Cuando me di cuenta que era negro

¿Qué cuando descubrí que era negro? Fue precisamente en el mes de agosto del 2007. Fue gracias a Emil Soler. No fue que por fin me mire en un espejo. Trabajamos en una obra de teatro Llamada el Carrusel. En este carrusel simbólico, se repetían las mismas escenas de racismo cotidiano, y al final el personaje principal se preguntaba lleno de furia interna “¿por qué no se burlan de los racistas?”.

Desde joven he crecido viendo a mi madre avergonzada por lo que llama su “pelo malo” (sabrá dios que le hiso ese pelo a alguien), desde joven crecí oyendo cosas como ‘negrito’, ‘te ríes y pareces un monito’, ‘negro sucio’, etc. etc. etc. (ya los conocen. No hay porque enumerarlos todos, la lista es larga). Sin embargo, como joven puertorriqueño común y corriente, entendía que esto no era racismo. Era sencillamente bromas. “Aquí no es como en EEUU que hay racismo. Aquí no somos racistas” siempre nos dicen. No fue hasta que llegue a la universidad que me di cuenta que ese tipo de conducta tiene nombre y apellido. No es cierto. No somos el resultado del feliz y armonioso mestizaje de tres ‘razas’ que se unieron para formar una nueva o algo así. Vale la pena destacar el hecho de que en este país celebramos con mucho júbilo niños de tez bien clara y ojos claros. En ocasiones se seleccionan las parejas pensando en esto. Recuerdo como mi abuela me dice todavía “nene, tú te vieras mejor si tuvieras los ojos azules de tu padre, y su pelo y su color de piel). Me atrevo a apostar que mi madre se enamoro de él estrictamente por eso, claro, no importa que se divorciaron al año, el objetivo siempre fue mejorar la raza.

Hablemos del imaginario que prevalece en el día a día de los puertorriqueños(as). ¿Donde caen aquellos de complejidad mulata o mestiza, cuando nuestros estudios sociales ignoran o excluyen la categoría ‘afro-caribeña’ como categoría de estudio? Este ideal de piel, que mientras más claro, más atractivo, mientras más lacio el cabello, mejor, (este mismo que lleva particularmente a muchas mujeres a gastar cantidades ridículas de dinero a querer tenerlo como lo ven en la publicidad), este mismo imaginario, es el que nos lleva a vernos en el censo como que somos casi 80% blancos lo cual es matemáticamente imposible y absurdo (incluiría las del 2010 pero no las tengo disponibles). Fíjense otra cosa y es que el tema de la raza se estudia de la misma manera parcializada que en EEUU. Por allá, la raza significa grupos enteros y color de piel. Sin embargo, por acá el tema de la raza se reduce a características fenotípicas (labios, narices, cabello). De igual manera, aquellos que creen en la lucha por derechos raciales, erróneamente todavía creen que son asuntos que se pueden atender con marchas y con figuras de los 60’s y 70’s de ese mismo país, me refiero concretamente a Malcolm X y a Martin Luther King. No, nunca despreciaría sus aportaciones para todos, negros o no. Si no que hoy, a casi 50 años de sus muertes, el racismo a evolucionado. Ya no luchamos por derechos civiles. Aunque estos se den o no, están en papel y los que no ven un problema con la raza, no van a fijarse mas allá de que estén escritos en un papel que supuestamente lo aguante todo.

Sucede que la raza hoy por hoy, se aborda desde la educación. Educar aquellos que la utilizan como comedia, que se enajenan de sus efectos bajo la excusa de la risa y se enajenan del efecto que esta causa (“¿Te ofendió? ¡Ese es tu problema!”, “Eso depende de la persona”, “Eres tú que esta acomplejado”). El racismo en Puerto Rico lo abordamos de otra forma. Significa rechazar a alguien por ser de otro país. Casi exclusivamente rechazar por ser de la Republica Dominicana. No podemos pretender abordar los males sociales, aumentando los policías en las calles mientras reproducimos los mismos discursos y conductas que nos han llevado a los problemas. Sean de género, violencia, discrimen, prejuicio, etc.

