The News is a leading Pakistani daily, in English, and today it had a scoop—an exclusive interview with President General (that’s his title) Pervez Musharraf. The story, under a headline that stretched across seven columns, included the following passage: “In ...
Author: Peter Maass
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.
Knock Knock
You are caught in a traffic jam in Karachi and a beggar raps on your window. He displays a withered limb or (take your pick) a twitching stump, a bleeding abscess, an arm bent like a question mark, hands with no fingers, a goutish tumor, a cleft lip, a scorched face. The ...
What Is Pakistan Reading?
The following titles are in the display window at London Books, a store in The Point, Karachi’s trendiest shopping mall:
“War of the Ring” by J.R.R. Tolkien
“The Trial of Henry Kissinger” by Christopher Hitchens
“Buddha” by ...
An Intelligent Choice
Just had my first encounter with brain masala. Not a joke. Quite popular in Karachi, and not at all bad; soft in texture and gentle in taste, much like tofu, though high in cholesterol, I’m told.
A Digital Leap Forward
Most technological breakthroughs are not breakthroughs in all ways; there’s often a drawback of one sort or another. As has been noted widely, PDAs are great but they don’t have the permanence of datebooks. A few years ago I leafed through my grandfather’s ...
The Slim-Fast Indicator
I walked into a drugstore in Islamabad yesterday and noticed, in a proud stack by the cash register, a dozen cans of Slim-Fast. A few yards away, on the street, was a montage of Pakistani misery—street kids, homeless men, hunger. This might be an economic indicator in ...
The Answer Is Yes
The headline over an opinion piece in The New York Times asks a good question: “Is America Abandoning Afghanistan?” Several thousand U.S. soldiers are in Afghanistan but the country is ...
DeLillo Lite
I arrived in Islamabad two days ago, and the 16-hour journey from New York gave me the time to begin reading Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” ...
The Angolan Connection
A new book is revising the conventional wisdom about U.S. intervention in Angola during the Cold War. The book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, quotes a former CIA station chief ...
IWPR Extends The Brand
The Institute for War and Peace Reporting is an obligatory stop for the Balkan news crowd; its reports are more detailed than anything else on the Web and written by journalists from the region. IWPR is the only ...