Book Review (By Gp Capt B S Nayyar) “Pakistan: A Hard Country” by Anatol Lieven There is an old saying “east or west home is the best”, the fact in the idiom is visible in the writing of Anatol Lieven. He appears to have developed special attachment (after staying there) with this obscure nation. The description of Pakistan by him is at variance with how the international community views this troubled nation, which in his views is marginally informed about this complex nation. Even I agree to disagree with his perspective with a flaw in my argument for not having lived there, while he has personally visited, even if briefly, almost all the places he writes about. “Pakistan A Hard Country” is described by its publisher as “a magisterial investigation.” The entire book is proof of that. Lieven has displayed extraordinary patience & determination while he observes and records all aspects about this unique nation otherwise known as Pakistan. After hundreds of pages we realise that actually it’s not very different from many countries. It has everything, ranging from good weather to religious fundamentalism to ethnic tension, only more of it. Anatol Lieven, a reporter for the Times in Pakistan in the late 1980s and currently professor of international relations and terrorism studies at London's King's College, has added his early experience of the country with extensive recent travels, including to a village of Taliban sympathisers in the NW Frontier, and conversations with a remarkable cross-section of Pakistan's population including farmers, businessmen, landowners, judges, clerics, politicians, soldiers and jihadis. In this book, Anatol Lieven, sets out to give a strong ‘message’ about this complex and troubled nation to often not very well informed public and usually ignorant leaders. Anatol Lieven has made a genuine attempt to alter perceptions & overturns prejudices. Although in his point of view Pakistan is one of those global hotspots where temperatures always remain high but rarely for constructive reasons.
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When Lieven tells us that Pakistan is "tough and resilient as a state and a society" and that "it is not always as unequal as it looks", he has the data and the case studies to back up his arguments. Lieven is in no hurry of winding up hence he gets into the complexities of provincial and caste relationships. He is a writer bent on documenting everything he encounters, and then always remembering to cross-reference other countries and other histories. He cites an exhaustive range of reference – Irish tribes, South Korean dictatorships, and Indian caste violence – as he probes into "the reality of Pakistan's social, economic and cultural power structures". He gives the readers a lot of fresh concepts with which to think about a routinely misrepresented country & other societies in the region. "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, examples from the socioeconomic actuality of India. Lieven's book also contains contemporary survey of "collapsing" Pakistan and some of the most clear-sighted accounts of "rising" India. Lieven describes the well-embedded power structures in the country, devoting separate chapters to Pakistan’s provinces, its political parties and, most important, its army. He moves around with Taliban sympathizers and generals, traces the role of religion and explains the concepts of kinship and honour at play in the country’s current travails. He does not appear to be afraid of reaching his own conclusions. Shariah, as per him, is not so much a strict set of rules as a system for how justice is delivered and who delivers it. Lieven's courage lies in his noteworthy, flesh-and-blood portrait of the nation, ranging across demographic swathes and including a chorus of voices from farmers to intelligence officers. The picture is one of a semianarchic nation stuck in police savagery, institutional corruption, population bulges, water shortages and the risk of catastrophic environmental disaster following last year's floods. The latter challenge, he narrates, poses the major long-term threat. In Lieven’s opinion, the West doesn’t realize that the problem in Pakistan is not a lack of democracy, but too much of it, with many competing parties and interest groups. Lieven is optimistic regarding repeated failures of democracy and the rule of law. These institutions, he suggests, were British colonial impositions that never struck deep roots in Pakistan. Even where the
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outward forms persist, they have always been corrupted and manipulated, usually of course in the interests of the rich. No wonder that both, various kinds of informal justice and the savage but comparatively swift and transparent processes of shariah, have so strong an appeal. Pakistan’s police forces and local courts emerge from Lieven’s account as absolutely “unfit for purpose” on every imaginable level. Lieven has attempted to paint a textured, complex portrait of the military and ISI. The army is the one Pakistani institution that works. It is organised, disciplined and defined by its post-Partition insecurity towards India. This is certainly not a new line of thought, but one that is fully investigated. Pakistan's anti-Indian agenda is still confused for a radical Islamist agenda in the West and Lieven surgically unravels the details. Pakistan's apprehension over being swallowed up, or surrounded, if India begins to involve itself in Afghanistan's affairs has led to the army's union with the Afghan Taliban. Yet off the home front, the ISI has helped to defeat the threat of terror in the Western world, its assistance "absolutely vital" to preventing more attacks on Britain, US and Europe. There exist a point to argue here i.e. for instance, there is no denial to the fact that Pakistan’s military Inter-Services Intelligence is the country’s most important body, the power behind every throne, Lieven says rather little about it, and where he does he is notably non-committal about its true role. A fuller discussion of why he rejects ideas of the ISI as all-powerful would have given better clarity. Lieven presents argument about the insurgency in the west of Pakistan and does not expect the collapse of the state as it is only the latest in a series of such uprisings that have marked that region over many centuries. In his perspective it is embedded in the rapid social changes that have occurred along the porous border with Afghanistan. The war against the Taliban into which they have been conscripted by the Allies, who might have been Pakistan's protectors but who now show a clear "tilt towards India". Another complicating factor is the army's campaign against the Pakistani Taliban, who are a direct threat to the nation, though officers are reluctant to wage violence on fellow-Muslims on the orders of the West. Lieven is perhaps too quick to dismiss the impact that the rapid urbanisation and growth of the last decades have had on the strength of organised political Islamism and, perhaps more important, the consolidation of what could usefully be described as an Islamic-nationalist worldview across huge sections of Pakistani society. The dismissal does not have
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enough arguments on its side as it is the urban middle class that is the classic constituency of such ideologies. In the end Anatol Lieven sounds too committed a journalist to let any story bound fears overpower his comprehensive and perceptive narrative although he has been almost silent on Pakistan’s foreign policy and economy. Finally subject book is recommended for reading but with few suggestions, so that author’s bias (if any) is identified & analysed enabling reader to draw his own conclusions. The proposed suggestions are as follows: Would I trust the information unsupported by facts or logical reasoning?
What facts has the author omitted?
What additional information is essential & necessary?
What method(s) have been used to create positive or negative impressions? I am sure that each reader may have his own “pointers” to ensure reading the book in totality and not as an isolated piece of writing before forming his opinion. Wishing you an unbiased reading. Recommended readings: 1.
Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army and the Wars Within (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008).
2.
Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (Hurst &Co., London, 2005).
3.
Chaudhary, Justice in Practices; Lyon, Anthropological Analysis.
4.
Z.A. Bhutto, Foreign Policy of Pakistan (Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, Karachi, 1964).
5.
Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants:’ Fun’ and Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004).
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