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DISPATCHES
named Louis remote-controlled the
dollies along a roadway of foot-thick
interlocking wooden planks that workers with forklifts picked up as soon as
the building passed over and carried
around to the front of the convoy, until
the whole procession had traveled the
length of two and a half football fields.
Since Katrina, New Orleanians have
gotten used to things disappearing—
homes, schools, businesses, housing projects, neighborhoods. But ultimately we
carry within us the apparatus for preserving what we really want to preserve. Sam
Morse will keep returning to the shotgun
on Palmyra Street, to the hamburger
joint his dad would treat him to after latenight asthma scares at Charity Hospital.
Anita's Diner, whose window frames the
new view of McDonogh No. 11, retains a
warm network of regulars, newcomers,
and longtime employees. If you're enjoying a bowl of butter-swamped grits and
ask about the old-school R&B playing
from a boom box, Dwana, who's worked
there for more than 20 years, will explain it's from a CD burned for the diner
by the cook's sister, and will give you a The charismatic KHan was once linked to noiiywooa actresses like Goldie Hawn.
copy if she has an extra.
Dwana seems unfazed by the accel- political nobody looking for a big favor elections and supported Bhutto's party,
led by her widower, Asif Zardari, who
erated urban morphing she's witnessed from Washington.
In January 2008, the onetime cricket became president.
from the diner's window, shift after
That Washington had little use for
shift, year after year. She just hopes the superstar turned lackluster politician
new hospital will create jobs and help visited the United States to discuss Khan's advice was not a surprise; at
residents of the surrounding neighbor- Pakistan's future. One of the bloodiest home he was considered a political
hoods. She points past McDonogh No. 11, years in memory had just culminated in lightweight, and on Capitol Hill, if he
poised on its blue steel dollies and ready the assassination of former Prime Min- was known at all, it was likely as a cafor its next move, to show me an empty ister Benazir Bhutto; President Pervez rousing cricket champion who starred
hotel the state plans to implode. Even if Musharraf, the military leader and an on the Oxford Blues and then, throughit's her day off, she says, she wants to be American ally, clung uneasily to power. out the 1980s, captained Pakistan's naElections were approaching, and Khan's tional team. Christened the "Lion of
at Anita's to watch it come dow^n. El
mission was to implore the foreign- Pakistan," he used to prowl London's
Anne Gisleson is a writer who teaches at the New policy heavyweights who would meet West End nightclub circuit with his
Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
with him—Senators Joe Biden and rugged good looks and flowing mane.
John Kerry among them—to keep the Dressed in a sharp suit—or shirtless
U.S. on the sidelines. Validating elec- if the occasion allowed—the playboy
tions held under Musharraf would be was spotted with an endless string of
SECOND ACTS
a mistake, he said. American intrusion glitzy British socialites. Gossip columns
would only aggravate an already tense linked him to actresses like Goldie
situation. "I came to warn them: don't Hawn and Elizabeth Hurley (he later
A FORMER CRICKET STAR MAY
back [the candidacy of] any individual," married Jemima Goldsmith, a young
BECOME PAKISTAN'S NEXT
Khan told me in New York City, two heiress to a British fortune). When he
RULER.
days after the meeting, with a hint of beat England in his last match, winBy Shahan Mufti
desperation in his voice. "Any govern- ning the 1992 World Cup finals. Khan ^
o
BEFORE BECOMING the most pop- ment that will deal with terrorism has became something of a demigod.
The stunning political success he Í
ular politician in Pakistan—before the to be credible, and a government that
record-size rallies and the odds-on bets is backed by the Americans will lose now enjoys was harder-won—this de- j
that the upcoming elections will make all credibility." Khan was unpersuasive. spite the fact that Khan was courted for s
him prime minister—Imran Khan was a The Bush administration backed the office even before he ended his cricket S
The Playboy
20
APRIL 2012
THE ATLANTIC
DISPATCHES
careen More recently, Musharraf offered to install him as prime minister.
Khan has claimed. But he had always
wanted more than a title. "Going into
politics and starting a movement for
reform are two different things," Khan
told the British newspaper The Guardian in 1996. That year, he launched the
Pakistan Movement for Justice, a political party determined to create, as
its founding charter stated, an "Islamic
welfare state." He had by then fashioned
a second incarnation as a philanthropist,
traveling the country collecting money
out of the back of a truck to build a hospital offering free care to poor cancer
patients. But while his welfare-minded
party repeatedly entered elections, it
never won more than one
seat in the Pakistani parliament. "Im the dim," as some
in Pakistan called him, was
dismissed as politically
inept and unelectable. To
the liberals worried about
his anti-American rhetoric,
he was "Taliban without a
beard"; religious conservatives abhorred his playboy past and maligned his British wife,
whom he divorced in 2004.
