Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [166]
This identification with the pastoral tradition gives rise to the public and formal (as opposed to private and familial) eating habits of the Punjabis, including in hotels and restaurants; a tradition whereby the green vegetable is almost a publicly persecuted species: part of a heroic effort by a people of mainly bean-eating sedentary farmers to portray themselves to visitors, each other and most of all themselves as meateating nomadic herdsmen.10
However, the fact that Pathan armies also repeatedly raped, looted and burned their way across Punjab (contributing to the province’s lack of historic cities) makes this Punjabi respect for Pathans a somewhat wary one. As a Punjabi lady acquaintance said to me of the Afghan Mujahidin back in 1988: ‘I know they are very brave people, fighting for their country against the great Russian army and so on, but I must say I’m glad they are based in Peshawar, not Lahore.’ Or as an old southern Punjabi proverb used to have it: ‘The son of a Pathan is sometimes a devil, sometimes a demon.’
INDUSTRIALISTS
Driving in Punjab can be a slightly surreal experience. Magnificent (but usually almost empty) new motorways coexist with the same old potholed two-lane ‘highways’, where the SUVs of the wealthy jostle perilously with the bullock carts and camels of the poor. The motorways are patrolled by the astonishingly honest and efficient national motorway police. The other roads are patrolled (or rather not) by the same old Punjab police.
The same element of surrealism goes for the contrasting sights along the road. Driving to Faisalabad from Multan in the evening, we passed mile after mile of primeval-looking mud villages, with the occasional electric light illuminating some home or roadside stall. My need to stop and retire behind a tree became increasingly urgent, but my driver would not permit it. ‘No stop here sir, here very bad people. Baloch, dacoits.’ Just as I was preparing to throw myself from the car and into the arms of any bandits who might happen to be passing, a mirage came into sight, blazing with lights like a solitary fairground in a desert: ‘Welcome to Paris CNG Station’ it said, and offered not merely gas, but a business centre with fax and e-mail and a lavatory with flush toilets.
Business and administration in Faisalabad are rather the same. Faisalabad is the Punjabi industrial and migrant city par excellence, at the heart of the canal colonies; and by many indices is Pakistan’s most modern and successful city. With a GDP in 2005 of $27 billion (according to Price Waterhouse Cooper) Faisalabad has the third highest GDP in the country after Karachi and Lahore, and the second in terms of per capita production and income; it vies with Karachi for the reputation of having Pakistan’s most efficient municipal administration, without Karachi’s feral ethnic politics; and it is the heart of Pakistan’s biggest export industry, that of textiles.
However, every time you begin to think that you really are visiting ‘the Manchester of the East’, you are apt to be brought back with a thump to the realities of kinship-based politics, dysfunctional administration, ineffective law, irrational economic policies, mass illiteracy, obscurantist mass culture, and media and academia addled with lunatic conspiracy theories, and (in the case of the English-medium institutions) often barely understanding the language in which they operate. If Faisalabad is clear evidence of Pakistan not failing as a state, it is certainly not evidence that Pakistan is ever going to succeed as one.
Faisalabad earned its proud title of ‘Manchester of the East’ when Manchester, England, was still the textile capital of the West; and its self-image has a certain nineteenth-century utilitarianism about it. In talking