Here’s the last installment of my column in the Books & Authors section of the Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn, which I’ve enjoyed writing the past several months:

“One of my purposes in writing about Pakistan and Pakistani communities is to counter their prevailing image in the West, which is unfairly negative and severely incomplete. The way to do that is not to write only positive things. No reader would find that credible, and it’s neither true nor compatible with my self-respect. True friendship entails telling the full truth, and I’m a true friend of Pakistan.”

I should have posted this a week ago - a link to the latest installment of my fortnightly Dawn column:

“Perhaps the statement is that he’s choosing not to engage with the hard issues that Pakistan represents, for reasons of personal preference or discretion. I won’t fault him for that. But, as a longtime admirer, I do regret it. If ever a country cried out to be complexified rather than peopled with cliches, it’s Pakistan.”

From my latest Dawn column, just published:

“The APPNA convention and my conversations with Todd [Shea] are likely to find their way into the new book I’m writing about Pakistan since 2004, to which this column is informally a companion. Above all, I wanted to hear from Todd about the situation in Mardan, where CDRS mobile teams are working.

“‘It’s not good,’ he said. ‘The monsoon rain season, people are not going back to their homes, they’ve been living in people’s homes for upwards of six-seven weeks, and in camps, and these places are not getting medical services. …’”

Here’s the text of the talk I gave at the Sindh Medical College Alumni Association of North America dinner at the annual APPNA conference in San Francisco on Friday, July 3:

I’d like to tell you about what I do - and why.

When people ask me about my religion, I often say - only half in jest - that my religion is journalism. And I describe myself as a lapsed or recovering journalist. We all have ideas about what journalism should be and do, and all too often it doesn’t live up to those ideas. Journalism for me has been a useful vehicle for exploring the world, but it’s not adequate to understanding it properly.

More specifically, the Pakistan I hear about in the news is not the Pakistan I know from my own experience. That’s why, after a decade of traveling and living in Pakistan, I wrote a book not of hard or political journalism, but of human stories. I did the opposite of what most Western writing on Pakistan does: I put Pakistani people in the foreground, and politics in the background.

I first visited Pakistan in 1995, after spending many weeks on the ground in Indian-held Kashmir, because I wanted to understand the Pakistani point of view on the situation there. I got a stiff dose of politics on two long visits to Pakistan in 1999. Then, in 2003, I was able to deepen my experience of Pakistan by accepting an invitation to spend a semester teaching at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore.

The result of that experience was my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, published in 2004. Since then, as Pakistan has become more and more prominent in the American media, I’ve done more and more speaking to American audiences about the Pakistan I know. Like anyone, I need to make a living, and I want to do it in a way that’s honorable and useful, and one way I can be useful is by sharing my mostly positive experience of Pakistan with other Americans. I’m doing this in churches and living rooms and public meetings around America, and in my blog, which is online at www.aliveandwellinpakistan.com. I’m also writing a second book, covering events in Pakistan since 2004 and narrating a trip I made there earlier this year, and showing slides of my friend Pete Sabo’s wonderful photographs from our trip.

One question people ask me often about my work is why I do it. This is a very telling question, and it deserves a thoughtful answer. When I don’t have the time or patience to answer it properly, sometimes I joke that I’m actually with the CIA. I’m not, but the suspicion that I might be reveals the lack of trust between Pakistanis and Americans that we must overcome.

My real answer is that I write and speak to Americans about Pakistan because it’s necessary work that I’m in a position to do. The other aspect of the “Why?” question, though, is, “Why bother?” A Pakistani lady I met earlier this week asked me, “But does it do any good?” and, “What about the media?” The defeatism inherent in these questions is understandable, but very regrettable.

The answer to the first question is that we can’t know how much good it might do; we have to do the work faithfully, and let it do whatever good it’s going to do. The answer to the second question is that, these days, we can be the media. In his earlier remarks Dr. Suhail Sidiqui mentioned Mahatma Gandhi, and I’m reminded of something Gandhi said: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Instead of complaining about the media, I’m meeting the American public in its own living rooms and churches. And the Internet and changes in printing technology, and the general democratization of communications, allow us to speak to and influence each other in ways we couldn’t have done even a few years ago.

To me, the challenge we face is represented by the woman at a church in Seattle who asked me what a drone attack is. She and many others like her need more and better information, and they also need to be reminded that the people who suffer first and most whenever there’s violence in Pakistan are Pakistanis.

One of the kindest things said about my first book was when the reviewer in The Daily Telegraph called it “a search for common humanity.” I’m continuing that search in my new book, which I’ll be using to help promote what I believe is a crucially important conversation with mainstream America. I have a compulsion to bring it out quickly - by early next year - and to keep control of the project, so that it finds the public and meets the need it’s intended for.

There are a few things you can do to help me help Americans understand the real Pakistan:

• You can give my books to your American friends and colleagues.
• You can use your influence as community and professional leaders to create and find audiences for me to speak to.
• You can visit and promote my blog, online at www.aliveandwellinpakistan.com, and encourage people to be in touch with me.

Thank you very much for inviting me to be with you tonight, and Pakistan zindabad!

My latest column in the Books & Authors section of Dawn is about the recent visit that Fawad Butt and I made to speak to a dinner and a group of high school students. Most interesting were the policy recommendations the students offered to President Obama:

“They were asked to decide whether they would continue the Bush policy of considering those who harbour terrorists to be terrorists themselves. Most groups would change that policy. ‘This would give a bad image to the US, because civilians would feel they were being punished for harbouring radicals,’ said one student. ‘A lot of the harbourers might be acting out of fear, so I don’t think they should be considered terrorists themselves.’”

Also, here’s a link to our “KQV Global Press Conference” radio interview with Dr. Schuyler Foerster, and a 29-minute video of the dinner talk:

The latest installment of my column for the Books & Authors section of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn has just been published. Headlined “Leading us with language,” it’s about President Obama’s historic speech on June 4 in Cairo, addressing America’s relationship with the Muslim world.

I want to tell you about three Americans that Pete Sabo and I ran into on our recent trip to Pakistan.

In my latest column the Books & Authors section of Dawn, I found it necessary to write about the situation of the (now) 2.5 million people in who have been driven out of their homes by the Pakistan Army’s decision to attack the Taliban in northwest Pakistan, but I didn’t want to write what I think of as “mere commentary”.

I’ve just published the first installment of my new column in the Books & Authors section of Dawn. Here’s a passage from it:

“My premise is that reminding Americans and Pakistanis of our common humanity is a useful thing to do, and something I’m in a position to do, at this fraught and crucial historical moment. Whether it can help forestall the dangers we all fear is another matter.”