Pakistan A Hard Country

Pakistan a hard country
kistan, Anatol Lieven writes in his new book, 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". It is easy to conclude, as many have, from this roll
call of infirmities that Pakistan is basically Afghanistan or Somalia with
nuclear weapons. Or is this a dangerously false perception, a product of wholly
defective assumptions?
Certainly, an unblinkered vision of South Asia would feature a country whose
fanatically ideological government in 1998 conducted nuclear tests, threatened
its neighbour with all-out war and, four years later, presided over the
massacre of 2,000 members of a religious minority. Long embattled against
secessionist insurgencies on its western and eastern borders, the "flailing"
state of this country now struggles to contain a militant movement in its
heartland. It is also where thousands of women are killed every year for failing
to bring sufficient dowry and nearly 200,000 farmers have committed suicide
in the previous decade.
Needless to say, the country described above is not Pakistan but India, which,
long feared to be near collapse, has revamped its old western image through
what the American writer David Rieff calls the most "successful national re-
branding" and "cleverest PR campaign" by a political and business
establishment since "Cool Britannia" in the 1990s. Pakistan, on the other
hand, seems to have lost all control over its international narrative.
Western governments have coerced and bribed the Pakistani military into
extensive wars against their own citizens; tens of thousands of Pakistanis have
now died (the greatest toll yet of the "war on terror"), and innumerable
numbers have been displaced, in the backlash to the doomed western effort to
exterminate a proper noun. Yet Pakistan arouses unrelenting hostility and
disdain in the west; it lies exposed to every geopolitical pundit armed with the
words "failing" or "failed state".
Such intellectual shoddiness has far-reaching consequences in the real world:

for instance, the disastrous stigmatisation of "AfPak" has shrunk a large and
complex country to its border with Afghanistan, presently a site of almost
weekly massacres by the CIA's drones.
Pakistan's numerous writers, historians, economists and scientists frequently

challenge the dehumanising discourse about their country. But so manifold
and obdurate are the clichés that you periodically need a whole book to shatter
them. Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country is one such blow for clarity and
sobriety.
Lieven is more than aware of the many challenges Pakistan confronts; in fact,
he adds climate change to the daunting list, and he is worried that Pakistan
may indeed fall apart if the United States continues to pursue its misbegotten
war in the region, thereby risking a catastrophic mutiny in the military, the
country's most efficient institution. But Lieven is more interested in why
Pakistan is also "in many ways surprisingly tough and resilient as a state and a
society" and how the country, like India, has for decades mocked its obituaries
which have been written obsessively by the west.
Briskly, Lieven identifies Pakistan's many centrifugal and centripetal forces:

"Much of Pakistan is a highly conservative, archaic, even sometimes inert and
somnolent mass of different societies." He describes its regional variations:
the restive Pashtuns in the west, the tensions between Sindhis and migrants
from India in Sindh, the layered power structures of Punjab, and the tribal
complexities of Balochistan. He discusses at length the varieties of South
Asian Islam, and their political and social roles in Pakistani society.
Some of Lieven's cliché-busting seems straightforward enough. Islamist

politics, he demonstrates, are extremely weak in Pakistan, even if they provoke
hysterical headlines in the west. Secularists may see popular allegiance to
Islam as one of the biggest problems. But, as Lieven rightly says, "the cults of
the saints, and the Sufi orders and Barelvi theology which underpin them, are
an immense obstacle to the spread of Taliban and sectarian extremism, and of
Islamist politics in general."
From afar, a majority of Pakistanis appear fanatically anti-American while

also being hopelessly infatuated with Sharia. Lieven shows that, as in Latin
America, anti-Americanism in Pakistan is characterised less by racial or
religious supremacism than by a political bitterness about a supposed ally that
is perceived to be ruthlessly pursuing its own interests while claiming virtue
for its blackest deeds. And if many Pakistanis seem to prefer Islamic or tribal
legal codes, it is not because they love stoning women to death but because the
modern institutions of the police and judiciary inherited from the British are
shockingly corrupt, not to mention profoundly ill-suited to a poor country.
As one of Lieven's intelligent interlocutors in Pakistan points out, many

