Pakistan: A Hard Country (3 page)

Lastly, the Pakistani establishment long cherished the hope that it could use Pakistani help against the Taleban to bargain for US

pressure on India to reach a settlement with Pakistan over Kashmir.

This hope has faded with the refusal (compounded of unwil ingness and inability) of both the Bush and the Obama administrations to play such a role; but this refusal, and America’s ‘tilt towards India’, have added greatly to longstanding Pakistani feelings of betrayal by the US.

Pakistan’s help to the West against the Afghan Taleban would, however, have been limited in any case both by strategic calculation and mass sentiment. In terms of mass sentiment, the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis – including the communities from which most Pakistani soldiers are drawn – see the Afghan Taleban as engaged in a legitimate war of resistance against foreign occupation, analogous to the Mujahidin war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

In terms of strategy, the Pakistani establishment’s approach to Afghanistan has long been driven by a mixture of fear and ambition.

The fear is above al of Afghanistan, under the rule of the non-Pashtun nationalities, becoming an Indian client state, leading to India’s strategic encirclement of Pakistan. This fear has been increased by a wel -founded belief that India is supporting Pakistan’s Baloch nationalist rebels via Afghanistan, and by what seems by contrast to be a purely paranoid conviction that India is also supporting the Pakistani Taleban.

The greater part of the Pakistani establishment therefore believes that it needs to maintain close relations with the Afghan Taleban, since they are Pakistan’s only potential al ies in Afghanistan. In recent years, belief in the need for a relationship with the Taleban has been strengthened by the growing conviction that the West is going to fail in Afghanistan, and wil eventual y withdraw, leaving anarchy and civil war behind – just as occurred after the Soviet withdrawal and the fal of the Communist regime from 1989 – 92. In the resulting civil war, it is believed, every regional state wil have its own al ies – and so must Pakistan.

Incidental y, it is worth pointing out that even entirely secular members of the Pakistani establishment do not see the Afghan Taleban as moral y worse than the Taleban’s old enemies in the Afghan Northern Al iance leaders, with whom the West has in effect been al ied since 2001. Their atrocities and rapes in the 1990s helped cement Pathan support for the Taleban. They massacred Taleban prisoners and looted Western aid after the overthrow of the Taleban in 2001, and their role in the heroin trade has helped destroy any hope of the West curtailing that trade since 9/11.

Equal y, it is important to note that in the great majority of cases, both in the elites and in the mass of the population, this sympathy or support for the Afghan Taleban does not imply ideological approval, or any desire that Pakistan should experience a Taleban-style revolution – any more than support for the Mujahidin in the 1980s implied much liking for them.

Hence, too, the great difference in Pakistani attitudes to the Afghan and to the Pakistani Taleban. There was never a chance that the Pakistani establishment and army were going to let the Pakistani Taleban conquer Pakistan. The long delay in fighting them seriously was because they were not general y regarded as a serious threat to Pakistan, but were seen as a local Pathan rebel ion which could be contained by a mixture of force and negotiation; because many ordinary Pakistanis (including soldiers) saw them as misguided but nonetheless decent people dedicated to helping the good jihad in Afghanistan; because there was deep opposition to the state engaging in a Pakistani civil war for the sake of what were seen to be American interests – especial y among al sections of Pakistan’s Pathan population; and, final y, because the Pakistani military and its intel igence services were deeply entwined with jihadi groups which they had sponsored to fight against India in Kashmir, and which were in turn entwined with the Pakistani Taleban.

As soon as the Pakistani Taleban were seen by the establishment to be a real y serious threat to the central Pakistani state, in the spring of 2009, the army, with the backing of the PPP-led government and much of the establishment in general, took strong action to drive them back. The army’s victories over the Pakistani Taleban in Swat and South Waziristan have settled the question of whether Pakistan wil survive the Pakistani Taleban’s assault (barring once again an attack by the US or ful -scale war with India). They have, however, settled nothing when it comes to the question of the army’s wil ingness to fight hard against the Afghan Taleban for the sake of a Western victory in Afghanistan.

TOUGHER THAN IT LOOKS

Failing a catastrophic overspil of the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan wil therefore probably survive as a state. The destruction of united Pakistan and the separation of Bangladesh in 1971 are often cited as possible precedents for the future disintegration of today’s Pakistan; but this is quite wrong. No freak of history like united Pakistan, its two ethnical y and cultural y very different wings separated by 1,000 miles of hostile India, could possibly have lasted for long, quite apart from the immense cultural and linguistic differences between the two halves.

The tragedy is not that it failed, but that a situation made for a civilized divorce should instead have ended in horrible bloodshed.

West Pakistan by contrast is far more of a natural unity in every way, with a degree of common history and ethnic intertwining stretching back long before British rule. Pakistan in its present shape has already survived considerably longer without Bangladesh (thirty-eight years) than the original united Pakistan managed (twenty-four years).

It is true that ‘Pakistan’ as a name is a whol y artificial construct, invented by Rehmat Ali, an Indian Muslim student in Britain in 1933, to describe a future Muslim state in the north-west of the then British empire of India embracing Punjabis, Pathans, Kashmiris, Sindhis and the peoples of Balochistan, different parts of which names make up the word Pakistan. ‘Pak’ in turn means ‘pure’ in Urdu, and so Pakistan was to be ‘The Land of the Pure’.

In the imagination of the coiners of this name, there was no thought of including Muslim East Bengal in this state, so Bengalis had no part in the name; another sign of how completely improbable and impractical was the attempt in 1947 to create a viable state out of two pieces 1,000 miles apart. Certainly most of the Punjabis and Pathans who dominate West Pakistan never real y thought of the East Bengalis as fel ow countrymen or even true Muslims, shared much British racial contempt for them, and contrasted their al eged passivity with the supposedly virile qualities of the ethnicities dubbed by the British as ‘martial’, the Punjabis and Pathans.

