Monsoon by Robert Kaplan (Book Review)

I'm pleased to share with Azanian Sea readers a guest post from Dr. Fahad Bishara. Fahad is a Prize Fellow in Economics, History and Politics at Harvard University's Center for History and Economics, and an Assistant Professor at the College of William and Mary. His current research traces the legal transformation of the Western Indian Ocean through the Arab and Indian settlement and commercialization of the East African coast during the nineteenth century. He received his Ph.D. in History from Duke University in 2012, and holds an M.A. in Arab Gulf Studies from the University of Exeter. Here he reviews Robert Kaplan's recent work on the Indian Ocean. 

Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. Random House. 366 pp. 2010. $28

Review by Fahad Ahmad Bishara (Center for History and Economics, Harvard University)

Historians of the Indian Ocean, and students of world history more broadly, are by now perhaps familiar with the story of the Chinese admiral Zheng He, who in the early 15^th century sailed around the Indian Ocean with a fleet of more than 200 ships, reaching Southeast Asia, East Africa, and even Arabia. Those who know the story, however, have a hard time understanding its historical significance, let alone its contemporary relevance.

Enter Robert Kaplan, seasoned journalist, history aficionado and traveler extraordinaire. The veteran journalist has spent the past two decades or so writing on American military campaigns in the Middle East, the Balkans crises, and world politics more broadly, and has spent even an even longer time as a foreign correspondent covering the Cold War and the Iran-Iraq war. Kaplan’s latest work, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power extends his time-tested mixture of travelogue, history, journalism, and strategic analysis – and to good effect.

Those who pick up Monsoon are in for something of a treat. With delightful prose and insightful analysis, Kaplan takes his readers on a tour of the Indian Ocean, stopping at some of its lesser-known (but, as he makes abundantly clear, no less important) port cities: Gwadar (in Pakistan), Chittagong (in Burma), and Hambantota (in Sri Lanka), to name just a few. For each, Kaplan is able to pull together a remarkably clear blend of history, anecdote, and analysis, and the reader leaves each chapter with a rather strong grasp of each port city’s past, present and future. His discussion of Gwadar, for example, highlights the port city’s Omani past, while situating its troubled place within the Pakistani nation-state, and suggesting how the ongoing development of a Chinese container port there might reshape both its present situation and its understanding of its own history.

Sandwiching these vignettes are more thematic reflections. Some are on regional history – Arab-Islamic expansion in the Indian Ocean, Zheng He’s voyage and British India all get the full treatment – and other times on more contemporary matters like the muted Sino-Indian jostling that characterizes much of the region’s political economy. Individually, they seem gratuitous; but together, they form the broader context and background, cluing us in to how Kaplan imagines the Indian Ocean as a unified space – an idea, as much a geographic feature, he reminds us.

Over the course of several chapters, the big picture begins to emerge – one in which China’s tentacles slowly make their way across the water to the Persian Gulf, East Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, binding them together into a new world system, to borrow Immanuel Wallersein’s provocative concept. In return for its oil, the Gulf receives a steady stream of Chinese manufactures; and for allowing Chinese companies to build a network of ports, governments around the Indian Ocean are compensated with development projects – highways, hospitals, and more – all gratis. Throughout the process, China is careful to stay below the radar – it even refuses to run the very ports it builds, preferring to allow the Singaporeans to do it instead.  This, then, is no plan for Chinese world domination; rather, it is a regional infrastructure built to ensure that China’s insatiable thirst for energy is met and its goods have a secured market. But, as Kaplan makes clear throughout, this is not without its political consequences, both domestic and international.

For all of its strengths, Monsoon can be a frustrating read. Those who read the entire volume are likely to be left wondering what they had just gone through. While Monsoon’s individual vignettes are thorough, stimulating and thought-provoking, the author does little to connect the dots; the book is not too much more than the sum of its parts. Readers are left to guess as to what Zanzibar has to do with Burma, or why a discussion of Gwadar necessarily precedes Gujarat; they get a vivid picture of politics and economics around the Indian Ocean, but little by way of a forceful argument. Kaplan seems to prefer the slow-cooker approach, dropping in bits and pieces of his overall argument and letting them stew together with his travel writing and history. Those looking for an argument presented neatly on a single platter will be disappointed.

