Ahmed Rashid, Taking Stock of Pakistani Politics

DATE December 12, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Journalist Ahmed Rashid discusses latest developments
in Pakistan and its upcoming elections
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Many critics of Pakistan's President Musharraf have been silenced. So have
many journalists in the country. But my guest, journalist Ahmed Rashid, is
currently visiting America and free to give his analysis of the situation.
He's speaking to groups in Washington and New York, including military
colleges. Rashid is best known in the West for his book, "Taliban," which was
published in 2000 and became a best-seller after September 11th. He's also
written about Islamic extremism through central Asia. We check in with him
from time to time to talk about the latest developments in Pakistan and on the
Islamic extremist front. One of the subjects for today's conversation is the
parliamentary election in Pakistan scheduled for January 8th, which, as we'll
hear, Rashid expects will be rigged. President Musharraf declared a state of
emergency in early November, suspended the constitution, and fired the supreme
court. For eight years, he was the head of the military as well as president.

Ahmed Rashid, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So since the last time we spoke,
which was just a few weeks ago, Musharraf has stepped down as head of the
military but he remains president. Does he have any less power than he did
before?

Mr. AHMED RASHID: Well, he does have less power in the sense that there's a
new army chief, so he has to contend now with a new army chief, even though
the new army chief is very much a loyalist to him. All the senior generals,
of course, very loyal to him. He had them placed specifically just before he
resigned from the military so that, you know, he knew that he could trust
them. But nevertheless, yes, I mean, you know, he does not command the army,
and that is a new factor. And eventually down the road, the new chief is
going to become his own man. At the moment he may be very owning to
Musharraf, but in a few months' time, if there's another crisis and Musharraf
is at the center of that political crisis, then we're going to see the new
military chief, General Kiyani, acting very much on his own.

GROSS: So the prime minister election is scheduled for January 8th. What's
at stake in this election?

Mr. RASHID: What nobody now expects is a free and fair election. I think
there's absolutely no doubt that Musharraf and the intelligence agencies and
the army are determined and united and have a common agenda in rigging the
election. Now, they're going to rig them, in my opinion, in such a way that
the former political alliance that Musharraf was ruling with, that is the
Pakistan Muslim League and affection of the religious Islamic parties will
once again form the government. In other words, the elections will be rigged
in favor of the ruling coalition that has ruled for the last five years.

I don't think that the deal that Musharraf had promised to the Americans
regarding Benazir Bhutto, that she would come back, she would be allowed to
contest in a free and fair vote, and she would probably win the election in a
free and fair vote and then become prime minister, I don't think that scenario
is on the cards anymore. I think Benazir Bhutto, Musharraf has not obviously
completed that deal. He's limiting her activities very much, and I think the
elections are going to be rigged in the sense that she would be left with a
certain number of seats in the opposition rather than in the government.

GROSS: When you said that the elections will be rigged, like how will they be
rigged?

Mr. RASHID: Well, you know, there's been a lot of practice for this. I
mean, we had very, very rigged elections in 2002. Now, this doesn't mean
ballot stuffing. In fact, I mean, those are techniques of the past. The fact
is, when all the results are being collated, they first go to a center--which
is not publicly admitted to, of course, by the military--they go to an
intelligence center of the ISI--that is the Inter-Services Intelligence.
They're supposed to go directly from the counting stations to the election
commission in Islamabad. Now, what happened certainly in 2002 was these
election results were first sent off to the ISI where they were dealt with.
Now, how were they dealt with? Well, one of the easiest methods is if there
is no real checking on the number of votes cast, you can decrease or increase
the number of votes cast by the flick of a computer switch basically. So you
don't actually have to physically stuff ballot boxes. What you have to do is
to fiddle with the number of votes cast in that particular constituency.
That's one of the methods, and there are several other methods. Not to speak
of the kind of intimidation that has been going on before the elections to get
people who might pose a threat to the government candidate to get them to
stand down and not to stand.

GROSS: Tell us a couple of the basic things we should know about Benazir
Bhutto and then about Nawaz Sharif. Let's start with Benazir Bhutto.

