Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven – review

Pakistan, 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 Pakistanis 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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