But lately, everything has changed.
Caught for years in a whirl of guerrilla war and dysfunctional government, huge numbers of Pakistanis are
now seizing on Khan's populist brand
of political Islam and his demands for
an independent judiciary. In advance
of elections expected later this year,
he's suddenly drawing historic crowds.
One rally held in Lahore last October
brougbt out more than 100,000 people,
shocking Khan's rivals and helping him
convert a slew of new political allies.
Khan's sudden popularity also owes
something to his biting criticism of the
United States. As a virulent campaigner
against the war in Afghanistan, Khan
earned an anti-American badge be now
wears with pride, while relations strain
over everything from the raid that dispatched Osama bin Laden to November's
errant American air strike that killed 24
Pakistani soldiers and sent riotous crowds
into tbe streets. At one point during his
massive rally in Lahore, Khan said he had
a message for Washington: "We may be
your friends, but we will never be your
slaves." The crowd was exhilarated.
But despite the image he enjoys as
an anti-American Islamist, Washington doesn't view Khan as unreasonable.
"We know that he opposes some American policies," an official at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad told me, but "he's
been balanced, and expressed where
he would like to see changes."
Indeed, Khan might be able to offer
the U.S. something no one else in Pakistan has: a path out of Afghanistan. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently
suggested that Pakistan should take a
lead in talking with the Taliban. Khan
agrees, and as a tribal Pashtun with
ancestral roots in South Waziristan,
he could be particularly helpful in
this sort of dialogue. "It should be the
politicians in Pakistan who
now should be moving in,"
he told me, "not only to
deal with our own tribal
areas but to help America
with a political settlement
and exit strategy."
These days. Khan
doesn'tfiyto Capitol Hill;
Americans are seeking him
out. A few weeks afrer the
Lahore rally, a delegation including the
U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron
Munter, paid him a visit at his offices in
a leafy section of Islamabad. Khan had
been anxious to leave for Khanpur, a
small town two hours to the northwest,
where he was due to speak at a rally. The
Americans were making him late. Afrer
Khan finally left his guests at the front
door, with smiles and handshakes, he
flashed a naughty grin. "They couldn't
get enough of me, I guess."
When Khan arrived at the rally, another enormous throng greeted him.
Wide-eyed young men pointed camera
phones at him, screaming out his name.
Scanning the crowd before taking the
stage. Khan surveyed the source of his
newfound political power. "If you have
tbe people with you, then you only need
Allah," Khan said, dismissing the old
saying that in Pakistani politics, a leader
needs two other A's behind him: America and the army. "We don't need them,"
he said before taking the stage, combing
his fingers through his hair. "They may
need us. We don't need them." El
Shahan Mufti is at work on a hook about Islam
in Pakistan.
SOVEREIGNTY
The Royal Me
W H A T ' S W I T H AUSTRALIA'S
SECESSION OBSESSION?
By Matt Siegel
ONE D O E S N ' T E X P E C T one's first
brush with royalty to take place in a
food court. Yet here I am, sitting in a
sticky pleather booth at a Sydney shopping mall with Princess Helena, a quiet,
matronly woman in her mid-60s, and
her emphatic, 40-something daughter.
Princess Paula. Helena sips hot chocolate regally, as Paula holds forth on
topics as varied as her correspondence
with Queen Elizabeth and the finer
points of the Montevideo Convention
of 1933. The man evidently in charge of
their security, a dour fellow with heavily pomaded hair, who goes by the name
Karl, sits perched between them and
the doorway.
After a few minutes of pleasantries and more hot chocolate, I fold
my hands on the table and delicately
broach the topic that has brought us
here: Why do these two women believe
that they are no longer subject to the
laws of Australia?
"At the moment, there are 193 member nations of the UN," Princess Paula
explains. "I would say that the majority
of those have been formed by secession
from some country or other." As proof
of her own nation's rightful sovereignty,
she pulls out land deeds, court documents, and Christmas cards from foreign leaders. "The U.S., as you well know,
seceded from England in 1776," she says.
"It's a remedial right, a last resort."
This is probably a good place to back
up and explain tbat few, if any, people
outside the food court believe Princess
Helena and Princess Paula to be royalty
of any sort. Yet the two maintain that
they rule the Principality of Snake Hill,
a sliver of land that seceded from Australia in 2003 following litigation over
a mortgage. (Paula says the territory is
"about the same size as Monaco" and
has several hundred citizens, though
both claims are subject to dispute.) Helena donned the crown as head of state
after the 2010 death of her husband,
Paul, who Karl says was assassinated
by a sniper. (Helena and Paula are disinclined to discuss the subject, saying
THE ATLANTIC
APRIL 2012
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