Mr. RASHID: Well, she has been prime minister twice. There have been both
times very controversial terms in office. She was thrown out for corruption,
for incompetence, for a variety of other things, but there's very little doubt
also that the army did and the intelligence services did help undermine her
government. So it's a mixture of her own failure and she being programmed to
fail, you know, by the military. But the point about Benazir Bhutto is she
has a legacy of a party that had been started by her father who was executed
by the army in the 1980s. She took over the mantle of the party and
traditionally this is a party that has been anti-army. It has been pro
democracy and anti-army, and it's been very anti-mullah. In other words,
anti-fundamentalist. It's perhaps the strongest and the most widespread, if
you like, secular party in Pakistan. So it has roots, you know, very deep
roots in the section of the population that traditionally has been very
anti-army and anti-extremist.

GROSS: Now, Nawaz Sharif, he represents a more religious party.

Mr. RASHID: Well, actually, you know, he represents what is today the ruling
party, the Muslim League, which is what Musharraf is ruling with. Now, Nawaz
Sharif has been prime minister twice, like Bhutto. Bhutto was his big rival
in the '90s. His regimes were also marred with a lot of corruption and
incompetence and attempts, in fact, to impose Islamic law at one stage. Since
then he's been in exile, and he now claims to be a far more moderate person,
much more in favor of democracy, opposed to military rule. He's taken a much
tougher line against Musharraf than Benazir Bhutto has. He refuses to deal
with him or work with President Musharraf, and he remains very popular in
Punjab province. He's a Punjabi himself. Punjab is the largest province in
the country, 65 percent of the population. And if you win the elections in
Punjab dramatically, you could probably win the whole parliament and become
prime minister. So what happens in Punjab is very important.

GROSS: In the meantime, Musharraf at about the same time that he declared
martial law, he sacked most of the judiciary. There's been a big protest by
judges in Pakistan. Are most of the judges who Musharraf put in prison or
under house arrest still in that condition?

Mr. RASHID: Well, I think this is what has been really, really tragic.
Musharraf deposed the judiciary, brought in new judges and made them swear an
oath of loyalty to him. This, of course, finishes any idea of having an
independent judiciary. Now, the former judges, most of them are under house
arrest. They're surrounded by police. Nobody can visit them. Their
telephones have been cut. You know, we're talking now about seven weeks after
the emergency. And it's a major demand, of course, by human rights groups.
The lawyers are still protesting in the streets. The law courts are still
paralyzed. The law courts are not functioning at all, you know, at the lowest
level or at the high court and the supreme court level. So there is still a
very strong protest movement, but unfortunately, there is no international
support for a free and independent judiciary. The American position, for
example, and the European position, nobody has asked for the restoration of
the former judiciary. And there's a lot of disappointment, I think, in the
sort of liberal elite and the liberal public, amongst the lawyers with the
international community, particularly with the Americans, that there is no
demand for the restoration of the former judiciary. And the point is simply
how can you have free and fair elections, I mean, if you've got this blind
judiciary. Because every time there's a charge of rigging, for example, you
have to go to the courts. And the courts are just going to throw these
charges out. There's going to be no fair hearing of rigging charges, for
example. So how can you have a free and fair election when you've got a
judiciary that has been, you know, set up by Musharraf?

GROSS: And sworn allegiance to him. So what do you think that Europe and the
United States could be doing?

Mr. RASHID: Well, you know, I think, that there are three red lines which
Musharraf has drawn, which I don't think the US is challenging at all. The
first red line is that the US is demanding an independent judiciary but is not
demanding the restoration of the former judiciary. So I think Musharraf has
won out on that. His first red line is that there will not be an independent
judiciary. The army does not like an independent judiciary, and it will not
allow one to happen. The judiciary has to be controlled by the military. I
think that's the first red line, and, unfortunately, that seems to be accepted
by much of the international community.

I think the second red line he's drawing is that we're not going to have a
free and independent press. There has been an enormous crackdown on the
press, as you know. It has eased up. But all the major news channels, TV
satellite news channels, have been forced to sign a code of conduct with the
military and the intelligence services of what they will run and not run. And
secondly, the military has insisted that their key anchors, some of them be
sacked. And for these channels to come back, they've had to do that. So one
channel, Geo, has refused to sign any of this and is still off the air, you
know, even six, seven weeks after the emergency. Now, again, the US is
calling for a free and independent press, but it's not highlighting and
pinpointing the kind of demands being made by the military, which are totally
against a free and independent press.

And I think the third red line he's drawn is that he will oversee the
elections. In other words, he will rig the elections. And here again we have
an American demand that there must be free and fair elections, but there's no
specific pointers to the military regime as to what it must to do ensure free
and fair elections.

