[LINK] Respecting the disrespectful

"Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary."

Am I self-hating if I still like the author's Pastwatch?

[REVIEW] Clarke and Baxter, A Time Odyssey

I'm definitely on the record as wishing that there is as little life outside of Earth as is possible. The news of Mars' barrenness initially reassured me that complex organisms aren't necessarily likely to develop; news that there is likely an abundance of Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way has done the opposite. Why? I'd like to believe that humans are one of the galaxy's elder species, the others existing somewhere else, in the Galactic Center or the Norma and Cygnus Arm or some globular cluster orbiting far above the plane of the galaxy, far far away from our little Orion Arm. I'd be just as happy to believe that David Brin was right in predicting that most Earth-like worlds are oceanic worlds, incapable of producing the sorts of land-based species incapable of producing the complex technologies, like fire, necessary for spaceflight. Why? Just like H.G. Wells, I'm quite aware of the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines, or Canada's First Nations, or the Mapuche of Chile, or the Khoisan of western South Africa, or ...

That's why I was interested in reading A Time Odyssey, Sir Arthur C. Clarke's three-volume collaboration with Stephen Baxter, that and the fact that these three are the last of Clarke's novels published before his death. The series is what Clarke called an "orthoquel" to the themes of 2001, a revisiting of his themes of a great ubercivilization in particular his mysterious monoliths and od-like powers. Clarke's decision to choice Baxter as collaborator, Baxter having written (among other cheerful novels) the Xeelee Sequence in which successive challenges from increasingly powerful alien civilizations cruelly dominate humanity, should be enough to give the casual reader some idea as to the nature of the god-like civilization this time. Beginning with Time's Eye, and continuing with Sunstorm and Firstborn, humanity is faced with successive challenges. The series revolves around Bisesa Dutt, a British soldier on UN detail who is sucked into a bizarre alternate version of Earth, a slices of Earth built up from different snopshot slices of the world taken at different times in its recent history. (That's how Alexander the Great gets to fight the Mongols of Genghis Khan, for example.) Who did all this, and why? Well, that would be completely spoiling the series.

How are they? I quite enjoyed the novels' increasingly vast and complicated scope, intricately constructed piece by piece. On the other hand, people who want science fiction with non-unidimensional characters probably should look somewhere. I've always liked to think that Clarke's characters had a certain amount of dimensionality to them, but Baxter's? I'd never accuse that worthy idea-rich man of that. Chacun à son goût, I suppose.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] What kind of war will Canadian soldiers fight, in the end?

While promoting his new book last year, In the Line of Fire, on an international book tour, Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf managed to trigger a minor controversy in Canada last week when he criticized the heavy press coverage of Canadian military casualties in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf told CBC Tuesday that the Canadian military casualties from fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan have been insubstantial compared with those suffered by Pakistan.

Musharraf brushed off the suggestion that his government was endangering Canadians and other troops in Afghanistan by not doing enough to root out the Taliban and al-Qaeda and their sympathizers.

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf told CBC's Carol Off on Tuesday that his government is doing all it can to root out the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and that Pakistani military losses have been much more substantial than those suffered by Canada.

"We have suffered 500 casualties [1000 as of April 2008]," he said. "Canadians may have suffered four or five."

[. . .]

Musharraf said any nation, such as Canada, that enters a war-torn area must be prepared to suffer casualties or get out of the operation.

"You suffer two dead and you cry and shout all around the place that there are coffins," he said. "Well, we have had 500 coffins."

The sentiment of indifference--towards foreign dead, true, but possibly also his own--might explain why Musharraf was the one who not only started the badly-planned and potentially catastrophic Kargil War of 1999. It might also explain recent events within Pakistan.

U.S. forces struck a suspected al-Qaeda hideout inside Pakistan Monday, exposing growing tensions between the allies over Pakistan's inability to deal with militants in its tribal regions.

The attack, believed to have killed a top al-Qaeda chemical and biological weapons expert, came as Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani arrived in Washington in an effort to reassure Americans of his country's efforts to eradicate the militants based in Pakistan, who are believed to be feeding the rising insurgency in Afghanistan.

While U.S. President George W. Bush praised Pakistan as a "strong ally and a vibrant democracy," yesterday's military strikes - the latest in a rash of such U.S. interventions - drew a quick rebuke from Pakistan's army, which warned they "could be detrimental to bilateral relations."

The attack also came a day after a senior United Nations envoy suggested that Pakistan's intelligence agents may have been involved in recent attacks inside Afghanistan.

As Mr. Gilani sought to present an image as the head of a freely elected government in a budding democracy, a drama back at home cruelly laid bare the limits of his power. As he left for Washington over the weekend, Mr. Gilani had issued a surprise order that placed Pakistan's notorious Inter-Service Intelligence agency under firm civilian control, by handing command of it to the Interior Ministry.

[. . .]

The military, however, refused to accept the change, as did President Pervez Musharraf, a former army chief, and the order had to be reversed within hours.

"The notification came as a surprise and we informed the government of our reservations," said Pakistan army spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas. "The ISI is basically responsible for external intelligence, only around 10 per cent of its work is internal security."

Carol Off accused the above Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence of masterminding the July 2006 Mumbai train bombings. Bernard-Henri Lévy would be in general agreement with this suggestion, as expressed in his rather frightening Who Killed Daniel Pearl?.

Back in January, the Canadian Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion suggested that NATO make a diplomatic intervention in Pakistan to install border controls that would prevent Taliban forces to move back and forth across the (contested) Durand Line with impunity. That seems unlikely to happen, especially with the tack of Pakistan's current government. Is the region going to experience a nasty scenario, whereby United States attacks on Pakistan soil and Pakistan's government remains willing to allow Tablian forces free egress (and recuits and arms and sundry?) on its territory? If so, should Canada really remain involved? I doubt that Canadians have much stomach for that sort of conflict, whether it becomes a low-level sort of thing or not (crushing defeat, by one side or another).

What are your thoughts on this situation?