Pakistan: A Hard Country (83 page)

The overal question of the future of US – Indian relations is far too broad to be discussed here. What can be said is that a balance needs to be struck between the economic and security benefits to the West of closer ties to India and the security threats to the West stemming from a growth of Islamist militancy in Pakistan. In the end, not even the greatest imaginable benefits of US – Indian friendship could compensate for the actual col apse of Pakistan, with al the frightful dangers this would create not just for the West but for India too.

We should also not dream – as US neo-conservatives are apt to do – that India can somehow be used by the US to control Pakistani behaviour. The truth, as outlined by Ambassador Patterson, is exactly the opposite. Only Pakistanis can control Pakistan, and the behaviour of the Pakistani security establishment wil always be determined by what they see as the vital needs of Pakistan and the Pakistani army.

A new approach to Pakistan over the future of Afghanistan should therefore be part of a much deeper long-term engagement with Pakistan by the West in general, and one tied not to the temporary war in Afghanistan but to the permanent importance of Pakistan as a state.

This is crucial for Britain in particular, whose large minority of Pakistani origin retains extremely close ties with Pakistan and forms an enduring organic link between the two countries, and, through Britain, to Europe and North America.

Whatever happens, this human link is not going to go away. To help make it a force for good rather than a danger, the west needs to develop a much deeper knowledge of Pakistan, a much deeper stake in Pakistan, and a much more generous attitude to helping Pakistan. I hope that by showing Pakistan in al its complex patchwork of light and shadow, this book wil help to bring about such a new approach.

Notes

1 INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING PAKISTAN

1 Tariq Ali, Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (Penguin, London, 1983).

2 Pierre Lafrance, in Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Pakistan: Nation, Nationalism and the State (Vanguard Books, Lahore, 2002), p. 339.

3 Interview with the author, Lahore, 8/1/2009.

4 My attention was drawn to this fascinating statistic by Dr Shandana Mohmand of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

5 Alison Shaw, Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani Families in Britain (Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam, 2000), p. 99.

6 Ibid., p. 154.

7 Stephen M. Lyon, An Anthropological Analysis of Local Politics and Patronage in a Pakistani Village (Edwin Mel en, Lewiston, NY, 2004).

8 Quoted in Muhammad Azam Chaudhary, Justice in Practice: The Legal Ethnography of a Pakistani Punjabi Village (Oxford University Press, 1999).

9 Sudeep Chakravarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin, New Delhi, 2009).

10 Chaudhary, Justice in Practice; Lyon, Anthropological Analysis.

11 On the initiative of the ANP provincial government, the province was official y renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in April 2010, to reflect its majority Pathan population, known in their own language as Pakhtuns or Pashtuns. However, since it was known as the North West Frontier Province during the period of research for this book, and during the historical and recent events I describe, I have kept the old name.

12 See Joshua T. White, Pakistan’s Islamist Frontier: Islamic Politics and US Policy in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (Centre on Faith and International Affairs, Washington, DC, 2007).

13 Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (Penguin, London, 1978), p.

151.

14 Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (Free Press, New York, 2006), p. 126.

15 Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police, published 4 August 2009, on http://www.hrw.org. See also a book on police and criminals in Mumbai: Suketu Mehta, Maximum City (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005). And see also the reports of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the Indian treatment of Kashmiri detainees, as stated to US diplomats and revealed by WikiLeaks in the Guardian (London), 17 December 2010.

16 Figures from the Population Association of Pakistan website: http://www.pap.org.pk/statistics/

17 John Briscoe and Usman Qamar, Pakistan’s Water Economy: Running Dry (Oxford University Press, Oxford and the World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006), p. xiv.

18 Michael Kugelman and Robert M. Hathaway (eds), Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis (Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, 2009), Introduction, p. 24.

19 This point is made wel in an engaging memoir about an American student’s life in Pakistan: Ethan Casey, Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Difficult Time (Grand Central Publishing, New York, 2005).

20 The answer, I eventual y discovered, is the charmingly named demoisel e crane. In an interesting example of human (male) minds working in the same way across very different cultures, while some Western naturalist named them after young French girls, in Baloch poetry they are used to symbolize girls bathing (French or otherwise).

21 John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes (Penguin, London, 1956), pp.

203 – 6.

