Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [14]
Pakistan is in fact a great deal more like India – or India like Pakistan – than either country would wish to admit. If Pakistan were an Indian state, then in terms of development, order and per capita income it would find itself somewhere in the middle, considerably below Karnataka but considerably above Bihar. Or to put it another way, if India was only the ‘cow-belt’ of Hindi-speaking north India, it probably wouldn’t be a democracy or a growing economic power either, but some form of impoverished Hindu-nationalist dictatorship, riven by local conflicts.
In order to understand how Pakistan works, it is necessary to draw heavily on the field of anthropology; for one of the things that has thoroughly befuddled not just much Western reporting and analysis of Pakistan, but the accounts of Pakistanis themselves, is that very few of the words we commonly use in describing the Pakistani state and political system mean quite what we think they mean, and often they mean something quite different.
This is true whether one speaks of democracy, the law, the judicial system, the police, elections, political parties or even human rights. In fact, one reason why the army is by far the strongest institution in Pakistan is that it is the only one in which its real internal content, behaviour, rules and culture match more or less its official, outward form. Or, to put it another way, it is the only Pakistani institution which actually works as it is officially meant to – which means that it repeatedly does something that it is not meant to, which is seize power from its weaker and more confused sister institutions.
Parts of Pakistan have been the subject of one of the most distinguished bodies of anthropological literature in the entire discipline; yet with the partial exception of works on the Pathans, almost none of this has made its way into the Western discussion of political and security issues in Pakistan today, let alone the Western media. Critically important works like those of Muhammad Azam Chaudhary and Stephen Lyon on Punjab are known only to fellow anthropologists.10
Incidentally, this is why in this book I have chosen to describe as Pathans the ethnicity known to themselves (according to dialect) as Pashtuns or Pakhtuns. It was under the name of Pathans (the Hindustani name for them, adopted by the British) that this people is described and analysed in the great historical and anthropological works of Olaf Caroe, Fredrik Barth, Akbar S. Ahmed and others; and it was also by this name that this people was known for more than a century to their British military adversaries. The name Pathan recalls this great scholarly tradition as well as the glorious military history of resistance to British conquest, both of which are crucial to understanding developments among the Pathans of the present age.
When it comes to other parts of Pakistani society, the lack of detailed sociological research means that analysts are groping in the dark, and drawing conclusions largely based on anecdotal evidence or their own prejudices. It is striking – and depressing – that more than eight years after 9/11, by far the best US expert on the vitally important subject of Islamist politics in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP)11 is a young graduate student, Joshua White – one key reason being that he has actually lived in the NWFP.12 This lack of basic knowledge applies for example to the critical area of urbanization and its effects – or lack of them – on religious, cultural and political patterns.
According to standard theories concerning urbanization in the Muslim world, the colossal movement of Pakistanis to the cities over the past generations should have led to fundamental cultural changes, reducing the power of the old political clans and traditional forms of Islam, and strengthening modern and radical forms of Islam and modern mass parties. But is this really happening? My own impressions would tend to suggest that things are