Book Review Manhunt: The Ten – Year Search for Bin Laden – From 9/11 to Abbotabad

Books and Authors | 26th August, 2012

 

 

 

Reviewed by Nadir Hassan 

If there is one subject on which Peter Bergen is a specialist it is Osama bin Laden. In 1997, he interviewed the Al Qaeda leader for CNN, becoming the first Western journalist to do so. Since then, working for both CNN and the New America Foundation, Bergen has become known as one of the few people who were sounding early and consistent alarms about bin Laden and for being extremely knowledgeable about the terrorist leader.

Perhaps it is Bergen’s outsized reputation that makes his new book Manhunt, an account of the decade-plus search for OBL, a triumph of access. In researching this book, Bergen was allowed to view US government files about the OBL hunt before they were declassified and he was given unprecedented access by authorities in Pakistan to bin Laden’s final home in Abbottabad before it was razed to the ground. This exclusivity lends an air of atmosphere and authenticity to many scenes in Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad.

This access on its own, however, is not enough to paper over some holes in the book. The portion which covers the actual US Navy SEAL’s attack on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad relies heavily, and almost exclusively, on an account reported by Nicholas Schmidle in The New Yorker. Many questions were raised about the veracity of Schmidle’s reporting, including the fact that his breathless, minute-by-minute descriptions of what the SEALs were thinking, doing and feeling were not actually based on any interviews with the SEALs themselves.

Part of the problem with Manhunt is something over which the author had no control. The search for Osama bin Laden lasted for well over a decade and, for much of that time, there simply wasn’t much progress at all. This makes the first half of the book quite dull. Bergen might perhaps have been better off acknowledging the glacial pace of the hunt rather than trying to maintain an air of suspense and impending thrills. It might not have made for a book that was particularly lively but it would have rung far truer. About the only interesting revelation in these sections is the prevalent sexism in the CIA of the late 1990s and how that may have caused senior officers to dismiss breakthroughs by women analysts.

Bergen’s account also throws up some contradictions and assumptions that remain unanswered. Through his interaction with intelligence officials in Pakistan and US government figures we learn that OBL simply wasn’t much of a threat in his latter years. He was disconnected from the rest of Al Qaeda and was increasingly frustrated by his marginalised role. Bin Laden spent his days dreaming up pointless schemes, like rebranding Al Qaeda by giving it a new name and obsessively reviewing the resumes of the militant outfit’s commanders.

This is mirrored by the fixation of the Obama administration and the CIA on hunting down Osama. Obviously, at the time, it was not known just how impotent Osama had become but,

even in retrospect, Bergen doesn’t question whether the Bush administration might just have struck the right formula in not attaching too much importance to a lone, symbolic figure. For Bergen, it is a given that tracking down Osama was so vital that the cost and risks did not matter.

Bergen’s questionable assumptions also lead him to ignore other potential costs of the Abbottabad raid. He lays out, with painstaking detail, just how circumstantial the evidence of OBL being in the compound really was. Pretty much all the CIA had to go on was that a Pakistani courier for Al Qaeda, known as “Kuwaiti” because of where he was brought up, would deliver messages to the compound. They also knew that one of those living in the compound was a tall man, whom they nicknamed “the walker”. On the basis of these two facts, President Obama was told that there was, at best, a 50 per cent chance that “the walker” was Osama bin Laden.

That was enough for Obama to consider the options of either launching a drone attack in Abbottabad or sending in a team to kill him. As it happens, the story turned out well enough for the Americans. Imagine for a second, though, that the man inside had not been OBL. Bergen doesn’t ponder the question of how a US attack on Pakistani soil would have fatally undermined the war against militancy if the target had turned out to be the wrong one. It is easy now to praise Obama for his courage but there is a thin line separating courage from foolhardiness.

Bergen’s analysis of possible Pakistani collusion in hiding OBL is similarly superficial. He raises the question and then simply declares it unlikely and is done with the matter.

Bergen’s Manhunt, then, is a mixed bag. It may prove to be the definitive account of the chase for Osama, mixing as it does unprecedented access and an amalgamation of other journalistic accounts. But its thoroughness should not distract from its analytical weaknesses. Future writers would do well to use his account as an initial source to explore more deeply the questions raised by the US obsession over this one man who came to be seen as the embodiment of evil.

Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad

(Terrorism)

By Peter Bergen

Crown Publishers, US

ISBN 0307955575

384pp. Rs1,995

Influence of classic literature on writers declining, study claim

Modern authors are stylistically influenced by their contemporaries rather than writers from the 18th and 19th centuries, according to word-frequency study of classic literature.

 

‘I no longer have the patience for long philosophical digressions’ … Lionel Shriver. Photograph: David Azia/AP

Harold Bloom famously dubbed it the “anxiety of influence” (paywall): the effect which the literary canon has on writers. Less today than it did in the past, according to a mathematical study which analysed thousands of works written over the last 500 years.