En el 2007, descubrí que lo que sentí y lo que me dijeron cuando tenía mi afro, no era sencillamente chistes necios y que “tenía que aguantar presión” como si la culpa fuera mía de los agresores irrespetuosos. Casi en su totalidad fueron mujeres que bromeaban sobre mi higiene en mi cabello. “¡Nene lávate ese pelo porque tienes piojos!” Ya no les tengo resentimiento. Ya sé que no son bromas sin sentido. Todo eso responde a algo mayor. Tiene nombre y apellido. Se llama Racismo Sistémico. Ahora entiendo lo que sintió mi madre creciendo. Como mujer y negra, su peso fue doble. Ahora entiendo mi familia y su generación que aunque digan que antes se respetaba, eso es mentira. Nunca le respetaron su decencia. Ya reconozco que trataron de borrar nuestra historia pero no lo lograron. Mientras existan seres consientes de su identidad, no podrán. Hoy se que no soy solamente “trigueño”. Mi madre lo es al igual que mi abuela (materna) lo es. Y la mayoría, aunque no lo sepa, lo son. Somos Afro-Caribeños y así nos nació la consciencia.

Los invito a que lean el trabajo de la organización Ilé, entre otros, para que vean la lucha en contra de la ignorancia que algunos llevan en este país. 

http://webs.oss.cayey.upr.edu/iii/sites/webs.oss.cayey.upr.edu.iii/files/u3/articulo_violencia_racista_IG.pdf

Could this be the end of America's economic supremacy?

By DOMINIC SANDBROOK

Last updated at 7:39 AM on 2nd August 2011

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For now, the American debt crisis is over. After a last-minute deal between President Barack Obama and his Republican opponents, Congress has agreed to raise the American debt ceiling by more than two trillion dollars, allowing the U.S. to keep borrowing money to fund the country’s operations.

To many of us here in Britain, the dispute seemed a bizarre exercise in brinkmanship, with posturing politicians taking the world’s largest economy to the verge of default. 

Had the Americans been forced to default, the result would probably have been a second global recession, spelling disaster for thousands of British businesses and piling agony upon agony for hard-pressed families.

Global concern: Employees of a foreign exchange firm in Tokyo watch TV reports that President Barack Obama had announced a US debt limit deal

But the truth is that although disaster has been averted for now, the U.S. debt crisis has been a troubling sign of seismic change. After leading the world for more than a century, a shining advertisement for capitalist values, the American economy is in deep trouble. 

Seventy years ago, the publisher Henry Luce claimed that the 20th  century would be remembered as the ‘American Century’. By and large, he was right.

 

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Having caught up with Britain in the dying years of the Victorian age, the U.S. had forged ahead in the first decades of the new century. 

By 1941, when Luce wrote those words, not even the Great Depression could disguise the fact that the U.S. was by far the world’s most powerful and productive economy. 

When Pearl Harbour forced America into World War II, its sheer industrial capacity tipped the balance in favour of the Allies. With U.S. GDP bigger than Germany, Italy and Japan combined, the Americans poured forth tanks, aircraft and ammunition. 

Added to British spirit and Russian blood, their economic muscle proved irresistible. 

Winning the war was expensive: by the end of the war, total American public debt had surged to some 120 per cent of GDP. Alone among the combatants, though, the U.S. had emerged richer and more prosperous than ever. 

In the next few decades, the heyday of U.S. power and prosperity, the economy boomed. Under Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, jobs were plentiful; inflation and interest rates were low; unemployment was no more than nominal. 

And through it all, successive administrations quietly paid off their wartime loans, so that by the end of the Seventies the total U.S. debt was less than 40 per cent of GDP.

