Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [94]
Western officials have often attributed the recruitment of militants in Pakistan to the enormous increase in the number of madrasahs (religious schools) during and after the Afghan war. This, however, seems to be in part a mistake. A majority of known Pakistani terrorists have in fact attended government schools and quite often have a degree of higher education – reflecting yet again the basis for Islamism in the urban lower middle classes rather than the impoverished masses. It is true that, as the chapter on the Taleban will explore further, a large number of Taleban fighters have a madrasah education – but that largely reflects the fact that in the tribal areas government schools are very rare. The communities concerned would have supported the Taleban anyway, madrasahs or no madrasahs.
A very large number of ordinary Taleban fighters have had no education at all, and their recruitment owes less to specific Taleban education than to the general atmosphere prevailing in their villages. Concentration on the role of madrasahs by Western policy-makers is not wholly mistaken, but it nonetheless reflects a very widespread mistake in Western analysis: namely, the tendency to look at Islamist groups and their strategies as instruments which can be isolated and eliminated, rather than phenomena deeply rooted in the societies from which they spring.
5
The Military
For men may come, and men may go, but I go on for ever.
(Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Brook)
Different sections of Pakistani society have different images or mirrors of paradise, which they try to create to the best of their ability on this earth, and that serve as havens from the squalor and disorder – physical and moral – by which they are surrounded. For believers, this image is of course the mosque, or, for the devotees of saints among them, the shrines.
As throughout the arid parts of the earth, almost everyone sees paradise as a garden, and those with the money to do so try to recreate on a small scale the great gardens of the old Muslim rulers. For the upper classes, paradise is an international hotel, with its polished cleanliness and luxury, its hard-working, attentive staff, its fashion shows and business presentations, in which they can pretend for a while that they are back in London or Dubai.
For the military, the image of paradise is the cantonment, with its clean, swept, neatly signposted streets dotted with gleaming antique artillery pieces, and shaded by trees with the lower trunks uniformly painted white. Putting trees in uniform might seem like carrying military discipline too far, and the effect is in fact slightly comical – like rows of enormous knobbly-kneed boys in white shorts. However, the shade is certainly welcome, as are the signposts and the impeccably neat military policemen directing the traffic in an orderly fashion.
The buildings of the cantonments are equally impressive inside. In the poorer parts of Pakistan, the contrast with civilian institutions – including those of government – is that between the developed and the barely developed worlds. In Peshawar, the recently refurbished headquarters of the XI Corps gleams with marble and polished wood, and has a fountain playing in its entrance hall, while government ministers work from decaying office blocks with peeling walls and broken stairs. In the military headquarters, every staff officer has a computer. In the government offices, most ministers do not (and in many cases would not know how to use them if they did).
The cantonments are