GROSS: Do you think this is in part because Musharraf has been seen as an
ally of the Bush administration, and maybe the Bush administration wants
Musharraf to stay in power so not intervening in the election is kind of a way
of ensuring that?

Mr. RASHID: I think that's very true. I mean, I think, you know, the Bush
administration has been caught, perhaps, earlier between this rhetoric of
wanting to promote democracy in the Muslim world but also wanting to keep the
sort of authoritarian rulers or tyrants that the US has supported in the Arab
world, in the wider Muslim world, to keep them in power and in place. I mean,
we see, for example, about two years ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's support for the democracy movement in Egypt, and then suddenly backing
off after Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush endorsed Mubarak,
backing off that and then endorsing Mubarak. In similar ways, the democracy
movement in other parts of the Arab world have really been stifled. So I
think what we're seeing by the Bush administration as it faces, you know, so
many setbacks in Iraq, with the policy on Iran, we're seeing a return to
support for authoritarian rulers, really, around the globe. And Musharraf is
taking advantage of that certainly.

GROSS: My guest is Pakistani journalist Ahmad Rashid. We'll talk more after
a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is the Pakistani journalist Ahmad Rashid, who's best known in
the United States for his best-selling book "Taliban," and he's briefly in the
United States to give a series of lectures in Washington and in New York.

We last spoke on FRESH AIR in early November, and you were in Spain then for a
conference. You've been back to Pakistan since then up until a few days ago.
So how has daily life in Pakistan changed for you and the people around you
since the institution of emergency law?

Mr. RASHID: Well, I missed the emergency, and a lot of my friends were in
jail, and most of them have been released, so a lot of the time when I went
back was spent actually in visiting people who had been in jail, and kind of,
you know, taking their news and etc. These were, you know, journalists, human
rights workers, heads of, you know, women, women NGOs, people who had been in
jail for two, three, four weeks, or under house arrest. So it's been a very
sad time. I mean, you know, and it's been perhaps, you know, people have got
even more depressed as the elections come up and there is every indication
that, you know, these elections are not going to be free and fair. So the
struggle in civil society, I think, amongst the lawyers, amongst the middle
class continues. But, of course, what has not happened and what has
strengthened Musharraf is the fact that, you know, there hasn't been a mass
movement. I mean, you haven't had, you know, millions and millions of people
marching in the streets to kick out Musharraf. And that, of course, you know,
civil society, the NGOs, the lawyers, I mean, they can't organize that. That
is up to the political parties and the political leadership. And the fact is
that the political leaders are discredited in the public. I mean, the public
in their millions are not coming out because they don't trust the political
leadership--Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, these are opposition leaders because
they've tried and tested them before. So it's a very complex, dangerous and
unpredictable situation.

GROSS: We've talked before about the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and
the latest US plan that we've heard about to help fight Islamic extremists in
Afghanistan is a plan to arm Pakistani tribal forces on the border area
between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's a group called the Frontier Corps.
This looks like it's a pretty controversial plan. Who is the Frontier Corps
and what is the plan?

Mr. RASHID: Well, the Frontier Corps is an 80,000 strong paramilitary force
largely made up of Pashtun tribesmen. The Pashtuns are the ethnic group from
which the Taliban are drawn and which inhabit both the Afghan side and the
Pakistani side of this common border between the two countries. Now
traditionally, under the British, it was a force raised by the British to help
the British keep the peace in the tribal areas, and it was raised from the
tribes themselves. But the Pakistani military over the past 25 years have
used the Frontier Corps as a kind of cutting edge front-line force to back up,
in the 1980s first the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets and then the
Taliban. So the Frontier Corps has become this kind of Islamist jihadist
force which for the last 25 years has been fighting for extremists, you know,
in Afghanistan as part of Pakistan's foreign policy in Afghanistan. It's been
training these extremists, it's been fighting for them, so, in my opinion, the
Frontier Corps is a thoroughly, thoroughly unreliable force right now.

Now, the American plan is that, you know, `Oh, let's arm them, let's give them
helicopters and tanks, let's throw money at them as much as we can, and
they're going to be this tribal force which is going to, you know, help us win
the war against terror.' Well, I mean, the whole point about this is, I think,
that the Frontier Corps, you know, has to be revamped completely, has to be
restructured, it has to be screened. Its officer corps, its members, I think
a lot of them are too closely linked to the whole jihadist philosophy to be of
any use.