Total war: Gen. Dwight D Eisenhower gives the order of the Day, "Full victory-nothing else" to paratroopers in England, just before the invasion of Normandy in June 1944

Across the world, the U.S. was recognised as by far the planet’s dominant economic power. At its peak in the Fifties, it produced a quarter of the world’s exports, half the world’s steel and one in every two cars, putting it far ahead of competitors such as Britain, Japan and West Germany.

Its value pegged to gold, the American dollar was the cornerstone of the world economic system, its purchasing power about ten times higher than it is today. And from televisions to cars, from Hollywood films to the latest teenage fashions, it was American consumerism that set the pace for the rest of the planet.

By the end of the Seventies, however, the first cracks in this hegemony had started to appear. 

Fattened by decades of affluence, the American people shrank from the tough choices they needed to make to retain their position as top dog.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won power by promising to cut taxes and increase defence spending — a combination that meant he would have to borrow billions. And by the time he left office, the U.S. had gone from being the world’s biggest creditor to the world’s biggest debtor, its total debt having surged from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion.

To his credit, Bill Clinton used the boom years of the Nineties to pay off some of Reagan’s deficits. But now the American people had had a taste of debt, and they decided they rather liked it. 

Prudent: President Clinton at a NATO summit in 1999 used his presidency to pay off public debt

When George W. Bush became President in 2001, he set out to prove that the U.S. really could have it all. Despite launching two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, he slashed taxes by almost $2 trillion, gambling that growth would pay for itself.

He hurled money around like confetti at a wedding, with spending funded not by tax receipts but by rampant, reckless borrowing. 

The statistics make horrific reading: in eight years, Bush drove up the national debt by more than 100 per cent, sending it well over $11 trillion. 

And although Barack Obama lambasted his predecessor for creating a situation in which the U.S. government ‘can’t pay its own bills’, debt has continued to soar. Last year, the total was $13.5 trillion, and by 2021 it is predicted to reach an eye-watering $26 trillion. 

As has often been pointed out, if this was any other country, the IMF would be at the door demanding tax rises and spending cuts. 

Feckless: President George W. Bush's spending was funded not by tax receipts but by rampant, reckless borrowing

There is simply no way that the U.S. can continue to have the world’s biggest military and European levels of social security while paying only about 24 per cent of its output in tax —  far less than the 40 per cent we pay here in Britain. 

Behind these figures lies the disease that has afflicted so many great powers through history: complacency. After decades of having it all, many Americans refuse to believe that they simply must slash their debts. 

Faced with the choice of cutting spending or raising taxes, they prefer to pretend the dilemma will go away. 

The results are becoming clear. Hobbled by massive debts, the U.S. economy posted dreadful growth figures for the first half of 2011. Output remains poor, house prices have collapsed, and some states — notably California — have managed their budgets so poorly they make Greece look a model of self-discipline. 

Meanwhile, neither President Obama nor his Republican opponents have emerged with any credit. At a moment of supreme economic uncertainty, they have conducted themselves like squabbling schoolboys. 

And when contemplating the bickering midgets in Washington, it is no wonder so many Americans have turned their backs on mainstream politics, either sinking into apathy or flocking to the banners of the eccentric and fervently nationalistic Tea Party. 

But there is a crucial international dimension to all this. The single biggest holder of American public debt is the Chinese government, which owns some 26 per cent of U.S. Treasury securities (a total of $1.16 trillion worth).  

Control: The Chinese government has a view as to how the world should be run - and their power is growing

The Chinese were unsurprisingly appalled by the pitiful dithering in Washington over raising the debt ceiling. But the fact remains that by continuing to throw money around without raising enough in taxes, the Americans have handed their biggest international rivals a stranglehold over their economy. 

Many in Washington fear that China could wield its massive U.S. debt holdings as a weapon to influence American government foreign policy.

At the root of all this is sheer hubris. From the Eighties onwards, the American people have refused to accept that to keep their status as the world’s most powerful economy, they need to make tough choices over the size of the government budget and levels of taxes. 

