Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [23]
Of course, an unescorted visit to the tribal areas, or a prolonged stay in Peshawar in unprotected accommodation, might very well prove fatal; but it is entirely possible to live for months on end in a dozen other different Pakistani cities, and most of the Pakistani countryside, without in my view running any very serious risk. Researchers, analysts and officials dealing with aid to Pakistan need to do this if they are to do their jobs properly.19
My own recent researches in Pakistan have been not nearly as long as I would have wished, owing to teaching commitments and a short deadline for this book; but they did give me the chance to talk to hundreds of ordinary Pakistanis from every walk of life, most of whom had never been asked for their opinion before by any Pakistani or Western observer or organization. The views of these voiceless masses form the heart of this book, and I have tried to reflect them as faithfully as I can and draw from them an understanding of Pakistani reality.
This has not always been easy. I remember a conversation with an elderly leader of the Awami National Party in Peshawar in 2008. In his garden were a pair of strikingly graceful long-legged grey birds with crests. I asked him what they were. ‘Flamingos,’ he replied.
‘Um, I don’t think so, sir ...’
‘No, you are right of course, they are not flamingos. They migrate to Russia in summer, sensible birds, and then come back here again to lay their eggs. We hoped one of them was female and would lay eggs, but it turns out they are both males. So they fight all the time or stand at opposite ends of the garden sulking.’
‘Like Pashtun politicians, sir, perhaps?’
With a deep laugh: ‘Oh yes, yes indeed, unfortunately! But what are they called now in English? We call them koonj.’ Turning to his staff, he asked, ‘What are koonj in English?’ And with absolute, unquestionable conviction, one of them replied:
‘Swans!’20
So if in the course of this book I have sometimes mistaken flamingos for swans, or indeed pristine Pakistani political swans for ugly ducklings, I can only plead in self-defence Pakistani society’s ability to generate within an astonishingly short space of time several mutually incompatible versions of a given event or fact, often linked to conspiracy theories which pass through the baroque to the rococo.
Conflicted Pakistani relations with reality notwithstanding, I am deeply attached to Pakistan, which has provided me with some of the best moments of my life; and Pakistan’s people have treated me with immense kindness and hospitality. Pakistan is one of the most fascinating countries of my acquaintance, a place that cries out for the combined talents of a novelist, an anthropologist and a painter. But after twenty years of intermittently covering Pakistan, this is a clear-sighted affection. I have good friends among the Pakistani elite, but I also take much of what they say with several pinches of salt – even, or especially, when their statements seem to correspond to Western liberal ideology, and please Western journalists and officials.
The problem goes deeper than this, however. Western-style democracy has become so associated over the past generation with human rights, wealth, progress and stability, that to accept that a country cannot at present generate stable and successful forms of it is an admission so grating that both Westerners and educated Pakistanis naturally shy away from it; Westerners because it seems insulting and patronizing, Pakistanis because it seems humiliating. Both, therefore, rather than examining the reality of Pakistan’s