Going soft on a hard country

PAKISTAN is the antithesis of an enigma - it splutters and gags at the slightest hint of neoteric progress, folds and refolds itself along the exhausted creases of its feudal lineages and has spent 60 plus years strategising on default when it should have been clicking on the ‘customise’ button when presented with large swathes of opportunity, and yet it perseveres. It is within this mangled perspective that Anatol Lieven’s masterstroke of investigative reporting, Pakistan A Hard Country, presents to readers the sweeping generalisations about a country. He has spent more than 20 years researching, and then proceeds to drill holes so deep into those same stereotypes that one cannot help but secretly marvel at what it is that actually makes this potential time bomb tick.

Officially released in April this year, Lieven’s book could not have accessed shelf space at a timelier hour in the nation’s seemingly blighted history: Salmaan Taseer had bitten the bullet, Raymond Davis had hit and run, US-Pak relations were vaulted in cold storage and the muted ambush and death of Osama bin Laden by a team of US Navy SEALS was barely a month away. A routine few months for Pakistan perhaps, an explosive setting for a book that turns the page on what we perceive, know, imagine and, quite simply, conspire about a country commonly referred to as being so far down the rabbit hole that the sky often appears little more than a pin prick.

Well then, the sky is falling and Anatol Lieven is secretly gloating somewhere at the book’s immensely successful disbandment of fact versus fiction. Any modern, analytical work produced on Pakistan today carries an undertone, overtone - the only tone - severed from optimism, of all that could be wrong about a country from poverty so prevalent it seems state endorsed, corruption so deep-rooted its branches have coiled and manacled themselves around every state institution, and terrorism so indiscriminate it has made the country one large killing field. Anatol talks about this collective malaise but manages to wrench out from these fault-lines a country and its people so adamant on persevering that the idea of a ‘failed state’ seems to fail on every count.
 
Not only is Pakistan A Hard Country one of the most comprehensive studies of the widening cracks that threaten - to the outside world - to swallow the nation whole into its pit of state failures and two-pronged strategies, this almanac is a hardbound struggle to outshine the perceptions with the potentials.

Divided into easily identifiable chapters and bracketed into carefully researched boxes of study, the book outlines everything from the history, religion, justice, military and provinces of this land to the state’s fight against the Taliban. Global relevance and regional importance aside, Lieven’s book is an anthropological foray into keen image-building by understanding Pakistan with all its nuances, seemingly uncivilised methods of delivering and delusions of grandeur and then telling the world that this is not necessarily a bad thing. “The traditional codes of Pakistan are based on quite different aims: the defence of collective honour and prestige, the restoration of peace and the maintenance of basic order” - not exactly ignoble aims.
 
As a Pakistani, this book did for me what very few home-gown analysts and self-styled thinkers have so far failed to amplify: Lieven has made what used to seem uncouth and, at times, barbaric seem tolerable - “no Pakistani can feel that his state law is Pakistani law…for the obvious reason that it isn’t. It is British law, as transmitted by British rule…somewhat modified by Pakistani governments and parliaments.” It is because of this reason that the traditional and ‘backward’ jirga system - as explained by Lieven - exists: to ensure that, unlike the corrupt judicial system in Pakistan where more often than not punishment does not follow the crime, tribal justice ensures speedy justice, an eye for an eye and compensation. In a country where the majority lives below the line that is even allowed to fantasise about welfare and hurried justice, this is an extremely workable system, no matter how savage the world may see it as.
 
There are stark contrasts in this book as well, where the untouchables overlap with the common man, but from a distance. In Pakistan, being ‘untouchable’ means being unreachable: the army and religion are impenetrable - one is a family onto itself and the other is an entity so fractured by disbanded beliefs and splintered claims that there is never any common consensus. “For the military the image of paradise is the cantonment, with its clean, swept, neatly signposted streets…In the blaring, stinking violent world of the modern ‘third world’ Muslim inner city, the mosque provides an oasis of calm and reflection” - Pakistan’s military and religion are two very unique, very untouchable families complete with their dysfunctions and patronage.
 
From kinship struggles, excess feudal baggage and interventions whether of the military kind or the religious kind in anything from politics and geography to the stories of the heartland, Lieven’s work narrates the wrath and the absolution, the primitiveness and the civility, the uncountable blunders and the still living beliefs that dot the landscape with their undeniable presence and effects. The now epicentre of the war on terror, the haven for almost all that could be wrong going wrong and the base camp of strife, warfare, militancy and disregard for law and order is, in a way, legitimised by Anatol by being presented as ‘liveable’. In this day and age, Pakistan, the hard country being treated to a softer approach certainly does seem like an achievement.

Book- Pakistan: A Hard Country; Author: Anatol Lieven; Language: English; ISBN: 978-1-846-14457-8; Price: 499; Pages: 560