Instead of working hard and consuming less, they have allowed themselves to grow fat and lazy. They’ve racked up debts as if there were no tomorrow, forgetting that one day those dues must be paid. 

No wonder that many observers think this will be the century of China and India. For although the U.S. may  hold what looks a commanding economic lead, we in  Britain know better than anyone that such leads can quickly disappear.

It is no exaggeration to say that the American economy is at a crossroads. 

If Washington somehow managed to conquer its addiction to debt, then the great productive capacities and inventiveness of the American continent would once again be unleashed. 

But the spectacle of posturing politicians on Capitol Hill offers few grounds for optimism. What is far more likely  is that we will go through all this again, and again, and again, while all the time the great engine of Chinese growth roars unhindered. 

At some future moment, the American people will look around and wonder where it all went wrong. But by then, of course, it will be too late.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2021313/US-debt-crisis-Could-end-Americas-economic-supremacy.html#ixzz1h3QrXSFd

Censorship of war casualties in the US

Opinion

Censorship of war casualties in the US

US mainstream media and the public's willful ignorance is to blame for lack of knowledge about true cost of wars. Ted Rall Last Modified: 28 Jul 2011 11:32

The US mainstream media has tended to shy away from showing images that accurately depict the reality of war [EPA] Why is it so easy for political leaders in the US to convince ordinary citizens to support war? How is it that, after that initial enthusiasm has given away to fatigue and disgust, the reaction is mere disinterest rather than righteous rage? Even when the reasons given for taking the US to war were proven to have been not only wrong, but brazenly fraudulent - as in Iraq, which hadn't possessed chemical weapons since 1991 - no one is called to account. The United States claims to be a shining beacon of democracy to the world. And many of the citizens of the world believe it. But democracy is about responsiveness and accountability - the responsiveness of political leaders to an engaged and informed electorate, which holds that leadership class accountable for its mistakes and misdeeds. How to explain Americans' acquiescence in the face of political leaders who repeatedly lead it into illegal, geopolitically disastrous and economically devastating wars of choice? The dynamics of US public opinion have changed dramatically since the 1960s, when popular opposition to the Vietnam War coalesced into an antiestablishmentarian political and cultural movement that nearly toppled the government - and led to a series of sweeping social reforms whose contemporary ripples include the recent move to legalise marriage between members of the same sex. Why the difference? Numerous explanations have been offered for the vanishing of protesters from the streets of American cities. First and foremost, fewer people know someone who has been killed. The death rate for US troops has fallen dramatically, from 58,000 in Vietnam to a total of 6,000 for Iraq and Afghanistan. Many point to the replacement of conscripts by volunteer soldiers, many of whom originate from the working class, which is by definition less influential. Congressman Charles Rangel, who represents the predominantly African-American neighbourhood of Harlem in New York, is the chief political proponent of this theory. He has proposed legislation to restore the military draft, which ended in the 1970s, four times since 9/11. "The test for Congress, particularly for those members who support the war, is to require all who enjoy the benefits of our democracy to contribute to the defence of the country. All of America's children should share the risk of being placed in harm's way. The reason is that so few families have a stake in the war which is being fought by other people's children," Rangel said in March 2011. War is extraordinarily costly in cash as well as in lives. By 2009, the cost of invading and occupying Iraq had exceeded $1 trillion. During the 1960s and early 1970s conservatives unmoved by the human toll in Vietnam were appalled by the cost to taxpayers. "The myth that capitalism thrives on war has never been more fallacious," arguedTime magazine on July 13, 1970. Bear in mind, Time leaned to the far right editorially. "While the Nixon administration battles war-induced inflation, corporate profits are tumbling and unemployment runs high. Urgent civilian needs are being shunted aside to satisfy the demands of military budgets. Businessmen are virtually unanimous in their conviction that peace would be bullish, and they were generally cheered by last week's withdrawal from Cambodia." Aware of this concern among the business class that finances the Republican Party, President George W Bush kept the lion's share of spending on the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq "off the books," relying on a new accounting gimmick - funding the "war on terror" from supplemental and emergency appropriations. As of 9/11 the Pentagon budget no longer included the price of its primary activity, waging war. Yes, the wars of the 21st century add to the national debt. But they don't add to the number reported by the business press - the annual budget deficit. Inattentiveness is a politician's best friend. Out of sight, out of mind