So I think, again, you know, the Americans are throwing money. I mean, there
are three separate ideas that the Americans are floating right now. One is to
spend $350 million to arm the Frontier Corps. The other is to spend $750
million to carry our development project in the tribal agencies themselves on
the Pakistani side. And the third idea is to arm some of the Pashtun tribes
to fight those Pashtun tribes who are helping al-Qaeda. In other words, to
repeat what has been happening in Anbar province in Iraq. Now, I think all
three projects are totally miscalculated and unappropriate. Unless there are
demands put on the Pakistan military to reform the Frontier Corps, there's no
point in giving this corps tanks and helicopters unless there are conditions
put on Pakistan to reform the tribal agencies. In other words, the tribal
agencies are, at the moment, outside the gambit of the Pakistan constitution.

And thirdly, I think, clearly, this whole issue of arming tribe against tribe,
I mean, you're going to create a civil war of horrendous proportions. And,
you know, the Pashtun tribes are already well-armed. To imagine that, you
know, a new consignment of American arms are going to come in on one side,
it's going to create a horrendous civil war. You don't have tribes there
which are dedicatedly against al-Qaeda. Everyone will run around the
Americans, take their money, take their weapons, and basically make fools of
this whole American strategy.

GROSS: Do you think that some of the tribes can be bought, that if we give
the people enough money, that they'll join our side and fight against Islamic
extremists even if it had fought for Islamic extremists in the past?

Mr. RASHID: You see, the problem, Terry, is that a few years ago, in other
words after 9/11, there were certainly tribes who intensely disliked al-Qaeda
and the Taliban, and there were tribal elders, there was a civil society in
these tribal agencies, there were, you know, students, there were teachers,
there were intellectuals, there were shopkeepers, there were businessmen, and
people, you know, who were dead against the Taliban, and if the Pakistan
government had carried out reforms at that time in these tribal agencies to
bring these anti-Taliban Pashtuns on side, I think, you know, we wouldn't be
in the mess that we are today. Now, what has happened, unfortunately, is that
you've had very strong and ruthless Pakistani Taliban movement in the tribal
agencies. Now, what have the Pakistani Taliban done? They've carried out a
kind of ethnic cleansing amongst their fellow Pashtuns. Anyone opposing them
has either been executed, you know, with having his throat slit, or has been
forced out to leave the area with his family and his belongings. So what we
have left now in many of these tribal agencies--there are seven of them, and
in about four of them, we have a totally Taliban population. In other words,
we have the Taliban and their sympathizers. Anyone who opposes them is
executed or driven out.

Now frankly, in this kind of situation, I think, political reform becomes even
more imperative. Of course, it's much more difficult, it'll take longer, you
don't have the civil society to back your political reform right now. You've
got to kind of bring them back and protect them and allow them to gain some
status. And at the same time, you have to defeat the Taliban militarily.
But, I mean, the problem is that you've allowed the situation to deteriorate
now to such an extent that these Pakistani Taliban are no longer in
competition with anyone. They are controlling territory and large chunks of
the population.

GROSS: Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and author of the best-seller
"Taliban." He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and
this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Pakistani journalist
Ahmed Rashid, author of the best-seller "Taliban." He's currently in the US on
a brief speaking tour. We check in with him from time to time about the
latest developments in his country and with Islamic extremism in the region.

You know, we spoke to Sarah Chayes earlier this week, and she is a former NPR
reporter who has been working on development projects in Afghanistan and has
gotten to know the country very well in the past six years. And she says that
Pakistan has been trying to exercise a kind of proxy control over Afghanistan.
I wonder if you agree with that, and, if so, if you would interpret that for
us.

Mr. RASHID: Well, you know, I mean, the military has, over the last six,
seven years, I mean, the military have a very complicated position vis-a-vis
Afghanistan, and unfortunately, the military has seen everything in
Afghanistan through the prism of India. India is Pakistan's, you know,
long-standing enemy. Right after 9/11, the Indians who had been, of course,
had no presence in Afghanistan during the Taliban period came back into
Afghanistan, have had a very effective aid and development program in
Afghanistan, etc. And the military has done its best to try and reduce the
Indian presences in Afghanistan.