The official language of Pakistan is native to neither of its old halves.

Urdu – related to ‘Horde’, from the Turkic-Persian word for a military camp – started as the military dialect of the Muslim armies of the Indian subcontinent in the Middle Ages, a mixture of local Hindustani with Persian and Turkic words. It was never spoken by Muslims in Bengal – but then it has never been spoken by most of the people of what is now Pakistan either. It was the language of Muslims in the heartland of the old Mughal empire, centred on the cities of Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Bhopal and Hyderabad, deep in what is now India.

Urdu is the official language of Pakistan, the language of the state education system, of the national newspapers, and of the film industry; but the only people who speak it at home are the Mohajirs, people who migrated from India after partition in 1947, and who make up only 7

per cent of Pakistan’s population.

However, what is now Pakistan is not nearly such an artificial construct as the old Pakistan of 1947 – 71. It has a geographical unity which in some respects is thousands of years old, being basical y the val ey of the River Indus plus neighbouring mountains, deserts and swamps. To a much greater extent than most post-colonial states, Pakistan therefore has a core geographical unity and logic.2

Moreover, most of Pakistan’s different ethnicities have lived alongside each other for mil ennia, have been Muslim for hundreds of years, and have often been ruled by the same Muslim dynasties.

Regional identity may be growing in political importance, with the 2008 elections showing a lower vote for the PPP in Punjab, and a lower vote for the Punjab-based Muslim League in other provinces. Al the same, with Pakistanis, there is usual y a wheel within a wheel, an identity within an identity, which in turn overlaps with another identity.

The only exceptions, the people with a single identity, are some of the Islamists, and some of the soldiers – but by no means al of either. Or as Ali Hassan, a young Lahori executive with a Norwegian company, said to me:

If I were to jump on a box and preach revolution, with the best programme in the world, you know what would happen? First, people from al the other provinces would say that we can’t fol ow him, he’s a Punjabi. Then most of the Punjabis would say, we can’t fol ow him, he’s a Jat. Then the Jats would say, we can’t fol ow him, he’s from such-and-such a biradiri. Even in my own vil age, half the people would say something like, I can’t fol ow him, his grandfather beat my uncle in a fight over land. If you preach Islamic revolution, most Pakistanis won’t fol ow you because they practise different kinds of Islam and worship different saints. So you see we Pakistanis can’t unite behind a revolution because we can’t unite behind anything.3

Or, in the saying common in Pakistan as across the Greater Middle East: ‘I against my brother, I and my brother against our cousins, and our family against our biradiri and our biradiri against other biradiri.’

Occasional y they end, ‘and Pakistan against the world’ – but not often.

Not surprisingly then, until recently at least, every attempt to unite large numbers of Pakistanis behind a religious, an ethnic or a political cause ended in the groups concerned being transformed by the everpresent tendency to political kinship and its incestuous sister, the hunt for state patronage. This wooed them away from radicalism to participation in the Pakistani political system, which revolves around patronage – something that is true under both military and civilian governments in Pakistan.

WEAK STATE, STRONG SOCIETIES

Indeed, a central theme of this book is that the difference between civilian and military regimes in Pakistan is far less than both Western and Pakistani analysts have suggested. A fundamental political fact about Pakistan is that the state, whoever claims to lead it, is weak, and society in its various forms is immensely strong. Anyone or any group with the slightest power in society uses it among other things to plunder the state for patronage and favours, and to turn to their advantage the workings of the law and the bureaucracy. Hence the astonishing fact that barely 1 per cent of the population pays income tax, and the wealthiest landowners in the country pay no direct taxes at al . As a state auditor in Peshawar said to me with a demoralized giggle, ‘If anyone took taxes seriously, I’d have the most difficult job in the world, but as it is I have the easiest.’

The weakness of the state goes far beyond a dependence on patronage for the survival of governments. To an extent most Westerners would find hard to grasp, the lack of state services means that much of the time, the state as such – as an agent with its own independent wil – does not necessarily affect many people’s lives very much, either in terms of benefits or oppressions. The presence of policemen, judges and officials may make it look as if the state is present, but much of the time these people are actual y working – and sometimes kil ing – on their own account, or at the behest of whoever has the most power, influence and money at a certain point, in a certain place.

The nineteenth-century British colonial official Sir Thomas Metcalf described the traditional vil ages of northern India as ‘little republics’, administering their own justice, deciding their own affairs, and paying only what tribute to the ‘state’ could be extracted from them by force.

This independence has been very greatly reduced over the years, but compared to any Western society a good deal of it stil exists in many areas, if not specifical y in the vil age, then in local society general y.

Society is strong above al in the form of the kinship networks which are by far the most important foci of most people’s loyalty.

For those readers who are really interested and have a few brain cel s to lose, a brief description of the horribly complex subject of kinship terms and groups in Pakistan is appended to the end of this introduction. Suffice it to say here that the language of kinship – even among people who are not in fact related – permeates most of Pakistan as it does most of South Asia, whether it is a matter of affection, responsibility, asking for favours or asking for protection. The most wonderful expression of this, which perfectly sums up India’s mixture of kinship, democracy and hierarchy, is the term with which you may wish to address a relatively menial person in northern India who happens to be in a position to help or harm you (like a bus-conductor): Bhai-sahib, or ‘Brother-Lord’.

Kinship is central to the weakness of the Pakistani state, but also to its stability, above al because of its relationship with class. Because the Pakistani political elites, especial y in the countryside, rely for their strength not just on wealth but on their leadership of clans or kinship networks, kinship plays a vital part in maintaining the dominance of the ‘feudal’ elites and many of the urban bosses.