Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [13]
HOW PAKISTAN WORKS
The original title for this book was ‘How Pakistan Works’, and one of its core goals is to show that, contrary to much instinctive belief in the West, it has actually worked according to its own imperfect but functional patterns. One of the minor curses of writing on world affairs over the past few years has been the proliferating use of the term ‘failed state’. Coined originally for genuinely failed and failing states in sub-Saharan Africa, this term has since been thrown around with wild abandon to describe a great range of states around the world, pretty much in accordance with the writer’s prejudices or the need of his or her publication for a sensational headline.
In this respect, it is instructive to place Pakistan in the context of the rest of South Asia. All of the states of this region have faced insurgencies over the past generation, which in two cases (Afghanistan and Nepal) have actually overthrown the existing state. Sri Lanka and Burma have both faced rebellions which have lasted longer, covered proportionally far more territory, and caused proportionally far more casualties than has been the case with the Taleban revolt in Pakistan.
India, the great power of the region, is a stable democracy compared to its neighbours; yet India too has faced repeated rebellions in different parts of its territory, some of them lasting for generations. One of these, the Naxalite Maoist insurgency, affects a third of India’s districts, and effectively controls huge areas of the Indian countryside – a far greater proportion of India than the proportion of Pakistan ever controlled by the Pakistani Taleban. The Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, in September 2009 described this insurgency as the biggest threat facing India, and said that to date India had been losing the struggle. A recent book by an Indian journalist describes the greater part of the countryside in several Indian states as effectively ‘ungoverned’.9
This is not to argue that India is in any danger of breaking up or collapsing. Rather, one should recognize that states in South Asia have not traditionally exercised direct control over much or even most of their territory, and have always faced continual armed resistance somewhere or other. As in medieval Europe, for most of South Asian history government was mostly indirect, and implemented not by state officials but through local barons or tribal chieftains – who often revolted against the king, emperor or sultan if they felt that he was not treating them with sufficient respect and generosity. The world of the Pakistani landowners of today would in some ways have been immediately recognizable to their fifteenth-century English equivalents.
The British introduced a modern state system which all the present countries of the region have inherited. Yet British rule too was to a great extent indirect. Two-fifths of the territory of British India was in fact ruled by autonomous princes who owed allegiance to the king-emperor (or queen-empress) but governed their own states under British tutelage. Even in the areas which came directly under the British Raj, British rule could not have long maintained itself without the constant help of the local landed aristocrats and chieftains, who in consequence often had pretty much of a free hand when it came to their treatment of their own tenants and labourers. As in parts of Pakistan and India today, these local princelings also sheltered and sponsored bandit groups (dacoits) to help in their constant feuds with their neighbours.
When compared to Canada or France, Pakistan inevitably fails. When compared to India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, things therefore do not look so terrible. In fact, a good many key features of Pakistan are common to the subcontinent as a whole, from parties led by hereditary dynasties through the savagery of the police