SLEEPWALKING TO SURRENDER
Khaled Ahmed
Penguin Viking
463 pages; Rs 699
"The Jihad in Kashmir is at a critical stage and cannot be disrupted. We have been covering our tracks so far and will cover them even better in the future. These are empty threats. The United States could not declare Pakistan a terrorist state because of our strategic importance… All we need to do is to buy more time and improve our diplomatic effort. The focus should be on Indian atrocities in Kashmir, not on our support for the Kashmiri resistance."
The quote is almost a quarter of a century old (1992) and spoken by Javed Nasir, then chief of Inter-Services Intelligence, as he was explaining to Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister of Pakistan, why the latter should ignore US Secretary of State James Baker's letter complaining about "direct covert Government of Pakistan support" to "Kashmiri and Sikh militants who carry out acts of terrorism".
Regular readers of Khaled Ahmed's columns would know how difficult a task it can be to quote from his work - there are just too many stunning stories, anecdotes and insights to make the choice easy. So I have allowed the news peg to help me out. Following the attack on the Uri army base, most of India is gripped with anger and helplessness. People are sitting around in circles, alternatively wringing their hands, throwing them up and slamming them on the table, wondering how Pakistan can manage to get away with it time and time again. The quote above not only shows how those driving the events from across the border viewed the situation in the past but also how little has changed since.
But, as Mr Ahmed details in his book, Sleepwalking to Surrender, Pakistan has incurred humongous costs for letting, as he puts it while narrating the incident above, IQ be ambushed by ideology. Mr Ahmed quotes former World Bank Pakistani economist Shahid Javed Burki's 2007 estimates that the Kashmir dispute alone had cost Pakistan 2.25 per cent to 3.2 per cent a year of growth loss in GDP terms. Compounded over a period of six decades, the direct economic loss is "colossal". However, even losses of this magnitude for a poor country like Pakistan are nothing in comparison to the cost of Islamic extremism unleashed in the process. And that is the subject matter of the book.
The truth is, over time the so-called non-state actors have actually become the state. Reading the book shows that it is misleading to imagine that India can fight a known enemy in the form of the Pakistan state. Frankly, before anyone else, their ideological monsters have already gnawed away the roots of nationhood in Pakistan. There are just too many sub-national plots for anyone to keep a tab, it seems. The book, in all its meticulous detail, makes one wonder if it is even worth wasting one's time fighting Pakistan - it already appears to be a doomed nation.
So while the rest of the world is firming its views on how to tackle terror, Pakistan's main concern is to have peace talks with the Taliban. In the bargain, Taliban gets its operatives out of state prisons, "most of them returning piously to their job of killing innocent people." Taliban today has an upper hand over the Pakistan state because it enjoys greater sway with the media as well. And what is Taliban's vision for Pakistan? In February 2014, a Taliban spokesperson stated that the "Taliban aspires to making its chief Mullah Fazullah the caliph of Pakistan under a suzerain in Afghanistan…"
Sleepwalking… is a smart book, divided into 32 chapters, each of which could be read like a longish column in a newspaper. It is not a book for beginners since Mr Ahmed does not go about giving boring sequential accounts, or proper introductions, of actors and organisations. Instead, he has largely focused on 2013 and 2014 and each chapter starts with some sordid event - and there were many in Pakistan over the past few years - and proceeds like a freewheeling conversation about the how the dramatis personae behaved and why. In doing so, as an aside, Mr Ahmed provides short and snappy introductions to the numerous personalities across the spectrum - civil servants, politicians, army and ISI officials and the heads of the various jamaats,among others.
In the same way, while narrating the events, Mr Ahmed refers to several books, written by Pakistanis as well as foreigners, to provide context and background, often quoting interesting paragraphs from those books. By the time one finishes his book, there is a handy list of the books to read on Pakistan. The text is peppered with revealing insights without impeding the flow.
Lastly, for Indian readers and especially for anyone who is deeply concerned by the upwelling of radical Hindutva, Mr Ahmed's description of current-day Pakistan is a scary warning. Sample this: "The new extremist Muslim mind favours Islamic punishments (hudood) without 'due process' and wants to punish people for not doing good things like saying namaz." Think Dadri, Gauraksha and all-round moral policing - religious and ideological extremism appears more infectious than previously imagined. That is why one doesn't know how to react when Mr Ahmed argues: "…India is lucky it is not an ideological state and its masses are not given to extremism…."
