Indeed, even in the violent challenges confronting its state authority, Pakistan is like its subcontinental neighbors: “All of the states of this region have faced insurgencies over the past generation,” Lieven notes, and by comparison to the Taliban conflict in Pakistan, Sri Lanka’s Tamil rebellion “caused proportionally far more casualties” and India’s Naxalite Maoist insurgency controls “a far greater proportion of India.”
Lieven has evident sympathy for the Pakistani military (indeed there are points when, in referring to a uniformed ancestor who served during British rule in what is now Pakistan, one suspects Lieven may have his own feelings of kinship with the Pakistan army). But he is clear about the role the army has played in fomenting militancy, and about the deadly threat militants now pose to Pakistan, especially the potential for far worse bloodshed if the remaining militant groups that have not yet turned on the military and are therefore being kept “in existence ‘on the shelf’”—including Pashtun militants focused on Afghanistan and Punjabi militants focused on India — were to do so.
Still, despite the ineffectiveness of much of the Pakistani state, he believes Pakistan’s kinship groups and its stabilizing and antireformist social structures give the country a combination of diversity and toughness that makes successful revolution highly unlikely. He also writes that the Pakistani army, as it demonstrated in the “brutal but in the end brutally effective” operation to liberate Swat from militant control in 2009, is fully capable of routing guerrillas who seize territory when it sets its mind to doing so.
A key question, therefore, is whether the army itself could split. Lieven thinks not (and we must fervently hope that he is right). The army, he explains, is an all-volunteer institution with a strong shared ethos, nationalistic rather than pan-Islamic in outlook, and increasingly vigilant against Taliban sympathizers within—“after all, we are not suicidal idiots,” an officer tells him. The real risk, which Lieven argues must be avoided at all costs, is of “open intervention of US ground forces” in Pakistan. For if ordered by their commanders not to resist, “parts of the Pakistani army would mutiny in order to fight the invaders,” and in such an eventuality “Islamist upheaval and the collapse of the state would indeed be all too likely.”
In passages such as this, Lieven comes close to describing Pakistan as if through a gunsight; but the gunsight belongs to an American decision maker on the hunt, with Lieven playing the role of preservationist guide. The best Western strategy, he counsels, would “stem from a recognition that Pakistan’s goals in Afghanistan are in part legitimate — even if the means with which they have been sought have not been”—and would “seek a peaceful solution to the Kashmir dispute, despite all the immense obstacles in both India and Pakistan.” For in the end, “not even the greatest imaginable benefits of US — Indian friendship could compensate for the actual collapse of Pakistan, with all the frightful dangers this would create not just for the West but for India too.”
Lieven’s is a vital book, with much wisdom in its advice for the West. But equally important, this detailed and nuanced survey offers Pakistanis a mirror in which to look hard at their country and themselves. Pakistan’s resilience is bound up with its resistance to reform, yet reform will be essential for facing the great challenges ahead, including the potentially devastating impacts of climate change on a dry and overpopulated land that is dependent on a single river and its tributaries. Pakistanis, and above all members of Pakistan’s military, would do well finally to reject their country’s disastrous embrace of militants. Pakistan must urgently mend its relationships in its own neighborhood and refocus on taking care of itself. Time is not on its side.
(2011)
12
Nationalism Should Retire at Sixty-Five
MY HOME COUNTRY, Pakistan, was born sixty-five years ago today. Next door, India reaches that milestone tomorrow. We’re in crowded company, anniversary-wise: three-quarters of Asia’s 4.2 billion people live in states that became independent or free of occupation around the same time, nations now in their sixties.
I would like to report that an aura of enlightened wisdom suffuses countries in their seventh decade. But, glancing around Asia, the years on either side of age sixty-five seem to bring instead an unfortunate obsession with national supremacy.
Pakistan, for example, is meddling in the affairs of neighbors, victimizing marginalized ethnic and religious groups, and building nuclear weapons while citizens go without electricity. India is doing the same. China is flexing its muscles along its frontiers, North and South Korea are growling at each other, and so are Iran and Saudi Arabia. Continent-wide, military spending is ratcheting upward.
Asian economies are approaching and surpassing in size those of Europe and North America. So it’s worth asking whether Asian states also hope to approach and surpass in horror the nationalistic miscalculations of Europe and North America, mistakes that made much of the twentieth century a blood-drenched global battleground?
Many say that the twenty-first century will be the Asian century, that Asia will become central to the world economy and to global geopolitics. But for us Asians, the Asian century is also likely to bring a great dryness. Monsoon rains will become unpredictable and aquifers will drop, as is already happening in India and Pakistan. These changes could in turn unleash famines and provoke deadly conflicts over disputed rivers and watersheds, especially those of the Himalayas.
And the Asian century is likely to bring a great wetness. Sea levels will rise and low-lying land will be inundated, as is already happening in the Maldives. Billions of Asians live in coastal areas. The displacement of large numbers of them, on the strip between Chennai and Yangon, say, or between Singapore and Shanghai, could trigger movements of people so gargantuan as to be unprecedented in history.
The Asian century is also likely to bring a great aging, a great inequality, a great slum expansion. It is likely to bring challenges too big for any one of our countries, even the biggest, to tackle humanely alone.
It may, therefore, be time for us to recognize that aggressively thumping one’s sexagenarian chest is a sign not of virility but of willful self-delusion. At sixty-five we would be better off thinking of retirement. Maybe not yet of our nations, for first we will have to develop a good alternative, but at least of our prickly nationalisms.
We need to begin to dismantle the chauvinisms we have built (partly as inoculations against the shame of our colonial experiences), and think about a morality that is bigger than Pakistan or India or even China — a morality that dares to be at least Asian in scale, and having achieved that, is ready to progress to something even larger, to the scale of humanity.
How might this be achieved? A change in rhetoric would be helpful. Instead of a relentless focus on the divided interests of our nations, the incessant drum beating of national propaganda, and the dice throwing of great games, we could begin to speak of an Asian interest, and a human interest, that is the opposite of zero sum.
We could commit to a blurring and reconceiving of national boundaries, to the immediate benefit of frontier-split communities, and to the growing benefit of everyone else. We might, as a start, embrace cross-border autonomous zones, visa-free travel, an Asian highway and railway network, and a reduction of legal differences between citizens and resident noncitizens.