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Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven – review

P akistan, 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 Pakistan is 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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“ Pakistan: A Hard Country ” is written by Anatol Lieven , who is a British author, policy analyst, and journalist (1985-1998). He did his BA and PhD from Cambridge University, England. He is the director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a member of the advisory committee of the South Asia department of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

His well-researched masterpiece “Pakistan: A Hard Country” was published in 2011, which includes twelve chapters distributed in four parts in which he basically explicates the domestic or internal policies, issues, structures, dynamics and struggle of Pakistan (as its title suggests) rather than external ones. This book elucidates the power and political society of Pakistan in depth.

Part I: “Land, People and History” analyzes historical development of Pakistan in pre- and post-independence period. This part includes two chapters. Chapter 1 is about the introduction and understanding of the internal affairs and dynamics of Pakistan. In this chapter, Author explicates the nature of Pakistan as disorganized, divided, economically backward, violent, corrupt and unjust and in many ways, tough and resilient as a state and a society. The National Finance Commission Award of 2010 demonstrated that Pakistan’s democracy, its federalism and political process retain a measure of flexibility, compromise and vitality. Pakistan will survive as a state, despite of separation of East Pakistan in 1971 and failing a catastrophic overspill of the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan has a core geographical unity and logic. According to him, the political fact is that a state is weak (whoever claims to lead it), whereas society in its diverse kinds is strong. Chapter 2 focuses on the struggle of Muslims of South Asia, how their struggle shaped their future, how Pakistan emerged as a separate independent state and the governmental failure (both civilian and military) that resulted from internal weaknesses of the State.

Part II: “Structures” includes four chapters in which the author elucidates the diverse aspects of power and structures in Pakistan; Justice, Religion, the Military and Politics respectively. Chapter 3 of this part mainly highlights the features of the Judicial system of Pakistan (though derived from British), the biases it inherits against the weak and poor, the nature and role of this system in the State and how competition of judicial codes hinders the development of the State. Chapter 4 focuses on role of religion, as Islam became state religion in 1973’s Constitution, how it prevented extremism and the different traditions it contains in the State. Chapter 5 explicates the role of the military (in both the defense and politics of Pakistan), its composition, functioning and influence in Pakistan.

Part III: “Provinces” branches out into different provinces of Pakistan; Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, along with diversity of the State. Chapter 6 basically highlights different political parties, their role and their politics, the role played by media in the State. At one place, author highlighted the general image of Pakistan’s political system portrayed by Western as well as national analysts that Pakistan’s political system is two-faced:

• It is bad for the overall economic development of the State.
• It creates obstacles to revolutionary changes.

Chapter 7 elucidates the characteristics of the biggest province of Pakistan with respect to population; Punjab, its history, regions, the impact of politics and its regional importance. Chapter 8 highlights the insecurity in the provincial capital of Sindh and the largest city of Pakistan; Karachi. He further emphasizes the history of Sindh in pre- and post-independence period, role of ethnicity, politics, social order and traditional systems in this feudal dominated province. Chapter 9 spotlights the characteristics of Balochistan; the largest province of Pakistan with respect to area and the smallest province with respect to population; highly enriched in mineral and energy resources, its strategic importance, ethnicity, tribalism and role in development of Pakistan and vice versa. It has both disputed history as well as population. Author has criticized the role played by State towards Balochistan that resulted into insurgency due to marginalization and exploitation of resources and benefits of this region by Punjab dominant Federal government over the local tribal population. Chapter 10 emphasizes the aspects of the Pathans, the people having proud history of independence, their traditional systems, nationalism, ethnic pride and political cultures.

Part IV: “Taliban” has two chapters in which author mainly explicates the roles of the Taliban; their rebellion and defeat. Chapter 11 illustrates the Pakistani Taliban’s nature, lineage, and support by the Pakistani government towards them. Chapter 12 mainly emphasizes the turbulence created by Taliban in some areas of Pakistan and their defeat, the role of public opinion, the part played by political parties, army and the police in defeat of threat that militants would push the Pakistan towards collapse by 2010.

Author has briefly concluded his two decades research by saying that Pakistan, a deeply troubled and a tough state, is likely to survive as a country despite many threats. Ecological change is a major threat to Pakistan rather than insurgency. Whatever policy Afghanistan adopts will influence Pakistan to a larger extent as more than half of the Pathan ethnicity lives in Pakistan, who maintain strong interest in their neighboring Afghan Pathans across the Durand Line. USA should use Pakistan as a mediator to enhance peace talks with Taliban to reach a settlement rather than by using force. Pakistan, being neighbor, can play prominent role in negotiations and West should recognize the legitimate goals of Pakistan in Afghanistan.

