Civil War in Libya

[Adrian II]

Look beyond the West and every succesful non European nation is a western style democracy. America, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, India, Brazil [..]

It is interesting though that islamic countries usually are not doing worse than their non-islamic neighbours. Islam is often blamed for the nefarious effects of cultural traditions older than islam, colonial heritage, rampant tribalism, protracted wars and civil wars, and imperialist meddling.

Anatole Lieven makes the point eloquently in his book Pakistan, A Hard Country. Instead of copying its introduction by hand, let me copy and paste part of a review in The Guardian:

Certainly, an unblinkered vision of South Asia would feature a country whose fanatically ideological government in 1998 conducted nuclear tests, threatened its neighbour with all-out war and, four years later, presided over the massacre of 2,000 members of a religious minority. Long embattled against secessionist insurgencies on its western and eastern borders, the "flailing" state of this country now struggles to contain a militant movement in its heartland. It is also where thousands of women are killed every year for failing to bring sufficient dowry and nearly 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in the previous decade.

Needless to say, the country described above is not Pakistan but India, which, long feared to be near collapse, has revamped its old western image through what the American writer David Rieff calls the most "successful national re-branding" and "cleverest PR campaign" by a political and business establishment since "Cool Britannia" in the 1990s. Pakistan, on the other hand, seems to have lost all control over its international narrative.

AII