What about the bodies? During the 1960s and early 1970s television viewers and newspaper readers in the US were regularly treated to images from the front that prompted even the most fervent proponents of the war to question themselves. "A stream of media reports and images describing spectacular carnage suggested that the United States was embroiled in a brutal, dehumanising struggle. For example, newspapers and television programs across the country carried gruesome images of the South Vietnamese national police chief executing an NLF prisoner with a shot to the head," writes Mark Atwood Lawrence in his book The Vietnam War: A Concise International History. The global war on terror, which under Obama has expanded from Afghanistan and Iraq to include Libya, an expanded secret drone war in Pakistan, as well semi-covert wars in Yemen and Somalia, obviously includes countless similar images "on the ground", in the parlance of US television analysts. ("On the ground" = "in real life.") US military actions in Libya, Yemen and Somalia barely register. Most in the US aren't even aware that they exist or, for that matter, where they are. According to a March 2011 poll, only 58 per cent of Americans knew that Libya is in North Africa. Jonathan Schell, writing in The Nation, recently marvelled at the Obama administration's argument that it did not need congressional approval for war against Libya because US forces were not substantially at risk in a campaign fought from high in the air and with drones. "War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we die," he wrote. "When only they, the Libyans, die, it is something else for which there is as yet apparently no name. When they attack, it is war. When we attack, it is not." Iraq and Afghanistan remain "real" wars in the traditional sense. Thousands of American soldiers have been killed. Tens of thousands have been severely wounded. But images from these "real" wars have been studiously sanitised to the point that a well-informed news consumer could be excused for thinking that their country's latest wars are virtually bloodless. "Pictures [of dead or dying American troops] have rarely been seen in recent years from Iraq and Afghanistan," acknowledged The New York Times in September 2009. "This was not the case during the Vietnam War." The Times published only a handful of photos of dead and dying soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Compare that with other countries, where pictures of the war dead routinely appear in print and on the air. The current atmosphere of censorship is unprecedented, even by the comparably squeamish standards of the US media. According to Professor Gail Buckland, who studies and teaches photo history at Cooper Union in New York, far more photos of dead US soldiers appeared in newspapers during the 1861-65 Civil War than have since 2001. The Bush administration censored the images of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base, a dignified rite that was a familiar sight on the evening news during Vietnam. Obama lifted Bush's coffin ban in 2009, but it made little difference. After the media showed a few such photos - to illustrate the story about the lifting of the ban - they disappeared. Self-censorship, it seems, is as powerful as the government variety. Media consumers saw thousands of images of dead and dying combatants, both American and Vietnamese, 40 years ago. Most were supplied by war photographers embedded with US troop units. But today's "embeds" are required to submit their work to military censors for approval and transmission. One reporter returned from the 1991 Gulf War to find that none of his photos had been sent to his employer. War correspondents in Vietnam were given "carte blanche", Don McCullin, who covered Indochina for the Sunday Times of London told The New York Times. "Vietnam was a total free-for-all," confirms Dirck Halstead, who ran the UPI wire service's photo bureau in Saigon in 1965-66. "Our job was to be there to take photographs of whatever happened in front of us. Our core mission was to record history." History changed public opinion. "As picture editor of The New York Times during the Vietnam War, I argued for prominent usage of the pictures by the AP's Eddie Adams of the execution of a Vietcong suspect, for the publication of the photo by the AP's Nick Ut of a naked Cambodian girl running from napalm, of the picture by John Filo of the shooting of a student at Kent State by National Guardsmen," says John G Morris. "If those pictures helped turned the world against continuation of the Vietnam War, I am glad." Where are the pictures? What pictures will turn Americans against their nation's wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen or Somalia? Atrocities committed - and often photographed - by US military forces have also been thoroughly sanitised from the public narrative. Thousands of digital photos of the 2004 torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were taken as souvenirs by the torturers, US occupation troops. This is a US government description of one trove: "A review of all the computer media submitted to this office revealed a total of 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse, 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse, 660 images of adult pornography, 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts, 20 images of a soldier with a swastika drawn between his eyes, 37 images of military working dogs being used in abuse