Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [4]
The National Finance Commission Award of 2010, which rebalanced state revenues in favour of the poorer provinces, was a reasonable if belated agreement. It demonstrated that Pakistani democracy, the Pakistani political process and Pakistani federalism retain a measure of vitality, flexibility and the ability to compromise. None of these things is characteristic of truly failed or failing states like Somalia, Afghanistan or the Congo.
That doesn’t mean that Pakistan always smells nice (though sometimes it does); and indeed, some of the toughest creepers holding the rotten tree of the Pakistani system together are at one and the same time parasites on that tree, and sometimes smell bad even by their own standards. Nonetheless, tough they are; and unless the USA, India, or both together invade Pakistan and thereby precipitate its disintegration, the likelihood is that the country will hold together, and that if it eventually collapses, it will be not Islamist extremism but climate change – an especially grim threat in the whole of South Asia – that finishes it off.
Support for extremist and terrorist groups is scattered throughout Pakistani society, but as of 2010 mass support for Islamist rebellion against the Pakistani state is so far present only in the Pathan areas, and in only some of them – in other words, less than 5 per cent of the population. That is not remotely enough to revolutionize Pakistan as a whole. During their rule over the region, the British faced repeated revolts in the Pathan areas, without seriously fearing that this would lead to rebellion elsewhere in their Indian empire.
Any Pakistani national revolution would have to gain not just mass but majority support in Pakistan’s two great urban centres, Lahore and Karachi; and as the chapters on Punjab and Sindh will make clear, this is unlikely for the foreseeable future – though not necessarily for ever, especially if ecological crisis floods the cities with masses of starving peasants.
When terrorist groups attack India, or Western forces in Afghanistan, their actions enjoy a degree of instinctive, gut sympathy from a majority of Pakistanis – not because of Islamist extremism, but because of Muslim nationalism and bitter hostility to the US role in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan’s region in particular. Support for a civil war and revolution in Pakistan itself that would turn Pakistan into a revolutionary Islamic state is, however, a very different matter from sympathizing with attacks on the US and India. That would mean Pakistanis killing Pakistanis on a massive scale, and by and large they don’t want to. They may well want to kill some set of immediate rivals, but that’s another matter.
It is important not to be misled by the spread of terrorism in Pakistan in 2009 – 10. In many ways, terrorism by the Pakistani Taleban is a sign not of strength but of weakness. If you want to overthrow and capture a state, you need either a mass movement on city streets that seizes institutions, or a guerrilla movement in the countryside that seizes territory, or a revolt of the junior ranks of the military, or some combination of all three. No movement relying chiefly on terrorism has ever overthrown a state. The Pakistani Taleban looked truly menacing when it took over most of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), followed by the districts of Swat and Buner. When it blows up ordinary people in bazaars and mosques, it merely looks foul.
Pakistan is thus probably still far from the situation of Iran in the late 1970s or Russia in 1917. Apart from anything else, the army is a united and disciplined institution, and as long as that remains the case, it will be strong enough to defeat open revolt – as it proved by defeating the Taleban in Swat and south Waziristan in 2009. Unlike in Africa and elsewhere, military coups in Pakistan have always been carried out by the army as a whole, on the orders of its chief of staff and