The author has criticized the intervention of ground forces of the USA in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) as this will escalate mutiny in Pakistan. The US should limit Indian involvement in Afghanistan and West should play part in order to resolve the Kashmir dispute and needs to adopt a generous attitude to assist Pakistan. Furthermore, he emphasized on cooperation between US and China for safeguarding Pakistan’s survival at regional level. Author has tried to anticipate the future of South Asia and standing of Pakistan in World’s Politics.

Lieven has given a perspicacious prospect of Pakistan, encompassing its cohesiveness and dysfunctionality simultaneously. He provides historical analysis, anthropological investigation, and deep analysis of its internal dynamics, structures, issues, and outcomes. Additionally, he delves into the political structures and culture, demographic swathes, history, religious traditions, and regions, striving to cover almost all aspects of Pakistani society. The author also accentuates the influence of climate change and global warming, emphasizing the ecological catastrophe by highlighting the floods of 2010. These floods devastated the state’s systems, damaged infrastructure, decimated agriculture and livestock, and resulted in a substantial loss of lives. Lieven adopts an analytical approach, traveling across the state and utilizing empirical resources to incorporate the voices of politicians, intelligence officers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, religious personalities, soldiers, and common people.

The author is currently acquiring BS in International Relations at the School of Politics & International Relations, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. She tweets at @_Amna_Zaman_

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• Pakistan: A Hard Country | Book Review

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Book Author:   Anatol Lieven

In post 9/11 era, Pakistan has been portraying by the mainstream scholars as a hazardous place on the face of the earth on the basis of its deteriorating security situation, declining economic condition and social unrest in the form of street protests and strikes. The prevailing transnational threat of terrorism in the presence of nuclear weapons has associated the probabilities of nuclear terrorism to Pakistan. Henceforth, the terrorism has become a gravest threat to Pakistan’s national security. It also provided sufficient chances to its traditional rivals to consciously criticize the state’s core values. Under the US led-war on terror, Pakistan has become an essential ingredient of US politics of South Asia. The Antol Lieven’s magisterial examination, after examining the Pakistan’s present position along with the evolution of history, foresee of future of Pakistan and its standing in the world politics.

Debate on Pakistan

The well-articulated research work of a London based scholar Lieven under the title of Pakistan: A Hard Country is a remarkable contribution in the ongoing debate on Pakistan and its allegedly continuous standing in world politics. Lieven, a former journalist of The Times , is presently a Professor of International Relations and Terrorism Studies at King’s College London. The analytical approach of the writer in this book describes the analysis of Pakistan’s internal and external problems. The central theme of the books is constructed on the view that the state is “divided, disorganized, economically backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism.” (p. 4).

Nontraditional Security Threats to Pakistan

The book represents 20year analysis of Lieven’s research on Pakistan’s status in the contemporary world. The debate begins with the significance of nontraditional security threat to Pakistan. The four portions of Lieven’s work cover four different dimensions of state. The first portion deals with the historical foundations of the state along with its cultural, demographical and geographical characteristics. The second part of the book emphasizes the internal structure of the state which is generally based on justice, religion, military and politics. After evaluating the internal arrangements of the state, Lieven elucidates the provincial balance of the country. Finally, the discussion ends with the calculation of Taleban’s role in the politics and an assessment of state’s defeating Taleban strategies. In short, the twelve chapters of this book grounded on aforementioned outlines are well researched and insightful, because in his work, Lieven heavily relies on empirical sources by conducting interviews of diverse personalities which include: politicians, intellectuals, soldiers, intelligence officers, bureaucrats, villagers, religious personalities and general public.

The convincing argument of Lieven emphasizes the ecological disaster as a result of climate change and their regular occurrences are the potential threats to states existence and to its organized society (p. 3). In order to highlight the effects of global warming on Pakistan, the writer focuses the “floods of 2010 which brought about a major transformation of state’s system, by damaging local agricultural and infrastructure.” (p. 205).

Pakistan was not responsible for the creation of Taleban in Afghanistan

The critical examination of Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities by international community in the US-led war on terror has mounted on Pakistan specific security concerns by truing blind eye on India’s nuclear program which not only sparked an arms race in the region but also forced Pakistan to detonate its nuclear devices. The US deliberate ignorance of Pakistan’s role and its significance in the war on terror while signing of a civil nuclear deal, which escalated a new debate in the region, has underestimated Pakistan’s efforts in fighting against terrorism. Even the Pak-US alliance in war on terror has shifted Pakistan in serious political, economic and social crises. Contrary to a widespread belief, “Pakistan was not responsible for the creation of Taleban in Afghanistan,” the mainstream Madrasahs of Afghanistan started and promoted the Talebanization initially (p. 406).

This is surprisingly one of the contemporary scholarly books on Pakistan, which reveals an account of entirely unfamiliar arguments. The book ignores the rationality based on false perception, incorrect evidence and flawed assumptions in the argument that Pakistan is a failing state. The work of Lieven states, Pakistan is a hard country in a struggling phase. It is a deeply troubled state which is facing presently the threats of ecological change. The greatest threat of insurgency to the state’s existence is difficult to accept as a potential threat to Pakistan.