ordinary people dislike the Anglo-Saxon legal system partly because it offers
no compensation: "Yes, they say, the law has hanged my brother's killer, but
now who is to support my dead brother's family (who, by the way, have ruined
themselves bribing the legal system to get the killer punished)?"
Lieven, a reporter for the Times in Pakistan in the late 1980s, has
supplemented his early experience of the country with extensive recent
travels, including to a village of Taliban sympathisers in the North West
Frontier, and conversations with an impressive cross-section of Pakistan's
population: farmers, businessmen, landowners, spies, judges, clerics,
politicians, soldiers and jihadis. He commands a cosmopolitan range of
reference – Irish tribes, Peronism, South Korean dictatorships, and Indian
caste violence – as he probes into "the reality of Pakistan's social, economic
and cultural power structures".
Approaching his subject as a trained anthropologist would, Lieven describes

how Pakistan, though nominally a modern nation state, is still largely
governed by the "traditions of overriding loyalty to family, clan and religion".
There is hardly an institution in Pakistan that is immune to "the rules of
behavior that these loyalties enjoin". These persisting ties of patronage and
kinship, which are reminiscent of pre-modern Europe, indicate that the work
of creating impersonal modern institutions and turning Pakistanis into
citizens of a nation state – a long and brutal process in Europe, as Eugen
Weber and others have shown – has barely begun.
This also means that, as Lieven writes, "very few of the words we commonly
use in describing the Pakistani state and political system mean what we think
they mean, and often they mean something quite different." Democratically
elected leaders can be considerably less honest and more authoritarian than
military despots since all of Pakistan's "democratic" political parties are
"congeries of landlords, clan chieftains and urban bosses seeking state
patronage for themselves and their followers and vowing allegiance to
particular national individuals and dynasties". (With some exceptions, this is
also true of India's intensely competitive, and often very violent, electoral
politics; it explains why 128 of the 543 members of the last Indian parliament
faced criminal charges, ranging from murder to human trafficking, and why
armies of sycophants still trail the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty).
Lieven's book is refreshingly free of the condescension that many western

writers, conditioned to see their own societies as the apogees of civilisation,
bring to Asian countries, assessing them solely in terms of how far they have
approximated western political and economic institutions and practices. He
won't dismiss Pakistan's prospects for stability, or its capacity to muddle along
like the rest of us, simply because, unlike India, it has failed to satisfactorily
resemble a European democracy or nation state. Rather, he insists on the long
and unconventional historical view. "Modern democracy," he points out, "is a
quite recent western innovation. In the past European societies were in many
ways close to that of Pakistan today – and indeed modern Europe has
generated far more dreadful atrocities than anything Islam or South Asia has
yet achieved."
Busy exploding banalities about Pakistan, Lieven develops some blind spots of
his own; they include a more generous view of the Pakistani military than is
warranted. He doesn't make clear if Pakistan's security establishment can
abandon its highly lucrative, and duplicitous, arrangement with the United
States, or withdraw its support for murderous assaults on Indian civilians.
Still, Lieven overturns many prejudices, and gives general readers plenty of
fresh concepts with which to think about a routinely misrepresented country.
Transcending its self-defined parameters, his book makes you reflect
rewardingly, too, about how other old, pluralist and only superficially modern
societies in the region work. "Pakistan is in fact a great deal more like India –
or India like Pakistan – than either country would wish to admit," Lieven
writes, and there is hardly a chapter in which he doesn't draw, with bracing
accuracy, examples from the socioeconomic actuality of Pakistan's big
neighbour. Easily the foremost contemporary survey of "collapsing" Pakistan,
Lieven's book also contains some of the most clear-sighted accounts of "rising"
India.
Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West is published by Picador.

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Pakistan a hard country

kistan, Anatol Lieven writes in his new book, is "divided, disorganised,

Such intellectual shoddiness has far-reaching consequences in the real world:

Pakistan's numerous writers, historians, economists and scientists frequently

Briskly, Lieven identifies Pakistan's many centrifugal and centripetal forces:

Some of Lieven's cliché-busting seems straightforward enough. Islamist

From afar, a majority of Pakistanis appear fanatically anti-American while

As one of Lieven's intelligent interlocutors in Pakistan points out, many

Approaching his subject as a trained anthropologist would, Lieven describes

Lieven's book is refreshingly free of the condescension that many western

Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West is published by Picador.

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