Dear _____,

You are living today in two Pakistans.

One country has joined the world with sufficient affluence or capital for accessing the Internet, developing relationships, participating in global media, and enjoying, for better or worse, the world in English, good and bad, and expanded worlds in other languages. The people living in that country have climbed a great mountain that somewhere started with work or power and developed enough infrastructure and technology to do what it now does online.

The other country has found itself clinging to what it knows and believes, including what it believes it knows about itself and its civilizational and national mission. That world too has accessed the web but it has taken positions opposite the enthusiasms and values that produced its modern capabilities. That world wants to continue living in a perpetuated yesterday.

The two countries in tentative formation are skirmishing with one another in every way imaginable, from the bureaucracies of the state’s military down to deadly activity — assassins on motorbikes, suicide bombers, etc. — in remote precincts.

My correspondent had asked for help on a piece probably appearing soon in the Daily Times (Pakistan).

So I wrote the above and said, “quote me.”

That should make his endeavor a little easier.

* * *

We use the nation-state as our unit of interest in international politics, but in the real politics tying together across any region its host of leaders in business and investment, culture and religion, and then politics, it’s really quite weak in the areas in which Islamic Small War conflict has a presence.  Clan, family, and tribal relations prove more powerful than state presence in many locales — and that’s true in remote areas or “dark space” outside of Islam as well.

Basically, the world just isn’t as organized and tidy as seemingly advanced, organized, and tidy states might prefer.

In the more anarchic regions, confusion and conflict travel together, and the process of reaching agreements and accommodations through other than fear and force seems a long process.  However, it’s an unavoidable process where better functioning states and their values have an interface with more troubled regions.

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