Adventures in Correspondentland (44 page)

Still, it is by no means coincidental that America's great laureate is Mark Twain, who warned of the perils of rashly composed obituaries. For so long as it remains the locus of the
world's creative industries and the home of the greatest universities, it will be hard to write off.

America will continue to attract waves of hopeful new immigrants and some of the finest undergraduate and postgraduate brains. Three-quarters of the PhDs awarded in US universities now go to foreign students, a statistic cited as evidence of the country's decline. Yet America's singular success since the turn of the last century has been to usurp the world's best talent, in whatever field, and this remains the case.

Carrying on this brain gain, two-thirds of these foreign PhDs stay for at least five years after graduation. Tellingly, this is true for nine out of ten Chinese doctoral students, the highest proportion of any foreign nation. That would suggest that the American dream, however bruised, battered and hackneyed, retains its lure, promise and animating energy. George Orwell, who curiously never visited the country, made the uncharacteristically bland point that America always retained its founding spirit of revolution, which is doubtless true. But Don DeLillo made the more compelling observation that no country in the world is so unafraid of the future.

Just as America remains the land of the first chance, it is also the land of the second, which helps explain why it so regularly springs back. It is a country where, less than two years after impeachment, Bill Clinton ended his term in office with the highest approval ratings of any departing president; where Al Gore lost the presidency but achieved great celebrity and claimed an Oscar; where Captain Yee, the former Muslim chaplain from Guantanamo, went from a navy brig in South Carolina to being an Obama delegate on the floor of the Democratic convention in Denver.

Were I American, the things that would take some of the
fizz and crackle out of my 4 July fireworks would be the state of the finances and politics. The gargantuan national debt has now surpassed $14 trillion, an all-time high that equates to over 95 per cent of GDP and some $90,000 for every working American. Ten years after 9/11, this Red Menace is now being spoken of as the gravest threat to national security, largely because foreign citizens and institutions hold almost half. A major upside, however, is that America simply cannot afford to send large armies into the Middle East or South Asia, and will not undertake the kind of Iraq-style open-ended military commitments that have sapped the country's morale and depleted its finances.

Now that the Iraq syndrome has come to loom as large in the minds of foreign policymakers as the Vietnam syndrome once did for their predecessors, traditional notions of hard power and soft power are being superseded at the Pentagon and State Department by talk of smart power, which is a snappier and more face-saving way of saying smaller budget, cost-effective power.

Washington politics is also impoverished. Since the end of the Cold War, which removed the patriotic imperative to present more of a united front to the Soviet Union, extreme partisanship has become the norm. Whereas once there was a clubby camaraderie on Capitol Hill, even among party rivals, something bordering on hatred now prevails. Politicians of all stripes rush to the television ‘stake-out' positions outside the House and Senate chambers to denounce each other, using shrill and often hysterical language. In the Senate, the use of filibuster, a stalling tactic used to block legislation, has become routine. Once, it was deployed sparingly as a last resort, now it is everyday, making it all but impossible to tackle some of America's most pressing issues, such as the scale of the deficit and the impact of climate change. Indeed, the poor state
of the politics and the perilous state of the finances are linked like conjoined twins.

With obstructionism the order of the day on both sides of the aisle, electoral mandates no longer have any currency, and the very legitimacy of the last three presidents – Clinton, Bush and Obama – has been contested. Winning the race to the bottom, some members of the Tea Party movement have questioned whether Barack Obama is a Christian or even a bona-fide American. Given how vituperative and deeply dysfunctional the country's politics has become, it was not particularly surprising that a gunman should attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, only that this kind of attack had not happened before. No wonder Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff, took to calling Washington ‘Fucknutsville' and then went home to Chicago, which now seemed positively genial in comparison. He had left behind a capital where politics had become conflict.

Were I to offer some other valedictory thoughts about the world beyond the Beltway, one would be that foreign correspondents could confirm the rumour, even if it requires regurgitating the banality, that the planet has indeed got smaller. What's more, globalisation runs the risk of making it drearily homogenous. A return trip to Delhi four years after my departure more than aptly made the point.

