Growing Up In Pakistan In The 1980s,

Living In A Place Like Pakistan, Very Often You Meet People Who Are Migrating Abroad. And Sometimes You'll Ask Their Parents, You Know - You Didn't Try To Stop Them? Like, Why Didn't You Say, Don't Go - I'll Miss You? Stay With Me. And, You Know, People Say, Well, It's Best For Them. They Have To Go. And Parents, You Know, Take On That Sadness Because They Know It's Better For Their Children If They Leave.

You Know, Very Often, If You Look At The Kinds Of Communications That They're Getting In An Isis Recruiting Video, The Videos That, You Know, That One Hears Of As Radicalizing Them, These Are Like Action Movies. And So In The Sense, It's That By Closing Off The Idea That Young Muslims And Particularly Young Muslim Men Can Be American Heroes, It Increases The Chance That They'll Try To Be Some Other Kind Of Hero. And That, I Think, Is Entirely Counterproductive.

Think That The External Situation Has Also Changed Somewhat. The Reduction Of U.s. And Nato Forces In Afghanistan Has, In A Sense, Reduced How Inflamed The Situation On The Pakistani Border Regions Was And Is.

When We Aren't Collectively Imagining Hopeful Futures, Then The Way Things Are Going Almost Invariably Seems Negative And Frightening.

Contemporary Culture In Pakistan, Just Like In America, Is Continuously Hitting Us With Scary Stuff. And So We Are Utterly Anxious. I Think That It's Very Important To Resist That Anxiety, To Think Of Ways Of Resisting The Constant Inflow Of Negative Feelings, Not To Become Depoliticized As A Result But To Actually Work Actively To Bring Into Being An Optimistic Future.