Pakistan: A Hard Country Read Free

ent administration – not that many, but enough to help keep the country trundling along: a few impressive modern industries; some fine motorways; a university in Lahore, parts of which are the best of their kind in South Asia; a powerful, wel -trained and wel -disciplined army; and in every generation, a number of efficient, honest and devoted public servants. The military and police commanders of the fight against the Taleban in the Pathan areas whom I met in Peshawar and Rawalpindi in 2008 – 9 struck me as highly able and patriotic men by any standards in the world.
    The National Finance Commission Award of 2010, which rebalanced state revenues in favour of the poorer provinces, was a reasonable if belated agreement. It demonstrated that Pakistani democracy, the Pakistani political process and Pakistani federalism retain a measure of vitality, flexibility and the ability to compromise.
    None of these things is characteristic of truly failed or failing states like Somalia, Afghanistan or the Congo.
    That doesn’t mean that Pakistan always smel s nice (though sometimes it does); and indeed, some of the toughest creepers holding the rotten tree of the Pakistani system together are at one and the same time parasites on that tree, and sometimes smel bad even by their own standards. Nonetheless, tough they are; and unless the USA, India, or both together invade Pakistan and thereby precipitate its disintegration, the likelihood is that the country wil hold together, and that if it eventual y col apses, it wil be not Islamist extremism but climate change – an especial y grim threat in the whole of South Asia – that finishes it off.
    Support for extremist and terrorist groups is scattered throughout Pakistani society, but as of 2010 mass support for Islamist rebel ion against the Pakistani state is so far present only in the Pathan areas, and in only some of them – in other words, less than 5 per cent of the population. That is not remotely enough to revolutionize Pakistan as a whole. During their rule over the region, the British faced repeated revolts in the Pathan areas, without seriously fearing that this would lead to rebel ion elsewhere in their Indian empire.
    Any Pakistani national revolution would have to gain not just mass but majority support in Pakistan’s two great urban centres, Lahore and Karachi; and as the chapters on Punjab and Sindh wil make clear, this is unlikely for the foreseeable future – though not necessarily for ever, especial y if ecological crisis floods the cities with masses of starving peasants.
    When terrorist groups attack India, or Western forces in Afghanistan, their actions enjoy a degree of instinctive, gut sympathy from a majority of Pakistanis – not because of Islamist extremism, but because of Muslim nationalism and bitter hostility to the US role in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan’s region in particular. Support for a civil war and revolution in Pakistan itself that would turn Pakistan into a revolutionary Islamic state is, however, a very different matter from sympathizing with attacks on the US and India. That would mean Pakistanis kil ing Pakistanis on a massive scale, and by and large they don’t want to. They may wel want to kil some set of immediate rivals, but that’s another matter.
    It is important not to be misled by the spread of terrorism in Pakistan in 2009 – 10. In many ways, terrorism by the Pakistani Taleban is a sign not of strength but of weakness. If you want to overthrow and capture a state, you need either a mass movement on city streets that seizes institutions, or a guerril a movement in the countryside that seizes territory, or a revolt of the junior ranks of the military, or some combination of al three. No movement relying chiefly on terrorism has ever overthrown a state. The Pakistani Taleban looked truly menacing when it took over most of the Federal y Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), fol owed by the districts of Swat and Buner.