The Indian capital could now boast a newly constructed airport, an airy steel and glass hi-tech affair that would not have looked out of place in Dusseldorf or Stockholm, or, more pertinently to the Indians, Shanghai or Beijing. Inside, major Western chains had crowded out local shops: Costa Coffee, WH Smith, Reebok and the like. Flight crews from Kingfisher Airlines headed towards their gates dressed in high-heels, boob-hugging
tunics and minimalist skirts rather than the saris traditionally favoured by Indian airlines. There was a Delhi Daredevils Bar, an American-style sports joint that took its name from the capital's Twenty20 cricket franchise and its merchandising cues from British Premier League football. No wonder. Many of its young Indian customers wore Manchester United and Chelsea shirts.

On the boating pond next to India Gate, the once-battered pedalos were now freshly painted in bright primary colours, their brand-new awnings emblazoned with the corporate logo of a foreign mobile-phone operator. In Khan Market – an enclave for literary Indians and expatriates – my two favourite bookshops had been closed down. One had been replaced by an interior-decor shop selling soft furnishings, while the other had been taken over by a high-end international jeweller. At the beautiful restaurant where I had first met my wife, the menu was now exclusively European, and its latest addition was a Tuscan kitchen. By now, the BBC had also succumbed to the Indian revolution by opening up a sparkling new bureau in a high-rise office block. Black leather armchairs that one might expect to find in the waiting room of a Los Angeles therapist adorned the reception. The newsroom was awash with plasma.

At least India was on the up. Much of the rest of South Asia was unravelling. Whether from massive flooding or the destabilising impact of attacks from al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban, Pakistan was in a state of perpetual crisis. Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated, her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, had been elected president and now it was Pervez Musharraf who was living in self-imposed exile in London and plotting a political comeback. A massive truck-bomb attack had destroyed the Marriott in Islamabad, and another of the region's marquee hotels, the Taj
Palace in Mumbai, had also been the focus of a seaborne attack on India's commercial capital that had been planned in Pakistan and carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba. Within the ranks of the ISI and the Pakistani Army, the belief still festered that militants remained useful proxies in thwarting the rise of India, even though they now posed a more serious threat to the state of Pakistan. On average, there was now one suicide bombing per week, and since 9/11 over 35,000 Pakistanis had been killed.

No attack more brutally encapsulated the deteriorating security situation in South Asia than the ambush of the convoy carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team in March 2009. Last-minute stand-ins for an Indian side dissuaded from touring Pakistan through fear of precisely this kind of attack, the players came under fire in the once-safe city of Lahore from militants trained to fight an insurgency in Kashmir and emboldened by the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Cricket had long been considered beyond the reach of militants, so the strike on the region's shared and sacred game was presumably intended to signal that militants no longer felt constrained by any self-prescribed limits.

Perhaps the choice of location for the ambush was also intended as another nihilistic flourish: Lahore's Liberty Square. Hurriedly, the Sri Lankan team was flown afterwards by military helicopter from the fresh-cropped wicket of Lahore's Gaddafi Stadium and then on to Colombo. The players touched down at the capital's international airport, which just ten days before had been the target of an aerial attack from the Tamil Tigers. Militant attacks had been ever more audacious and ever more alarming. The already frail notion of jihadi self-restraint had become firmly oxymoronic, and such were the fears about the rise of violent Islam in a nuclear-armed country that foreign-policy experts started
referring to the Pak–Af problem when talking about lawlessness in the region rather than using the usual Af–Pak shorthand.

In Sri Lanka, the aerial attack on Colombo proved to be the Tigers' last hurrah. The Sri Lankan Army launched an all-out assault, pursuing a strategy of total annihilation that forced the Tigers out of their strongholds and into the jungle. Barred initially from the battlefields, journalists were soon flown to what the government portrayed as a liberated Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu, which now looked even more ghostly than after the tsunami. With the Tigers surrounded in a three-square-mile strip of land, the army claimed the prized scalp of Prabhakaran himself, and the pictures of his bloated, bullet-ridden dead body were no less startling than those of Saddam Hussein with a hangman's noose around his neck. Soon, the martyrs' cemetery in Kilinochchi was flattened, and it became the site for a new divisional headquarters of the Sri Lankan Army.