Now, as part of that, it has also feared the Northern Alliance--that is the
non-Pashtun warlords who helped defeat the Taliban back in 2001 and then ran
the government for several years. I mean, they're no longer really running
the government. But Pakistan has always distrusted the Northern Alliance
because they've been backed by India and Iran and Russia.

And thirdly, Pakistan has for the last 10 to 15 years certainly been trying to
exercise a domination over the Afghan Pashtun population who live in the south
and the east of the country. So, as a mixture of all these policies, I think
that is the reason why Pakistan gave sanctuary to the Taliban after 9/11 when
they were outed by the Americans, they fled into Pakistan and Pakistan has
given them sanctuary. And it is from these sanctuaries in Pakistan which
they've been going back and, you know, launching attacks in Afghanistan and,
of course, spreading their influence and, subsequently, also spawning the
Pakistani Taliban, that is, you know, this similar type of movement on the
Pakistani side of the border. But so, I wouldn't put the whole of the rise of
the Taliban--blame the whole thing on Pakistan because clearly the Taliban do
have their own agenda and they have resuscitated not just with the help of
Pakistan but also with the help of al-Qaeda and with the help of militant
groups in the Middle East and militant groups in Pakistan. So the Taliban
have had their own agenda and their own capabilities, but there's little doubt
that without the sanctuary that Pakistan has provided them in the last few
years, you wouldn't have had this expansion of the Taliban movement.

GROSS: The last couple of times you've joined us on FRESH AIR, you've warned
that the Pakistan Taliban have spread out to some of the settled areas in
Pakistan and that they're exerting their control and forcing people in some
areas to conform to a more strict Islamic code. Have you seen an increase in
that in the past few weeks since we last spoke?

Mr. RASHID: Well, in fact, since we last spoke, there has been an attempt by
one militia, a sort of Taliban militia, to take control of the Swat Valley.
Now, the Swat Valley is 100 miles north of Islamabad, the capital. It's a
very developed valley, it's a very scenically beautiful valley, it's a center
of tourism in Pakistan, you know, and, as a consequence, it's had a very good
infrastructure, roads, electricity, 80 percent of the population is literate.
And this Taliban militia which has been growing there over the last two years
has not been stopped in any way by the military. They've been running their
sort of radio stations. They've got FM radio stations, and they run this hate
propaganda, you know, demanding Sharia, Islamic law, and hate propaganda
against anyone who's not saying their prayers five times a day or doesn't
support the Taliban. The military's been allowing all this to happen. And
suddenly, what I think happened in the last three or four weeks, you know,
this militia made a bid to capture the whole valley, and you had dozens of
police posts falling to them, posts of the Frontier Corps falling to them.
And finally the army had to go in, went in and has now cleared the rebels of
the main towns, has driven them up into the mountains, but has not finished
them. So, you know, you now have a full scale war going on. Now it's very
unfortunate. If the military had done this two years ago, they wouldn't have
needed such a big military operation. This militia was a very small militia.
There was very little support for it at that time. You could have cleared up
these few miscreants with probably a few policemen at that time. Now you've
had to sent 20,000 troops with tanks and helicopters into this valley, killing
a lot of civilians, bombing, destroying a lot of these towns and people's
homes and things, creating a huge exodus of refugees, creating a huge crisis,
basically, about something that could have been resolved as a simple police
operation two years ago.

GROSS: Why didn't the Pakistani military do anything two years ago?

Mr. RASHID: Well, I think you know, this has been the tragedy of the
Musharraf regime. I mean, I think, they've been kind of blackmailing the West
and, in particular, the American policymakers by trying to demonstrate to them
that, `Look, we are facing this fundamentalist threat here, and, consequently,
I am the only one who can protect American interests and fight these
fundamentalists.' And so the army has had this sort of dual track policy of
raising the threat of fundamentalism so that they can go to the Americans say,
`Look how serious this threat is,' and then finally after a lot of hesitation
and allowing the threat to grow more and more and more, then finally deal with
the threat.

We saw this happening with the Red Mosque incident earlier this year in
Islamabad, if you remember. This group of militants took over this mosque and
held it for six months in the middle of the capital of the country. And the
police could have moved in and cleared out these militants in the beginning.
There were like 20, 30 militants. And after six months, there were 4,000
militants, and you had to send in the army. So again, you know, I mean, these
are these sort of classic ways in which the military tries to get the sympathy
of the Bush administration. And, quite frankly, it's been working. And I
think a lot of Pakistanis have contempt for the Bush administration for the
ease with which they fall for this again and again and again.

