Press

Full Interview HERE. Oct 04.2013:

PG: Is there a political solution possible in Waziristan?

MT: The U.S. has to leave, but they also have to stop funding the Pakistani establishment, and they have to start taking the Pakistan civilian government seriously. The tribal areas also need to be incorporated into Pakistan. How this is done is up to them, but the services of the state need to be extended to that area. There is a whole range of socio-political issues, which need to be resolved. They will require money and also will among political leaders, but this is impossible as long as the United States continues its meddling, occupation, and funding of the Pakistani political establishment.

PG: What do Americans most need to understand about the drones in Pakistan?

Distinguished Professor of Geography, Derek Gregory, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver wrote up a thoughtful post on WOUNDS and connects it to his own work. It’s chock full of useful links and footnotes to other relevant readings on drone warfare. Here’s a snippet:

This matters so much – and reappears in a different form in ‘Moving targets’ – because the contemporary individuation of ‘war’ (if it is war) works to sanitize the battlefield: to confine attention to the individual-as-target (which is itself a technical artefact separated from the exploded fleshiness that flickers briefly on the Predator’s video screens) and to foreclose the way in which every death ripples across a family, a community…

Read the whole thing here.

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I just wanted to make a quick note of a few things here: First, I’ll be presenting at the DARC conference along with Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who has been demanding justice for drone affectees as well as filmmaker and academic Wazhmah Osman. You can find out more about our panel and register here.

I’ll also be doing a reading at Page Turner, a festival by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop on October 5th. Festival details here.

I’m slowly getting to pulling together various appearances, articles, talks, etc. Here’s a piece in the Sunday Guardian about Wounds of Waziristan. Below is a video from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:

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With Wounds of Waziristan, Tahir tries to foreground the people who materially experience loss and absence — not as abstract body counts, but as the absence of a brother or a niece or a wife. “Haunting is the insistence by the dead that they be acknowledged, that the social conditions that brought about their demise be made known and rectified. So, haunting is about unfinished business. And, it’s thoroughly social and political. This film focuses on the people who live in Waziristan and who live among loss. Material conditions, whether it’s the rubble after a drone attack or the grave of one’s kin, persist in reminding the living of what they have lost,” she explains.

Full piece here.