22 Sir Denzil Ibbetson, Panjab Castes (Civil and Military Gazette Press, Lahore, 1883, reprinted Sang-e-Meel, Lahore, 2001), p. 1.

2 THE STRUGGLE FOR MUSLIM SOUTH ASIA 1 Faiz Ahmed Faiz, ‘You tel us what to do’, in The True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated by Naomi Lezard (Vanguard Books, Lahore, 1988), p. 63.

2 Iqbal Akhund, Trial and Error: The Advent and Eclipse of Benazir Bhutto (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2000), p. 116.

3 This was true both of architecture and of human cultural resources. At partition, India got to keep the greater part of the Muslim cultural intel igentsia and – most miserably of al for most Pakistanis – of the nascent film world. India’s Bol ywood film industry would not exist in its present form without the contribution of great Muslim actors, actresses, directors and composers: Nargis, Waheeda Rehman, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, the greatest male hearthrob of the present age Shah Rukh Khan, and many others. On the other hand, in Saadat Hasan Manto, who left for Pakistan, Bol ywood lost what could have been its greatest writer.

4 Indeed, Muslim forces were as responsible for the fal of the Mughal empire as Hindus, Sikhs or the British. The single most shattering moment in the Mughal col apse was the capture and sack of Delhi itself in 1739 by the Persian and Afghan forces of Nadir Shah, an event so ghastly that it is stil commemorated by an Urdu word for atrocity, nadirshahi. In 1761, the city was sacked again by the founder of Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Durrani.

5 This belief also permeates the Pakistani diaspora in Britain; and not just ordinary people, but members of the educated elites as wel . Thus at a meeting of the Pakistan Society of University Col ege London which I addressed on 3 February 2010, the great majority of students who spoke thought that the US or Israel had carried out the 9/11

attacks. If this is true of students in Britain, then the chances of the West persuading students in Pakistan to support Western policy would seem negligible.

6 Cited in Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit (Chatto & Windus, London, 1964), p. 11.

7 Cited by S. M. Burke, Landmarks of the Pakistan Movement (Punjab University Press, Lahore, 2001), p. 182.

8 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985).

9 A curious last echo of Muslim League hopes for a united confederal India is to be found in the fact that the inscriptions on the tombs of Jinnah and his deputy Liaquat Ali in Karachi are in both Urdu and Hindi.

10 Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972), p. 239.

11 Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (Hurst & Co., London, 2005), p. 120.

12 Cited in Shafqat Tanveer Mirza, Resistance Themes in Punjabi Literature (Sang-e-Meel, Lahore, 1992), p. 162. I have changed the English translation slightly to eliminate bad grammar.

13 Liaquat’s assassination in 1951 was the first in a long series of unexplained kil ings of Pakistani politicians, which have contributed greatly to the conspiracy-mindedness which is one of the biggest curses of intel ectual life and public debate in Pakistan.

14 Figures at http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/GDP-Growth.aspx?Symbol=PKR.

15 For a description and analysis of the concept of modern ‘Sultanism’, see H. E. Chehabi and Juan J. Linz, Sultanistic Regimes (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1998).

16 Interview with the author, Lahore, 15/10/1988.

3 JUSTICE

1 Cited in G. C. J. J. van den Bergh, ‘The Concept of Folk Law in Historical Context: A Brief Outline’, in Alison Dundes Renteln and Alan Dundes (eds), Folk Law: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Lex Non Scripta, vol. I (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1995), p. 7.

2 Interview with the author, Mohmand Agency, 2/9/2008.

3 Ibid.

4 Akbar Hussain Al ahabadi (1846 – 1921), in The Best of Urdu Poetry, translated with an introduction by Khushwant Singh (Penguin Viking, New Delhi, 2007), p. 81. And he, by the way, was a British judge in India!

5 Interview with the author, Karachi, 17/4/2009.

6 Sir Cecil Walsh, KC, Crime in India (Ernest Benn, London, 1930), p.

31.

7 Ibid., p. 45.

8 Muhammad Azam Chaudhary, Justice in Practice (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999), pp. 25 – 6.

9 Interview with the author, Karachi, 17/4/2009.

10 Cited in C. van Vol enhoven, ‘Aspects of the Controversy on Customary Law’, in Renteln and Dundes (eds), Folk Law, vol. I, p. 254.