GROSS: My guest is Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. We'll talk more after
a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who's best known in
the United States for his best-selling book "Taliban," and he's briefly in the
United States to give a series of lectures in Washington and in New York.

As part of your trip to the United States, you've been speaking to the
military. What are those interactions like? I mean, who are you speaking to
and what do you think the people you're speaking to in the military are making
of the kind of analysis that you're giving, which I assume is kind of similar
to what you're telling us now.

Mr. RASHID: Well, I've been speaking at military colleges, you know, where
officers are doing courses and where the staff is trying to teach some of
these things. And, obviously, there are a lot of officers there who are back
from Iraq who, perhaps, are looking at the border regions and the Taliban
through the eyes of their own experiences in Iraq. And to some extent I think
that's probably relevant, but in other extent, it's not. For example, this
whole issue of arming the tribes, I mean, obviously everybody was very
interested in that. What happened in Anbar, or what I understand is that
actually some of the Iraqi tribes came to the Americans and said, you know,
`We hate al-Qaeda. They're harming our people. Give us weapons. Give us
money and arm us and let us fight them.' And the Americans did so. Now, you
know, there's no comparable situation in the tribal areas, in the Pashtun
tribal areas in Pakistan or on the border with Afghanistan because the Taliban
are Pashtun, number one, and they are not outsiders. In Iraq, of course, many
of the al-Qaeda people are outsiders. They're not Iraqis. They're Saudis or
they belong to other Arab nationalities. So, in these border regions, the
Taliban, first of all, are Pashtuns.

Secondly, they've been using a mixture of terrorizing the local population by
executions, by forcible recruitment of sons of villagers, etc. They've been
terrorizing the population to make sure that the population does not resist
them in any way. So I don't think anything is really comparable to the
situation in Iraq. But it was very interesting. I mean, I think the US
military is the most skeptical about throwing money at problems, you know. I
think the State Department and the CIA and certainly the White House have this
idea that, you know, all you need to do is to throw money at the problem and
the problem will go away. Well, I think, you know, the fact is that, seven
years after 9/11, the extremists and terrorists in my part of the world are
stronger than ever. American policies have failed to deal with extremism.
They've failed to catch Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, you know, the Taliban
leader, etc. We're in a much, much worse situation and a much more desperate
situation where you've got these extremists spreading now in Pakistan,
winning, if you like, in Afghanistan, being able to train these European
groups who are plotting to launch more 9/11-type attacks in Europe. So I
think, you know, there's an enormous concern amongst the US military as to why
their policies have not been successful in Pakistan/Afghanistan, and what
needs to be done.

GROSS: I would just be interested in getting your quick reaction to the
recent American National Intelligence Estimate that said that Iran had
basically stopped its secret nuclear weapons development program in 2003.

Mr. RASHID: Well, I think at one level there's an enormous relief in
Pakistan because I hope what it means is that, you know, the Americans will
really have no reason to attack Iran. And certainly what many Pakistanis and
Afghans fear very much is a war with United States, which would, of course,
drag in all the neighboring countries. And both Pakistan and Afghanistan are
neighbors of Iran, and these countries would be forced to take sides. And
obviously they would side with the Americans, and the Iranians would then do
as much as they could to undermine both the governments in Pakistan and
Afghanistan. So at one level there's enormous relief.

But I think at another level, I mean, it really has confused people and is
going to lead to a lot of confusion. And I think the whole credibly now of
the US intelligence establishment and the kind of judgments they make and the
kind of spin given by the Bush administration is all in doubt. Now, tomorrow
you're going to have National Intelligence Estimates about al-Qaeda, about the
Pakistani Taliban, about, you know, the Pakistani nuclear program,
about--etc., about nuclear proliferation, about, you know, the viability of
President Karzai being able to survive, etc. And I think really the problem
now is that, you know, there's a lot of doubts will be cast upon these
estimates and the kind of seriousness with which these intelligence estimates
were held, both by the American population, the American public, the American
media, Congress, and, of course, abroad. You know, when American intelligence
made an assessment, I mean, it has always been taken very seriously. Whether
it was against you or in favor of you, it was taken very seriously. I think,
unfortunately, what this administration has done has been to completely
destroy the credibility of these intelligence estimates both for the American
public and for foreign countries.

