Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [8]
However, what is now Pakistan is not nearly such an artificial construct as the old Pakistan of 1947 – 71. It has a geographical unity which in some respects is thousands of years old, being basically the valley of the River Indus plus neighbouring mountains, deserts and swamps. To a much greater extent than most post-colonial states, Pakistan therefore has a core geographical unity and logic.2 Moreover, most of Pakistan’s different ethnicities have lived alongside each other for millennia, have been Muslim for hundreds of years, and have often been ruled by the same Muslim dynasties.
Regional identity may be growing in political importance, with the 2008 elections showing a lower vote for the PPP in Punjab, and a lower vote for the Punjab-based Muslim League in other provinces. All the same, with Pakistanis, there is usually a wheel within a wheel, an identity within an identity, which in turn overlaps with another identity. The only exceptions, the people with a single identity, are some of the Islamists, and some of the soldiers – but by no means all of either. Or as Ali Hassan, a young Lahori executive with a Norwegian company, said to me:
If I were to jump on a box and preach revolution, with the best programme in the world, you know what would happen? First, people from all the other provinces would say that we can’t follow him, he’s a Punjabi. Then most of the Punjabis would say, we can’t follow him, he’s a Jat. Then the Jats would say, we can’t follow him, he’s from such-and-such a biradiri. Even in my own village, half the people would say something like, I can’t follow him, his grandfather beat my uncle in a fight over land. If you preach Islamic revolution, most Pakistanis won’t follow you because they practise different kinds of Islam and worship different saints. So you see we Pakistanis can’t unite behind a revolution because we can’t unite behind anything.3
Or, in the saying common in Pakistan as across the Greater Middle East: ‘I against my brother, I and my brother against our cousins, and our family against our biradiri and our biradiri against other biradiri.’ Occasionally they end, ‘and Pakistan against the world’ – but not often.
Not surprisingly then, until recently at least, every attempt to unite large numbers of Pakistanis behind a religious, an ethnic or a political cause ended in the groups concerned being transformed by the everpresent tendency to political kinship and its incestuous sister, the hunt for state patronage. This wooed them away from radicalism to participation in the Pakistani political system, which revolves around patronage – something that is true under both military and civilian governments in Pakistan.
WEAK STATE, STRONG SOCIETIES
Indeed, a central theme of this book is that the difference between civilian and military regimes in Pakistan is far less than both Western and Pakistani analysts have suggested. A fundamental political fact about Pakistan is that the state, whoever claims to lead it, is weak, and society in its various forms is immensely strong. Anyone or any group with the slightest power in society uses it among other things to plunder the state for patronage and favours, and to turn to their advantage the workings of the law and the bureaucracy. Hence the astonishing fact that barely 1 per cent of the population pays income tax, and the wealthiest landowners in the country pay no direct taxes at all. As a state auditor in Peshawar said to me with a demoralized giggle, ‘If anyone took taxes seriously, I’d have the most difficult job in the world, but as it is I have the easiest.’
The weakness of the state goes