Sunday, August 30, 2009

Everything Is Wrong With Pakistan

Everything in the world that can be wrong with a country seems to be wrong with Pakistan. Of all the things we might want to use our severely limited political influence to fix, it's hard to know what to choose. Pakistan has political instability, violent religious fundamentalism, horrible misogyny, crushing poverty, nuclear proliferation, a threat of nuclear war with India, and to top it all off, Osama Bin Laden probably lives there.

If this story is right, you can add "deadly reality TV" to the list. A dude was swimming across a river with a 15-pound backpack on for a Pakistani reality TV show, and he drowned. This probably goes eighth on the list of things to fix behind all that other stuff.

3 comments:

Lester Freamon said...

You forgot "threatened by climate change".

If you thought India/Pakistan relations were bad now, wait until there's not enough runoff from the glaciers in the Himalayas to sustain both countries' populations.

Neil Sinhababu said...

Oh, yeah, I heard about that. Bad stuff.

opit said...

You have no idea.
International Rivers has had a PDF up for ages outlining how dams are adversely affecting runoff - think of the Turkey-Iraq situation - and not just water access but destruction of river ecosystems and flood hazard!.
JanforGore posts at Current articles which I have long noted as insightful and frightfully important.
Care2 is another place I raid on my quest for info.
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2009/07/water-wealth-power.html
But as to the motivations for this activity - predicted in the War Game 'Post Saddam Iraq' a good decade ago, listed under Documents - it is really hard to improve upon this musical video fronting the section http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2009/07/perception-alteration.html

Long time no quip. You may remember me from old threads at Ezra Klein's homepage years back.