GROSS: Well, Ahmed Rashid, I want to thank you very much for talking with us,
and I wish you a good stay in the United States.

Mr. RASHID: Thank you.

GROSS: Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and author of the best-seller
"Taliban." He's in the US on a brief speaking tour.

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Profile: Maureen Corrigan gives list of books for holiday gifts
TERRY GROSS, host:

We asked our book critic Maureen Corrigan for some holiday gift
recommendations, and she came up with a list of books that have been
resurrected, reprinted or repackaged.

Ms. MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Here's a holiday literary fantasy. Say you had a
great-great-grandparent who was a reader and a pack rat, and imagine that
somewhere in the piles of print this obsessive ancestor saved there was a copy
of Beeton's Christmas Annual for the year 1886. You would have inherited
quite a nice little present. This past summer a copy of that cheap pulp
magazine was auctioned for $156,000. That's because contained within the
moldering contents of Beeton's is a short story called "The Study in Scarlet,"
by a then unknown author, Arthur Conan Doyle. It was the first Sherlock
Holmes tale, and it was rejected by a number of publishers before it landed in
Beeton's grubby pages. The frustrated Doyle complained in a letter to his
mother that `Verily, literature is a difficult oyster to open.'

In 1997, a collection of about 1,000 of Doyle's letters, many of them to his
mother, came to the British library, and they've recently been published by
the Penguin press in a handsome illustrated volume called "Arthur Conan Doyle:
A Life in Letters." For any Sherlock Holmes addict on your holiday list this
book would be a delight. Conan Doyle's letters to his mother about Holmes
credit her not only with plot inspiration but also with extending the life of
the great detective long after Conan Doyle wearied of him. As the letters
also attest, Conan Doyle lived an interesting life apart from Holmes. He
traveled the world, beginning in medical school when he took a post as a
ship's surgeon on an Arctic whaler. He socialized with the likes of Oscar
Wilde and H.G. Wells, and he guiltily struggled with his love for another
woman, while his first wife slowly succumbed to tuberculosis. But, for me,
the great charm of this collection is not its drama, but rather its
tranquility. Conan Doyle's letters give contemporary readers a sense of the
slower pace of life in the latter half of the 19th century. Here's a snippet
of a letter to his mother from 1871, written when the young Conan Doyle was in
boarding school. He's describing a winter holiday.

"We went out skating till 5:00. We then went home and had dinner of pork and
applesauce and potatoes and then tarts and oranges till half past 5. We then
went to the playroom and played games till 7. We had supper of bread and
milk. We then again took our skates and went to the pond, and there we found
it all illuminated with Chinese lanterns. And there was a band on the side of
the pond playing "Rule Britannia," and so we enjoyed ourselves till 11:00.
And then we all got a tumbler of punch, and then we took off our skates and
went to bed."

Conan Doyle clearly had a literary gift, even if he sometimes regarded his
greatest creation as a curse.

For those writers, artists, and other creative types on your holiday list who
haven't yet met with any measure of Conan Doyle's success, I recommend the
balm of Lewis Hyde's odd minor classic called "The Gift." Just republished by
Vintage books in a 25th anniversary paperback edition, "The Gift" is a poetic
defense of the value of creativity in our commodity culture, the very same
commodity culture that's turned that first Sherlock Holmes story into a
whoppingly overpriced artifact. Hyde invokes folk tales, fairy tales, myth,
and Bible stories to give weight to the artistic impulse. Occasionally, I'll
confess, Hyde loses me with one too many ancient tales from, say, the Inuits
or the Celts, but overall "The Gift" powerfully speaks to the mystery of works
of art that can transmit vitality and revive the soul. Such works, Hyde says,
circulate among us as reservoirs of available life.

Someone at the Feminist Press certainly had a gift, or I should say a genius
for repackaging. The result is a wonderful paperback series called "Two by
Two," which pairs unexpected literary couples who've written short stories or
poems on the same topics. The little volumes so far include Tillie Olsen and
Leo Tolstoy writing on death; Grace Paley--who we lost this year--and her
husband Robert Nichols, writing on old age and politics, and two couples whose
works aren't as familiar to Western readers, the 20th-century Chinese authors
Ding Ling and Lu Hsun writing on revolution, and African writers Bessie Head
and Ngugi Wa Thiong'O capturing the sometimes brutal transition from
colonialism to independence.