Washington and Beijing can safeguard Pakistan’s survival

Furthermore, the writer is of the view that, at regional level, the cooperation between Washington and Beijing can safeguard Pakistan’s survival. Both the US and China should avoid the struggle to control Pakistan. Concerning the US engagement in Afghanistan, Pakistan is a vital component of US strategic calculation. Therefore, the inevitable role of Pakistan in US Afghan policy is a supporting rationale in shaping South Asian politics (p. 477). Along with US, the EU, like China as a South Asian key player, should also exert its influence in resolving the Afghan conflict while recognizing Pakistan’s legitimate goals.

The whole discussion of Lieven’s book is revolves around the collapsing survey of Pakistan. It also contains few accounts of shortsighted India’s role in the region. The US could play an effective role in minimizing the toxicity Indo-Pak relations. It is appropriate for the US to limit the India’s covert involvement in Afghanistan, which could be a viable option and prerequisite for the establishment of regional peace. Later on, the peaceful resolution of disputed territories could be helpful for the development of pleasant Indo-Pak bilateral relationship. In short, the writer tries to foresee the future of South Asia by providing sufficient options to overcome the present crisis.

Two decade of analysis based on extensive travel

The academic and journalistic attributes of Lieven represents the more than two decade of analysis based on extensive travel in order to access empirical knowledge. Therefore, balancing and convincing arguments evaluated the role of centrifugal and centripetal forces in Pakistan. It is hard to say the book introduces several new ideas while eliminating the existing prejudices regarding Pakistan’s values. Moreover, the book is a complete account of politics, history, sociology and anthropology, because it has diversity in its theme.

Book Review by:

Attiq-ur-Rehman

Lecturer in International Relations Department, NUML, Islamabad.

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By Nadir Hassan | Arts & Culture | Books | Published 13 years ago

At first, A Hard Country may seem like an inartful way to describe Pakistan, but Lieven explains the subtitle of his book convincingly. Certainly, Pakistan is a hard country to live in for its citizens and hard to work in for journalists. No matter how much we enjoy stressing our diversity, the tolerance of a vast majority of our citizens and our thriving culture, there is no denying that Pakistan can be quite a nuisance on the world stage. But Lieven’s definition of hard goes deeper than that. Pakistan may routinely be described as a failed state that is plagued by terrorism and poverty . Yet is has survived over 60 years of being pronounced a failure. That, Lieven posits, can only be explained by the hardness of Pakistan’s citizens. We have the strength and fortitude to withstand every challenge the country faces, bruised and battered certainly, but not yet knocked out.

As a central thesis, this dual definition of hardness is a sound one. Unlike others who have written about Pakistan, though, it is Lieven’s optimism that is a bit jarring. His arguments will be familiar to local readers as he employs arguments that we have used, even if we aren’t convinced of their rightness, as a defence mechanism against those who have already dismissed us as a failed state. Yes, the Taliban exists but religious parties never fare well in elections. Certainly, Wahabism has spread but our long Sufi tradition will counter that. These lines of debate are faulty because they refuse to acknowledge that Pakistan has changed. The forces of obscurantism are spreading and gaining in popularity and the buffers against them are weakening. Sufi shrines are specifically being targeted by militants and our long tradition of tolerance has done nothing to arrest the militant march, or even provoke a significant public outcry against the bombings.

Like many western journalists, Lieven, who reported on Pakistan for The Times during the Zia era, falls for the lie that the military is the most efficient and only unifying force in the country. Recent debacles, like the presence of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad and the daring attack on PNS Mehran in Karachi expose the intelligence shortcomings of the military. Pakistan has been through four military dictators not one of whom has left the country better off after their authoritarianism. Much of the current mess is Zia’s poisoned gift to the country , a fact that Lieven should be well aware of. It is then off the mark for him to say that democratically-elected leaders, flawed though they may be, tend to be more authoritarian than military dictators.

Lieven is at his best when he writes not as a journalist but as an anthropologist. He unpacks the tribal nature of Pakistan’s politics and how that has led to a rejection of western definitions of democracy and justice. Unlike many liberals at home, Lieven does not see the tribal system as a hindrance to Pakistan’s development; rather he considers it a key stabilising factor.

Islamic militancy, too, is not the biggest problem Pakistan faces, contends Lieven. That distinction, according to him, belongs to climate change . He believes that Sindh could be ravaged by global warming, setting off a catastrophe that will finally make the most pessimistic predictions about Pakistan come true. It is a conclusion that can be hotly debated and is, to put it mildly, controversial but unlike most books about Pakistan it will actually give the reader something to chew on.

This review was originally published in the June 2011 issue under the headline “Hard to Swallow.”

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Pakistan : a hard country

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