of detainees and 125 images of questionable acts." But only a small fraction of these have been disseminated in the United States. The porn - which supposedly depicts US soldiers engaged in sexual acts with Iraqi prisoners - never appeared in any American media outlet. When President Obama refused to release the entire Abu Ghraib dossier to the media, no less a luminary than New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch defended censorship: "Who are we trying to fool, if not ourselves, if we pretend that we need more photos to know what has been going on?" Americans need something. That's certain. Because they definitely do not know what is going on. In 2009 a US "kill team" operating near Kandahar was accused of "killing innocent civilians for sport and mutilating their bodies by cutting off fingers and ripping out teeth to keep as trophies," in the words of a reporter for the UKGuardian. Investigators discovered some 4,000 photographs documenting these horrific acts. The German weekly Der Spiegel, citing US and NATO concerns that publication of the trophy photos could spark riots in Afghanistan as the result of "a new Abu Ghraib", ran three of the suppressed images. The feared riots never materialised. None of the pictures appeared in the United States. The story lasted one day. When it comes to the carnage of war, even a simple count of civilian casualties is hard to come by for Americans trying to find out what's going on in wars being fought in their name, by their fellow citizens, using weapons financed by their tax funds. In yet another marked departure from Vietnam, when the Department of Defense obsessively attempted to count the number of military and civilian dead on both sides of the conflict, the US claims to no longer track the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon complained about the famous Lancet study which found that more than a million Iraqis had perished since 2003, but had no numbers with which to counter it. Then there's the muddling of the few numbers that are available. US media outlets reported that civilian casualties were up 15 per cent in Afghanistan this year - but parsed the blame. Civilian deaths caused by anti-government forces, they said, were up 28 per cent. Pro-government forces, on the other hand, were responsible for nine per cent fewer dead civilians. Left unsaid: if not for the US and NATO, the war might have been over years ago. Americans in denial Now the US is increasingly reliant on remotely controlled aerial vehicles, or armed "drone" planes, to fight its wars. How many civilians get killed by US drone attacks in places like Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province? "The overall numbers are important because they would allow the public to assess whether drones are a new, more precise method of exerting air power," Salon quotes Jonathan Manes of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the US government to compel it to reveal its casualty count. The Pentagon denies keeping track. "While each drone strike appears to be subject to an individual assessment after the fact, there is no total number of casualties compiled," says the ACLU. "Moreover, information contained in the individual assessments is classified - making it impossible for the public to learn how many civilians have been killed overall." Dead and wounded Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Somalis, Yemenis and Libyans have been expunged from American popular culture as well. Popular films like "Restrepo" and "The Hurt Locker" depict the experience of US troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, and do with unreserved sympathy for the American side. The US occupation of Afghanistan has been going on for ten years, yet there is still no sign of a Hollywood movie that gives time to the "enemy" side, as "The Longest Day" did with World War II. The closest attempt at pure criticism in the vein of the post-Vietnam film "Apocalypse Now" was "Extraordinary Rendition," a flat-footed look at the Bush-era torture outsourcing program. It's hard to imagine that American audiences will someday see a film that depicts, say, the Taliban resistance with a level of sympathy approaching "Letters from Iwo Jima," a Clint Eastwood-directed look at the "enemy" military during the closing months of the Battle of Japan. Americans don't see the brutality of their wars in the newspaper, on the nightly news, in their weekly newsmagazines, or at the movies. They don't even see them in books, where educated people turn for nuance and breadth. Coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, such as it is considering that most such books are written by American reporters embedded with US forces, is decidedly Americentric, such as Dexter Filkins' bestseller "The Forever War". Literary works that depict the point of view of civilians tend to view them as passive victims, such as Khaled Hosseini's novel "The Kite Runner" and Greg Mortenson's "Three Cups of Tea" (though under attack in the media as fictionalized, the latter title continues to sell briskly). American citizens are morally responsible for the wars and the war crimes committed in their name. The sad truth is, however, that they don't know what's going on - and they don't lift a finger to find out. Ted Rall is an American political cartoonist, columnist and author. His most recent book is The Anti-American Manifesto. His website is rall.com. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