11 Interview with the author, Peshawar, 25/7/2009. See also Aurangzaib Khan, ‘Judge Thy Neighbour’, The Herald (Karachi), 40

(4), April 2009.

12 M. P. Jain, ‘Custom as a Source of Law in India’, in Renteln and Dundes (eds), Folk Law, vol. I, p. 75.

13 W. H. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, ed. Vincent A. Smith (1844; reprinted Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1980), p. 388.

14 Interview with the author, Karachi 2/5/2009.

15 Interview with the author, Multan, 18/1/2009.

16 James Traub, ‘Lawyers’ Crusade’, New York Times magazine, 1

June 2008.

17 District Gazetteers of Balochistan, 1906, edited and compiled by Mansoor Bokhari (reprinted Gosha-e-Adab, Quetta, 1997), vol. I, p. 94.

18 Jain, ‘Custom as a Source of Law’, p. 70.

19 Stephen M. Lyon, An Anthropological Analysis of Local Politics and Patronage in a Pakistani Village (Edwin Mel en, Lewiston, NY, 2004), p. 24.

4 RELIGION

1 Muhammad Iqbal, Mazhab, cited in Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (Routledge, London, 2000), p. 578.

2 Koran, Sura 2 (The Cow), verse 172.

3 Major Aubrey O’Brien, ‘The Mohammedan Saints of the Western Punjab’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 41 (1911), p.

511.

4 Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006), p. 52.

5 Ian Talbot and Shinder Thandi, People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post-Colonial Migration (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004), p. 183.

6 Saifur Rehman Sherani, ‘Ulema and Pir in Pakistani Politics’, in Hastings Donnan and Pnina Werbner (eds), Economy and Culture in Pakistan: Migrants and Cities in a Muslim Society (Macmil an, London, 1991), p. 221.

7 Interview with the author, Karachi, 7/11/1988.

8 Pnina Werbner, ‘Stamping the Earth with the Name of Al ah: Zikr and the Sacralising of Space among British Muslims’, Cultural Anthropology, 11 (1996), pp. 309 – 38.

9 Interview with the author, Lahore, 1/8/2009.

10 Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Shambhala, London, 1997), p. 213.

11 Interview with the author, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), 4/1/2009.

12 O’Brien, ‘The Mohammedan Saints’, p. 509.

13 Katherine Pratt Ewing, ‘Malangs of the Punjab: Intoxication or Adab as the Path to God?’ in Barbara Daly Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (California University Press, Berkeley, 1984), p. 363.

14 Hasan al-Banna, cited in Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought, with an introduction by Roy P. Mottahedeh (I. B. Tauris, London, 2005), p. 85.

15 http://www.jamaat.org.

16 Interview with the author, Abbotabad, NWFP, 12/8/2008.

17 Interview with the author, Faisalabad, 12/1/2009.

18 http://www.jamaat.org/new/english.

19 Interview with the author, Mansura, Lahore, 4/1/2009

20 Ibid.

21 Interview with the author, Islamabad, 30/4/2007.

22 Interview with the author, Peshawar, 2/5/2007.

5 THE MILITARY

1 Interview with the author, Karachi, 1/5/2009.

2 Interview with the author, Quetta, 1/8/2009.

3 Hasan-Askari Rizvi, Military, State and Society in Pakistan (Sang-e-Meel, Lahore, 2003), p. 8.

4 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army and the Wars Within (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008), pp. 446 – 58.

5 As recorded by US diplomats and revealed by WikiLeaks. See the Guardian (London), 1 December 2010.

6 Figures from The Military Balance 2009, published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, and Owen Bennett-Jones, Pakistan, Eye of the Storm (Yale University Press, London, 2009), pp. 270 – 72.

7 See Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc. Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2007).

8 Ibid., p. 212.

9 Interview with the author, Karachi, 1/5/2009.

10 Adnan Adil, ‘Pakistan’s Post 9/11 Economic Boom’, 21

September 2006, cited in Brian Cloughley, War, Coups and Terror: Pakistan’s Army in Years of Turmoil (Pen and Sword Books, Barnsley, 2008), p. 157.

11 Interview with the author, Rawalpindi, 27/7/2009.

12 Interview with the author, Peshawar, 28/7/2009.