FOREIGN AFFAIRS: MARY FITZGERALDreviews Pakistan: A Hard CountryBy Anatol Lieven Allen Lane, 560pp. £30
FOUR DAYS after Osama bin Laden was killed during a US Navy Seals raid on a villa in northwest Pakistan, a column appeared in Dawn, the venerable newspaper established by the country's founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. In it, the writer Cyril Almeida captured the anguish felt by many Pakistanis as they struggled to come to terms with the fact that the world's most wanted man had been living for several years close to Pakistan's equivalent of Sandhurst. "Did [the Pakistani army] know he was here? Surely they knew he was here," Almeida wrote. "If we didn't know, we are a failed state; if we did know, we are a rogue state."
Pakistan is no stranger to such epithets. So many times it has been described as failing, failed or rogue. So many times its obituary has been written by western critics who deplore it as unstable, hopeless and impossible to understand, let alone govern. It is seen by some as an entity whose very creation was questionable, if not misguided; a nuclear-armed state caught in a debilitating existential crisis, the effects of which extend far beyond its borders, making it an “international migraine”, as the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright once put it.
Yet Pakistan, despite its innumerable fault lines, endures – just about. I remember an animated conversation with Pakistani friends after a trip we made late last year to the Swat Valley to assess how Pakistan’s northwest was coping after being ravaged first by militancy and then by the devastating late-summer floods that swept entire villages away. We discussed how, aside from tensions between liberal and conservative or secularist and Islamist, Pakistan struggles to contain its other fractures: the sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia, ethnic rivalries, the nationalist rebellion in Baluchistan and the threat from the Pakistani Taliban, home-grown militants who have gained in strength and ambition in recent years. “We always seem dangerously close to the brink,” said one friend. “But somehow, despite all the odds, Pakistan always survives.”
Anatol Lieven’s hefty volume echoes this, arguing that Pakistan, far from being another Somalia in the making, is “tougher than it looks” and, in some unexpected ways, quite stable. That said, he does not shrink from the country’s many woes, writing that it is “divided, disorganised, economically backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism”.
Indeed, Lieven admits that there were times during the writing of the book when “it seemed that it would have to be titled ‘Requiem for a Country’ ”, given the unprecedented pressures on Pakistan from without as well as within.
Lieven, who lived in Pakistan as a foreign correspondent two decades ago, draws on that experience as well as more recent research trips in his capacity as professor of international relations and terrorism studies at King’s College London. The result is an insightful book that is part anthropological study, part reportage. Threaded throughout are the voices of ordinary Pakistanis – farmers, politicians, spooks, landowners, businessmen, soldiers, judges, clerics and jihadis – whose contributions in the form of direct quotes enliven and illuminate this complex yet affectionate portrait of their country.
Published just before bin Laden’s death, the book does not read as if it has been overtaken by events. Indeed, its textured, penetrating survey of the dynamics shaping contemporary Pakistan could hardly be more timely, given the relative dearth of literature on the subject. Lieven makes a compelling case for why we should pay more attention to what is one of the most important but least understood countries in the world.
Pakistan’s geopolitical significance needs little explanation, sitting as it does between China, India and Iran. Apart from being a nuclear power, the country has an all-powerful army that is one of the world’s largest. With a population – already almost two-thirds that of the entire Arab world – predicted to reach 335 million by mid-century, state failure would have far-reaching consequences.
Lieven’s central thesis is that Pakistan is far more resilient and durable than it appears, due to dense networks of kinship which result in a political system based on patronage. This, he writes, makes Pakistan a “negotiated state” where institutions and political actors engage in the constant brokering of authority. He argues that while this deep-rooted clientelism is a huge obstacle to Pakistan’s development as a modern democratic state, the social conservatism underpinning it acts as a brake on revolutionary forces, particularly those of the Islamist variety.
Challenging the type of scaremongering that often reduces Pakistan’s complexity to little more than the beards-and-guns stereotype, Lieven says the key question is not why Islamist political movements are so strong in Pakistan, but why they are so weak – such parties have never garnered much more than 10 per cent of the vote.
The book falls down, however, in its overly sympathetic examination of Pakistan’s military and wider security apparatus. Lieven’s view of the army skates close to apologia, all the more so in light of the bin Laden episode, which yet again raised questions about suspected duplicity when it comes to relations with the US.
To the familiar list of challenges faced by Pakistan, Lieven adds another: climate change. The fate of the Indus River, which runs like a spine down the length of the country, is crucial. Water shortages or catastrophic flooding could strain to breaking point the kinship and patronage networks that anchor society. Lieven also warns against large-scale military intervention by US ground forces, arguing that this would risk splitting Pakistan’s most stable institution, its army, and could plunge the country into civil war. Such a scenario, he writes, would be “the shortest road to victory for al-Qaeda”. A sobering thought in the wake of bin Laden’s killing.
Mary Fitzgerald is Foreign Affairs Correspondent of
The Irish Times. She has reported from Pakistan several times since 2002.