Why My Father Hated India

Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship

By AATISH TASEER

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

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Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Mohandas Gandhi visits Muslim refugees in New Delhi as they prepare to depart to Pakistan on Sept. 22, 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Every day at sunset, Indian and Pakistani guards on the Wagah border face off in a militaristic flag-lowering exercise called the Beating Retreat Ceremony. WSJ's Tom Wright reports on India's effort to tone down the bizarre display.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.

But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

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Rex USA

Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, in May 2009. He was assassinated in January 2011.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.

—Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September.

The Truth About Why Men Cheat

Counselor M. Gary Neuman surveyed 200 cheating and noncheating husbands to get at the real reasons behind men's infidelity.

By Nicole Yorio

Photo Credit: Forest Woodward/iStock

What makes men cheat? Marriage counselor M. Gary Neuman dug through past research on male infidelity and found that most answers came from the wife's point of view. Wouldn't it make more sense to ask the guys? he thought. So for his new book, The Truth About Cheating, Neuman surveyed 200 cheating and noncheating husbands to get at the real reasons behind men's infidelity — including what cheating men say could have prevented them from straying. Here, some of his findings: 

48% of men rated emotional dissatisfaction as the primary reason they cheated.
So much for the myth that for men, cheating is all about sex: Only 8 percent of men said that sexual dissatisfaction was the main factor in their infidelity. "Our culture tells us that all men need to be happy is sex," Neuman says. "But men are emotionally driven beings too. They want their wives to show them that they're appreciated, and they want women to understand how hard they're trying to get things right." The problem is that men are less likely than women to express these feelings, so you won't always know when your guy is in need of a little affirmation. "Most men consider it unmanly to ask for a pat on the back, which is why their emotional needs are often overlooked," Neuman says. "But you can create a marital culture of appreciation and thoughtfulness — and once you set the tone, he's likely to match it."

66% of cheating men report feeling guilt during the affair. 
The implications are a little scary: It isn't just uncaring jerks who cheat. In fact, 68 percent of cheaters never dreamed they'd be unfaithful, and almost all of them wished they hadn't done it, Neuman says. Clearly, guilt isn't enough to stop a man from cheating. "Men are good at compartmentalizing feelings," Neuman explains. "They can hold on to their emotions and deal with them later." So even if your husband swears he would never cheat, don't assume it can't happen. It's important for both of you to take steps toward creating the marriage you want.

77% of cheating men have a good friend who cheated. 
Hanging around friends who stray makes cheating seem normal and legitimizes it as a possibility. The message he's subconsciously telling himself: My friend is a good guy who happens to be cheating on his wife. I guess even the best of us do it. You can't simply ban your husband from hanging out with Mr. Wandering Eyes, Neuman says, but you can request that they spend their time together in an environment that offers less temptation, like at a sporting event or a restaurant for lunch rather than at a bar or club. Another strategy: Build your social circle around happily married couples that share your values — it'll create an environment that supports marriage.