Pakistan isn’t a failed state that some media critics would like us to believe. But is it heading towards a meltdown of governance or a permanent state of anarchy even as Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many supporters take over the commanding heights of state power? Prima facie, this is what circumstantial evidence on the Osama bin Laden case (and earlier incidents) would tell us. So, can we conclude that a slow, insidious and long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis has been lit by the Taliban and Islamists that the state is unable, or partly unwilling, to put out? Superficially, this is what many of us would believe but Anatol Lieven, a professor of International Relations and Terrorism in King’s College, London, doesn’t believe so in Pakistan: A Hard Country (Allen Lane, Special Indian Price, Rs 499) as he tries to tell us in what could be described as The Idea of Pakistan.
Professor Lieven, who is both a scholar and a journalist, tells the Pakistan story in four parts: part one, “Land, people and history; part two, “Structures that deal with justice, religion, the military and politics”; Part three, “the provinces that cover the four main divisions of Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and the Pathans”; and part four or “the Taliban” with two chapters on its present status in Pakistan and its likely future.
It is an introduction to the making of Pakistan and its constituents, more addressed to the western reader than to us. We, on the sub-continent, have been provided with many more studies in depth on the army and its grip over the entire economy and over the politics of the state. However, it is useful as an introduction.
Begin with the central fact of Pakistan’s life, the military. A popular joke in Pakistan is that while all countries have an army, here we have an army that has a country. But does it have a stable and unified country any more? Look at the scene as it exists now.
In northern Pakistan, where the Taliban and its allies are largely in control, the situation is critical. State institutions are paralysed and over a million have fled their homes. The provincial government of North-West Frontier Province has gone into hiding and law and order has collapsed.
The overall economy is crashing, with drastic power cuts across the country as industry shuts down. Unemployment and lack of access to schools among the young are widespread, creating a new source of recruits for the Taliban. Mr Zardari and Mr Gilani spent the last year battling their political rivals instead of facing up to the Taliban threat and the economic crisis. This is not a cooked-up story but the exact scenario provided by official Pakistani sources and by Ahmed Rashid, one of the best-informed people on the current situation in Pakistan.
How widespread is the Taliban influence is perhaps the most important question that Professor Lieven just glosses over possibly because these areas were simply not accessible to him. But, according to the Islamabad columnist Farrukh Saleem, 11 per cent of Pakistan’s territory is either directly controlled or contested by the Taliban. Ten per cent of Balochistan, in the southwest of the country, is a no-go area because of another raging insurgency led by Baloch separatists. Karachi, the port city of 17 million, is an ethnic and sectarian tinderbox waiting to explode. The Taliban is now penetrating into Punjab, Pakistan’s political and economic heartland where the major cities of Lahore and Islamabad are located and where 60 per cent of the country’s 170 million people live.
Clearly, the Taliban has taken advantage of the vacuum of governance by carrying out suicide bombings (the average age of a suicide bomber is just 17) in major cities across the country. This description is not trumped up by anti-Pakistani observers but is a summary of recent happenings as reported in the Pakistani press.
Why has Pakistan dug itself into this hole? Professor Lieven has just air-brushed these issues, though he doesn’t quite ignore them. There are two factors: the role of the military that permeates every nook and corner of governance, and the essentially feudal nature of society.
The chapter on the military, from which the book draws its strength, covers all aspects of life in Pakistan, to an extent unimaginable here.
“The Pakistani military … suffers from one tragic feature which has been with it from the beginning, and which has done terrible damage to Pakistan and which could in some circumstances destroy it and its armed forces altogether… that is, its obsession with India in general, and Kashmir in particular… As Bhutto once said, ‘Kashmir must be liberated if Pakistan has to have its full meaning’.” And this message has permeated right down to the masses, mainly because of the ISI that has been described as “the intellectual core and centre of gravity of the army. Without the ISI, the army is just an elephant without eyes and ears”. You can figure out why the military is in cahoots with the ISI and why the two must have been involved in the bin Laden case.