Perhaps a more glaring shortcoming is Kaplan’s failure to deliver on the second half of the book’s title. Beyond hanging thoughts and throwaway sentences that pepper the volume, Kaplan does nothing to explain how the United States fits into the picture, let alone establish the Indian Ocean as “the essential place to contemplate the future of U.S. power.” Policy buffs will undoubtedly be left unhappy with the book’s unfulfilled promises.

So then what are we left with? A great deal, actually. Beyond enriching vignettes, the book illuminates the reorientations of different parts of  the Middle East, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia towards China. Indeed, if there is a protagonist to the book at all, it is Chinese capital, which has managed to forge a world of its own, replete with protected sea routes and eager markets. It might not be Zheng He all over again, but it’s certainly something close – and Kaplan does not fail to impress upon his readers the importance of seeing the region in light of its history.

All told, Kaplan has thus given us a thoughtful, balanced and readable – though not always entirely coherent – analysis of the modern Indian Ocean. Those looking to assign students a readable book on the modern Indian Ocean with which to cap a history course, then, can do a lot worse than Kaplan’s Monsoon. The book’s structure makes it easy to pull out chapters to assign, and the prose is both informative and eminently readable – which in itself is a remarkable feat.

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The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Book Review)

Mohsin Hamid's second book after the critically acclaimed "Moth Smoke", "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" follows a young Pakistani-American named Changez who gains entry into the elite world of Princeton University and corporate America and then gradually becomes disillusioned with his life. An outsider to the world of the rich American elite, he nevertheless excels in it. His efforts lead him to work for a top firm called Underwood Samson, doing business analysis and profit forecasting jobs around the world. He remains absorbed in his work, although never fully absorbed into the lives and attitudes of his colleagues, until the events of September 11th, 2001 propel some intense soul-searching, causing him to wake up to the life he had been living. Even as Changez is waking up, the girl he has been pursuing the whole novel--the beautiful Erica--is slipping deeper into a nostalgia for her dead lover Chris. These two parts of the narrative work quite beautifully together. The book would be another (beautiful) coming of age story but for the unique voice of the narrator, who tells his whole story to "you", a mysterious American stranger and also the reader. We shall return to this shortly, but first a word about the meaning of Erica.

Many reviewers have commented that Erica and her "nostalgia" are a thinly veiled metaphor for post-9/11 America (One reviewer suggested that Chris meant Christopher Columbus, in which case Erica's malaise is symptomatic of America's longing for the beauty of its founding myth). Indeed the narrator's name is a not so subtle riff on those Muslim Western-educated young people from India, Pakistan and elsewhere whose lives were changed by 9/11 and the discrimination they faced in its wake. However the changes Changez undergoes feel forced and compressed at times--he seems like a man too immured of Western comforts and ideals to abandon them as quickly as he does. No doubt Erica's fate prompted some of his alienation. But all-together his transformation feels too compressed; this sabatoges the novel's otherwise uncanny realism and subtle emotional depth (especially the passages dealing with the emotions and betrayal of relationships).

Still this is a strongly written book overall. When Changez is fired from his prestigious job and returns to Pakistan, he does not become the radical mullah or Islamist leader one would expect from the title. More true to his character, he begins teaching at a university, becoming more radicalized through his contact with the students there. Although he is thrown in jail for organizing protests at the embassy, it is not until he makes statements about the USA in response to what he believes is an unjust detainment of one of his students that he comes to the attention of the American government. The reluctant fundamentalist then, refers not to the aspects of his life in Pakistan, but to the corporate persona he assumes at Underwood Samson, where he is trained to always "focus on fundamentals". This inversion of the reader's expectation is brilliantly executed and makes the final scenes all the more ambigous--we wonder if Changez is executing a brilliant plan of attack or attempting to save his own life.

From a stylistic point of view, this novel is a unique achievement. From a moral point of view it offers a strong critique of US foreign policy and the dangers of intervention and playing "world policeman". All told it is the emotional investment in the central character--his compassion, his ambition, his gentility and his disillusioned break with complacency--that makes the moral impact of the novel so resonant in these times.

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US walking a tightrope with its Yemen policy

US walking a tightrope with its Yemen policy

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Ugandans Serve as Private Mercenaries in Iraq

Corporate globalization gone haywire

UGANDA/IRAQ: Why 10,000 Ugandans are eagerly serving in Iraq

by Max Delany, Christian Science Monitor
March 6th, 2009

Under a relentless equatorial sun and the gaze of her Zimbabwean instructor, Juliet Kituye quickly reassembles her AK-47. Next to her, a young man in a ripped red T-shirt discharges imaginary rounds at an invisible target.