American mathematicians, led by the chair of Dartmouth Collegemathematics department Professor Daniel Rockmore, set out to investigate “large-scale” trends in literary style. Using digitised works in the Project Gutenberg library, they processed 7,733 works from 537 authors written after the year 1550, were looking for the frequency at which 307 “content-free” words – such as “of”, “at” and “by” – appeared. They called these words the “syntactic glue” of language: “words that carry little meaning on their own but form the bridge between words that convey meaning”, and thus “provide a useful stylistic fingerprint” for authorship.

“When we consider content-free word frequencies from a large number of authors and works over a long period of time, we can ask questions related to temporal trends in similarity”, they write in their new paper,“Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature”.

After finding that authors of any given period are stylistically similar to their contemporaries, they also discovered that the stylistic influence of the past is decreasing. While authors in the 18th and 19th centuries are still influenced by previous centuries, authors writing in the late 20th century are instead “strongly influenced” by writers from their own decade. “The so-called ‘anxiety of influence’, whereby authors are understood in terms of their response to canonical precursors, is becoming an ‘anxiety of impotence’, in which the past exerts a diminishing stylistic influence on the present,” they write. This could, they suggest, be explained by the modernist movement, in which authors “reject their immediate stylistic predecessors yet remain a part of a dominant movement that included many of their contemporaries”.

There are also, they point out, more books available to read these days. “One hypothesis is that there is so much more to read now and more kinds of ‘important’ work that if we believe that style is influenced by what one reads, then it is less likely that people generally devote the preponderance of their reading to the older ‘classics‘,” said Rockmore. “This is not unrelated to the acknowledged gradual diminishment of a canon in literature. If one believes that writing style is significantly related to spoken language, then it might be traced to the rapid evolution of that form of communication.”

The paper only covers works written up to 1952, because of copyright issues, but Rockmore believes the decreasing influence of the canon will only have continued in the authors of today. The Orange prize-winning novelist Lionel Shriver agreed this was probably true in her case – and suggested it was likely to apply to her contemporaries as well. “About all I can do is confess that while I myself devoured classics in my teens and 20s – even 30s, come to think of it – I now read contemporary fiction almost exclusively,” she said. “I feel ambivalent about this evolution, but between reviewing, blurbing occasionally, and keeping up with what’s out there on general principle I don’t often get around to touching base with the literary canon. When I have tried to, say, reread a Dostoevsky novel, I’ve discovered that I don’t have the patience any longer – for the long philosophical digressions, for example. I bet I’m not alone in this reduced tolerance for the stylistic traditions of the past.”

Rockmore said he hoped to talk to literary colleagues to investigate if the mathematicians’ formulae could be applied to literary criticism. “I do believe it is an interesting approach to literary analysis,” he said. “We are hopeful that we can engage some colleagues expert in those areas to find what the interesting questions are. That is a necessary first step and we look forward to collaborations to those ends.”

Article from: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/may/14/writers-no-longer-influenced-by-classics

Books are a tonic for the Brain

Reading is not just another leisurely activity or a way of brushing up your literacy skills and factual knowledge – it acts as a tonic for the brain too.

Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield suggests that reading helps to expand attention spans in kids. “Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end – a structure that encourages our brains to think in sequence, to link cause, effect and significance,” she says.

“It is essential to learn this skill as a small child, while the brain has more plasticity, which is why it’s so important for parents to read to their children. The more we do it, the better we get at it,” Greenfield added.

Reading can enrich our relationships by increasing our understanding of other cultures and helping us learn to empathise, the Daily Mail reports.

“In a computer game, you might have to rescue a princess, but you don’t care about her, you just want to win,” explains Greenfield. “But a princess in a book has a past, present and future, she has connections and motivations. We can relate to her. We see the world through her eyes.”

John Stein, emeritus professor of neuroscience at Magdalen College, Oxford, says reading is far from a passive activity. “Reading exercises the whole brain,” he explains. Reading stories to children will help their brains develop the ability to analyse the cause, effect and significance of events

In 2009, a brain-imaging study in the US showed that reading about landscapes, sounds, smells and tastes, activates brain areas tied to these experiences in real life, creating new neural pathways. Simply stated, our brains simulate real experiences, which doesn’t happen when you’re watching TV or playing computer games.

In 2009, University of Sussex researchers showed how six minutes of reading can slash stress levels by more than two-thirds, more than listening to music or going out for a walk.

http://books.hindustantimes.com/2012/08/books-are-tonic-for-the-brain/

Book Review: Fifty Shades of Grey via @etribune

By Noman Ansari

Published: August 26, 2012

 

The book is classified as erotic fiction, where I am sure the word ‘erotic’ is used in the loosest sense of the word. PHOTO: PUBLICITY

Which series has sold over 40 million copies worldwide and overtaken Harry Potter as well as The Da Vinci Code to become the fastest selling paperback in countries like the United Kingdom? Fifty Shades of Grey, of course.

