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over the future of Afghanistan should therefore be part of a much deeper long-term engagement with Pakistan by the West in general, and one tied not to the temporary war in Afghanistan but to the permanent importance of Pakistan as a state. This is crucial for Britain in particular, whose large minority of Pakistani origin retains extremely close ties with Pakistan and forms an enduring organic link between the two countries, and, through Britain, to Europe and North America.

Whatever happens, this human link is not going to go away. To help make it a force for good rather than a danger, the west needs to develop a much deeper knowledge of Pakistan, a much deeper stake in Pakistan, and a much more generous attitude to helping Pakistan. I hope that by showing Pakistan in all its complex patchwork of light and shadow, this book will help to bring about such a new approach.

Notes

1 INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING PAKISTAN

1 Tariq Ali, Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (Penguin, London, 1983).

2 Pierre Lafrance, in Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Pakistan: Nation, Nationalism and the State (Vanguard Books, Lahore, 2002), p. 339.

3 Interview with the author, Lahore, 8/1/2009.

4 My attention was drawn to this fascinating statistic by Dr Shandana Mohmand of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

5 Alison Shaw, Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani Families in Britain (Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam, 2000), p. 99.

6 Ibid., p. 154.

7 Stephen M. Lyon, An Anthropological Analysis of Local Politics and Patronage in a Pakistani Village (Edwin Mellen, Lewiston, NY, 2004).

8 Quoted in Muhammad Azam Chaudhary, Justice in Practice: The Legal Ethnography of a Pakistani Punjabi Village (Oxford University Press, 1999).

9 Sudeep Chakravarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin, New Delhi, 2009).

10 Chaudhary, Justice in Practice; Lyon, Anthropological Analysis.

11 On the initiative of the ANP provincial government, the province was officially renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in April 2010, to reflect its majority Pathan population, known in their own language as Pakhtuns or Pashtuns. However, since it was known as the North West Frontier Province during the period of research for this book, and during the historical and recent events I describe, I have kept the old name.

12 See Joshua T. White, Pakistan’s Islamist Frontier: Islamic Politics and US Policy in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (Centre on Faith and International Affairs, Washington, DC, 2007).

13 Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (Penguin, London, 1978), p. 151.

14 Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (Free Press, New York, 2006), p. 126.

15 Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police, published 4 August 2009, on http://www.hrw.org. See also a book on police and criminals in Mumbai: Suketu Mehta, Maximum City (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005). And see also the reports of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the Indian treatment of Kashmiri detainees, as stated to US diplomats and revealed by WikiLeaks in the Guardian (London), 17 December 2010.

16 Figures from the Population Association of Pakistan website: http://www.pap.org.pk/statistics/

17 John Briscoe and Usman Qamar, Pakistan’s Water Economy: Running Dry (Oxford University Press, Oxford and the World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006), p. xiv.

18 Michael Kugelman and Robert M. Hathaway (eds), Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis (Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, 2009), Introduction, p. 24.

19 This point is made well in an engaging memoir about an American student’s life in Pakistan: Ethan Casey, Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Difficult Time (Grand Central Publishing, New York, 2005).

20 The answer, I eventually discovered, is the charmingly named demoiselle crane. In an interesting example of human (male) minds working in the same way across very different cultures, while some Western naturalist named them after young French girls, in Baloch poetry they are used to symbolize girls bathing (French or otherwise).