On a disused soccer pitch in the suburbs of the Ugandan capital, Kampala, 300 hopefuls are being put through rudimentary firearms training. Many of the recruits are raw and their drills occasionally lurch towards slapstick. One trainee lets the magazine slip out of his automatic rifle and onto the red earth, someone else about turns right instead of left. All of them share the same dream, however: going to Iraq.

As President Barack Obama announces plans to withdraw US troops from Iraq, thousands of young Ugandans are increasingly desperate to be sent to the war-torn country. Already, the Ugandan government says there are more than 10,000 men and women from this poverty-stricken East African nation working as private security guards in Iraq. Hired out to multibillion-dollar companies for hundreds of dollars a month, they risk their lives seeking fortunes protecting US Army bases, airports, and oil firms.

The war in Iraq is the most privatized conflict in history. Since the invasion in 2003, the US Department of Defense has doled out contracts worth an estimated $100 billion to private firms. Covering a vast range of services from catering to dry cleaning to security, one in every five dollars the US spends in Iraq ends up in the pockets of the contractors, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office. Increasingly these jobs have been outsourced to developing countries.

It is clear why the US contractors came to Uganda. As an impoverished former British colony, the country is awash with unemployed and English-speaking potential recruits. Its pliant government was an early member of President Bush's "coalition of the willing," and with a lingering 20-year insurgency, it also has a glut of experienced army veterans, who made up the initial contingent of Ugandans in Iraq.

More important, hiring Ugandans is cheap. Since the first Ugandans were sent to Iraq in late 2005, competition from other developing countries in Africa and the Indian subcontinent has seen the government cut the minimum wage from $1,300 to $600 a month. That compares with the $15,000 that one industry insider estimated an American guard could make each month. Nevertheless, competition is fierce, and for those Ugandans who land a job, Iraq can prove a bonanza.

Paul Mugabe is back in Uganda for a month. For the past year, the sinewy, nervous young man has been guarding the American Camp Diamondback at the airport in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, and soon he will be heading to Baghdad.

"It's not like Uganda. You sweat and sweat and sweat," says Mr. Mugabe, a former soldier in the Ugandan Army. "It is the most dangerous place in the world. It's even worse than Congo."

With the money he's earned during those 12 months, back in his village Mugabe has built himself two houses, bought a bar, and increased the herd of cows his father left him to 30.

"You should see the size of my banana plantation," he smiles. When he returns from another year in Iraq, he should have saved enough money to cover a wedding and the traditional bride price needed to find a pretty wife, he says.

But despite his nascent business empire and hopes of love, the fact that he is putting his life on the line to help US companies make massive profits is not lost on him. "If I am earning $600 a month and these companies are making billions, it is not fair," he says.

For Uganda, however, another country's war on a continent far away has proved to be lucrative. "The Iraq opportunity brings in about $90 million dollars, whereas our chief export, which is coffee, brings in around $60 or $70 million a year," says the former state minister for labor, employment, and industrial relations, Mwesigwa Rukutana, now minister of higher education. That figure is mostly made up of remittances.

But domestic criticism has been fierce, with some equating the system to human trafficking or slavery. Reports of abuse, ranging from poor conditions and changeable contracts to sexual assault, have appeared in the media.

"Unlike in the past when there was the slave trade, no company comes here and recruits anyone against their wishes. It is willing worker, willing employer," Mr. Rukutana says. "If anyone thinks the conditions there are bad or that he is going to be exploited, no one is compelling him to go." Rukutana says that only one Ugandan has been killed in Iraq, while others say more have died.

If anyone understands some of the hardships of working in Iraq and the industry it's spawned, then it is Moses Matsiko. Mr. Matsiko has spent nearly four years working for a US firm in Afghanistan and Iraq. In late 2006, a convoy he was escorting through the town of Fallujah was ambushed. He was shot seven times but survived. Two American colleagues he was with were killed.

But far from shy away from the dangers of Iraq, Matsiko has embraced its opportunities. In 2007, he started his own company to train and send guards to Iraq and now has over 1,200 in the country.

"My experience in Iraq is that despite having been shot seven times, it is very great," he says. President Obama's withdrawal plans have cast a shadow of doubt over his future business plans. But that has just forced Matsiko to start looking opportunities elsewhere.

"If all goes well, then I hope to be sending people to Afghanistan in the near future," he smiles.

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