The book is classified as erotic fiction, where I am sure the word ‘erotic’ is used in the loosest sense of the word. If erotic passages are meant to induce an almost impossible combination of disbelief, cringing and inadvertent hilarity then, by all means, Fifty Shades of Grey is the most erotic novel ever written. Frankly, until now, I did not think it was possible to wince, laugh, and grind my teeth at same time.

There is also no doubt that the book is fictional because it requires a suspension of disbelief that I believe the human mind isn’t dull enough to manage. I am not sure who the 40 million people who purchased this book are, but either the US is experimenting with fresher ways to torture those being held for terrorism or Fifty Shades of Grey is really popular with the stoner crowd.

The book is told from the perspective of a 22-year-old college student Anastasia “Ana” Steele who, while doing a favour for her friend Katherine Kavanagh, meets 27-year-old businessman Christian Grey and they develop a mutual attraction. After a longwinded courtship, they eventually become involved in a more physical relationship. Initially, their physical interactions are limited to regular sexual play. Ana, who has little sexual experience, not even solo, finds Christian irresistible, and through him reaches a sexual awakening. But things get out of control when they turn to BDSM.

To his credit, Christian is very receptive to Ana’s physical needs and is both attentive and successful at sexually pleasing Ana. Unfortunately, as a male reader, that’s the only positive or realistic thing I can say about this character.

Other than that, what Fifty Shades of Grey has taught me is that I would have to be incredibly handsome, in peak physical condition, a billionaire, a philanthropist, able to fluently speak foreign languages, be trained at flying aircrafts, be the world’s best lover and, on top of all that, be impressively endowed, to attract Ana. Yes, I’d essentially have to be Batman.

But while the depiction of Christian Grey as some sort of superhuman can be perfectly acceptable as a woman’s fantasy, his characterisation makes him quite unlikable. Not only is Christian emotionally distant, rude and gloomy, he is manipulative and borderline psychotic in stalking Ana. And for a man in charge of a huge company, he seems to spend little time actually working.

On the other hand, Ana is even less likable as a highly neurotic and insecure woman, who has never been romantically interested in another person until she found someone like Christian who only appeals to her on a superficial level.

Fifty Shades of Grey is poorly written, and that too to a surprising degree. Twice, I stopped reading to check if I had been duped in my purchase or whether I was reading an authentic eBook. This isn’t surprising given that this first novel in the trilogy by British author EL James began as erotic fan fiction for the Twilight saga.

Aside from the poor characterisation, the author did not do her research properly and used plenty of British colloquialisms that sound odd being spoken by the book’s American characters. Worse still are the words and phrases that repeat themselves with such frequency, including 58 counts of the term ‘inner goddess’, that I wonder if the author set shortcuts for common phrases on her keyboard.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, August 26^th, 2012.

Poet Faraz’s fourth death anniversary today

Published in The Express Tribune, August 25^th, 2012.

Private functions organised to pay tribute to one of the most popular poets in recent times.

ISLAMABAD: The fourth death anniversary of legendary poet Ahmed Faraz will be commemorated on Saturday.

Known for his progressive and romantic poetry, Faraz’s verses were simple and inspired a large number of people not only in Pakistan but all over the world especially the younger generation. The poet was awarded Hilal-e-Imtiaz, Sitara-e-Imtiaz and Hilal-e-Pakistan posthumously. Faraz was arrested for reciting his famous poem criticizing military dictator Ziaul Haq .

After his release, Faraz went into self-exile. He spent six years in Britain, Canada and Europe before returning to Pakistan. Initially, he was appointed Chairman of the Pakistan Academy of Letters and later Managing Director of the National Book Foundation, a position he held for several years.

To pay homage to the poet, the Ahmed Faraz Trust, founded by his son Shibli Faraz, will hold a memorial reference on Saturday in which writers and intellectuals will pay homage to the great poet and participate in Quran khwani along with dua at his mausoleum at the H-8 Graveyard at 11am.

Intellectual and writer  Ashfaq Salim Mirza pointed out that the lack of government initiative to commemorate the poet’s death anniversary was because of Faraz’s take on politics. “Neither democratic governments nor dictatorships were ever happy with Faraz. He believed in progressive ideals who raised his voice against aristocratic rulers, obscurantism and bigotry without fear.”

Mansoor Javaid a close friend of Faraz is also organising an event to remember the poet. According to him, “ Faraz was not only a poet, he was an activist. When women marched against Zia’s regime, Faraz was leading from the front, facing shells and sticks, but he didn’t care.  He was a great man and a great poet.”

He also participated in protests against Musharraf for restoration of democracy in 2007 before his illness.

Whether or not the poet’s death anniversary is officially commemorated, he will always be remembered as the poet of the people.