The one-time mountain kingdom of Nepal was now a republic, and King Gyanendra had been banished from his Kathmandu palace. To complete his defenestration, a Maoistled coalition came to power after the parliamentary elections, which followed the Ring Road Revolution. The Maldives had also ditched another autocrat, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom – he of the exquisitely packaged canned-tuna fame – who had been replaced by the democracy campaigner Mohamed Nasheed. But its atolls were still being inundated by the waves.

In Afghanistan, the country's second presidential election held in 2009 had been even more farcical than the first five years earlier, and was marred by vote-rigging, ballot-box stuffing and intimidation from the supporters both of Hamid Karzai and of his main rival. As in 2004, the legitimacy of his victory was highly
questionable. The security situation had also worsened. Almost 2500 Afghan civilians were killed in 2010, the highest civilian death toll since the US-led invasion. After a tortuously long review of US strategy, Obama ordered an Iraq-style surge but also signalled a withdrawal starting in mid-2011. It was a timetable that the Taliban would have interpreted as an unmistakable sign that America had lost its stomach for the fight. The police chief in Mazar-i-Sharif, who had been bullied by the warlords, was now dead, having been killed in a suicide-bomb attack by the Taliban. Even the heavily protected Kabul Intercontinental came under assault from militants, who killed a senior judge, a Spanish pilot, waiters and musicians performing in the hotel during a five-hour rampage. As for Kamila, the border region she lives in is still so dangerous that we have not yet managed to return.

Elsewhere in Asia, the rise of China had become the modish story of the times. When first I joined the BBC, Beijing – or Peking as it was still commonly called then – was regarded not so much as a posting as an academic sinecure. It was an ivory tower, where Oxbridge-trained sinologists were renowned more for the size of their brains than the volume of their output. It was almost as if they had been assigned for their own intellectual delectation, and that reporting was an extracurricular activity. The focus of a speedy expansion, Beijing has become one of our most important and busiest bureaux, with Shanghai another vital outpost.

Ten years earlier, our main bureau in Europe had received a Beijing-style boost in BBC investment, but, as the world's locus shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Brussels was trying still to coalesce into a major power centre, and thus a major story. Pre-empting its emergence as a counterbalance to the US, the BBC had sent my happy band of trainees off to Brussels for a two-day
fact-finding mission on the basis that the European parliament might one day rival Capitol Hill. But no one had yet managed to make an EU working-time directive sing on television, nor the endless summitry or treaty writing.

More recently, the European Union had appointed a kind of foreign secretary, so that any international leader could ‘call Europe'. Yet Charlemagne,
The Economist
columnist and a fellow diarist from my high-society days at the
Evening Standard
, summed up the irrelevancy of the post when he relayed the gag doing the rounds in Brussels: if ever anyone dialled the European hotline, they would merely hear a recording, ‘For French foreign policy, press 1. For British foreign policy, press 2…' On the other side of what used to be the Iron Curtain, Moscow, which had always been seen as a stepping stone for Washington, was now viewed as something of a backwater and hardship posting.

In Iraq, as the US and British pulled out, the BBC also lightened its footprint. Correspondents looking for trouble in Mesopotamia started eyeing up Tehran instead. In Jerusalem, the peace process felt even more like a slogan lacking any credibility, as one British diplomat deftly put it, and Israel waited still for another Rabin. Instead, Benjamin Netanyahu, his old nemesis, was prime minister.

In Gaza, no longer was there any need for Hamas militants to slip furtively into the backs of cars to conduct interviews with visiting correspondents, as they had done on my first visit. Now, they ran the show. A terrorist organisation in the eyes of Israel, America and the EU, Hamas had risen to power in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, its landslide win in Gaza an inadvertent by-product of the Bush administration's push for democracy in the Middle East.