Any of these slim Feminist Press volumes would make excellent stocking
stuffers. But if I had to select just one, it would be the African stories.
Bessie Head was a revelation to me, and her tale, "The Collector of
Treasures," about an African woman jailed for murdering her husband, embodies
Lewis Hyde's poetic pronouncement about the power of genuine art to transmit
vitality. Just think, all these different voices, these stories, these lives,
available to us in books as gifts for less than the price of a tank of gas.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. You can
find her holiday book recommendations on our Web site, freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, the two best Christmas albums of 2007 as chosen by our rock critic
Ken Tucker.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

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Review: Ken Tucker reviews Darlene Love's album "It's Christmas,
Of Course," and Raul Malo's album "Marshmallow World and Other
Holiday Favorites"
TERRY GROSS, host:

The holiday season always brings a batch of new Christmas albums to pick
through. Our rock critic Ken Tucker has found the two he thinks are the best:
Darlene Love's "It's Christmas, Of Course," and Raul Malo's "Marshmallow World
and Other Holiday Favorites."

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. DARLENE LOVE: (Singing)
Bells will be ringing that glad, glad news.
Oh, what a Christmas to have the blues.
My baby's gone, I have no friends
To wish me greetings once again.
Choirs will be singing...

(End of soundbite)

KEN TUCKER: Darlene Love, the former Phil @ Specter girl group singer, shakes
the rafters of David Letterman's talk show when she makes her annual
appearance singing "Christmas, Baby, Please Come Home." That hot chestnut
isn't on her new collection called "It's Christmas, Of Course," but Darlene
Love fills this one with radiant rhythm and blues holiday tunes such as this
cover of James Brown's "Santa Claus, Go Straight to the Ghetto."

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. LOVE: (Singing)
Santa Claus, go straight to the ghetto,
Hitch up your reindeer, ha,
go straight to the ghetto.
Santa Claus, go straight to the ghetto
Fill every stocking you find,
Kids are going to love you so.
Ho!
People...

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: The interesting thing about a singer like Love is that she is,
to some extent, a great voice captive to her musical arrangements. Take for
example Christmas all over again, which features a terrific vocal but would
have benefited from a slower tempo and something other than the rather tinny
electric guitar behind her.

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. LOVE: (Singing)
Well, it's Christmas time again,
Decorations all hung by the fire.
Everybody's singing,
All the bells are ringing out,
And it's Christmas
All over again.
Yeah, again.
A distant...

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: Meanwhile, Raul Malo, former lead singer of the Mavericks and
now a solo act, has put out a Christmas record that's in the spirit of the
best such efforts. It's both playful and sincere, celebratory and a little
rueful.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. RAUL MALO: (Singing)
It's a marshmallow world in the winter
when the snow comes to cover the ground.
It's the time for play.
It's a whipped cream day.
I wait for it the whole year round.

Those are marshmallow clouds being friendly
In the arms of the evergreen trees.
And the sun is red
like a pumpkin head.
It's shining so your nose won't freeze.

Oh the world....

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: Malo offers a jazzy version of "White Christmas," a superfluous
Elvis impersonation on "Blue Christmas," and manages to make "Silent Night"
something other than solemn. But on the album's high point, he lifts Bobby
Vee's 1962 recording of "A Not So Merry Christmas" to a whole new level of
accomplishemnt.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. MALO: (Singing)
A not so merry Christmas I'm going to spend this year
A not so merry Christmas though you've a kiss for Christmas cheer
A year ago December you were here to understand
A year ago remember you were here to hold my hand
Mistletoe and holly...

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: Now that's a song worth hearing anytime of year. A few months
ago Malo put out an album of adult contemporary standards called "After Hours"
that sounded as though he was @channeling Dean Martin on an off night. In
fact, Dino recorded the title song of this album "Marshmallow World." It
sometimes seems as though Malo doesn't know what to do with his beautiful
instrument, but until he figures out his next move, this Christmas album will
do just fine.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is editor at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
Darlene Love's, "It's Christmas, Of Course," and Raul Malo's "Marshmallow
World and Other Holiday Favorites."

You can download podcasts of our show on our Web site, freshair.npr.org.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. MALO: (Singing)
I'll be home for Christmas,
You can count on me.
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents on the tree.
Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light gleams.
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams.

(End of soundbite)
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