whatever
Teachers will recognize the uphill-all-the-way vibe, I suspect, though this picture was taken 33 years ago, just before I started what I recall as a very energetic class on photography-as-anthropology, in my first year of teaching. I remember some of the people quite clearly, though I can only retrieve one name (Ginger Joyce, over on the left). The stimulus materials are some I’d still use today: Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye, Hanns Reich’s The World from Above (a wonderful collection of aerial images), The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson… and just think how far we’ve come since the days of the epidiascope!

links for 2006-12-14

déjà vu rules, O.K.

The phrase “tribal areas” keeps showing up as a trope in reportage on Afganistan and Pakistan, in areas that the British knew as the [ungovernable] North-Western Frontier. A quick glance at Mad Mullahs and Wily Pathans will remind readers of the broader context. Here are some bits quarried from today’s NYTimes Taliban and Allies Tighten Grip in North of Pakistan:

“It is the lesson from Afghanistan in the ’90s,” he added. “Ungoverned spaces are a problem. The whole tribal area is a problem.”…

In recent weeks, Afghan officials say they have uncovered alarming signs of large-scale indoctrination and preparation of suicide bombers in the tribal areas, and the Pakistani minister of the interior, Aftab Khan Sherpao, publicly acknowledged for the first time that training of suicide bombers was occurring in the tribal areas…

Pakistani intelligence agencies have long nurtured militants in the tribal areas to pressure the rival government in Afghanistan…

“There are clearly very substantial training facilities that are still operating in Waziristan, both north and south, and other parts of FATA and Baluchistan,” said a diplomat in Kabul, referring to the region by the acronym for its formal name, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas…


Javed Iqbal, the newly appointed Pakistani secretary of the tribal areas, defended the North Waziristan accord as an effort to return to the traditional way of running the tribal areas, through the tribal chiefs. That system, employed by the British and Pakistani rulers alike, was eroded during the military campaigns of the last few years…

“In South Waziristan the government does not even pretend to have a remit that runs outside of its compounds.”

Like so much else in today’s conflicts, it seems that this story has unreeled before. My fingers itch to peruse some of the materials reviewed and written (JSTOR tells me 190+ items) by Malcolm Yapp (Emeritus Professor of the Modern History of Western Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, such as The Beginning of the Great Game in Asia 1828-1834 by Edward Ingram.