The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

When the ISI men come to the door, the illusion of a democratic state melts away. Nobody can stop them – no judge, no lawyer, no ambassador, not even a minister. The angels rule.

It was a devastating blow – not only because the Bengalis accounted for half of Pakistan’s population and held one-third of its territory, but because their departure had shattered a foundational myth: that Pakistan was the sole homeland for the Muslims of South Asia.

The key to meeting the right people was sifarish, an intercession from a well-connected friend.

Mostly Western-educated, their lives were punctuated by dinner parties, swanky weddings and foreign vacations. They resented being lumped in with the ‘fundos’, as fundamentalists were pejoratively known, and, as Islamophobia swelled in the West, felt their identity as Muslims was coming under siege.

Yet nostalgia and denial could not mask the cruel, ugly and downright terrifying side of Pakistan. Hateful currents swirled close to the surface of daily life. Extremists attacked Christians, Shias and other minorities – gunning them down in the streets, torching their homes and blowing up their places of worship. Discrimination was enshrined in the law. Members of the Ahmadi faith, considered heretics by orthodox Muslims, had to renounce a central tenet of their faith to get a passport. Justice was a function of income: the rich and well connected could steal, kill and avoid their taxes with wide impunity. Women were subjected to heinous violence – shot, stabbed or strangled, often by their own families – in the name of ‘honour’. Others were burned with acid, their faces melting in agonising pain, all for the rage of a jealous or insecure man. Such crimes were so banal as to barely merit a few inches in the papers, alongside the other tales of heartbreaking desperation: a maid found hanging from a fan in her employer’s living room; a rickshaw driver, driven crazy by poverty, who killed his children, his wife and then himself. As much as anything, those small stories presented a searing indictment.

One day, a street would fill with rioters protesting against an obscure insult to the name of the Prophet Muhammad. The following day, rich folk would gather to party in a mansion along the same street,

clinking their glasses in a Gatsby-like bubble. Depending on who you asked, Islam or the army were supposed to be the glue holding the place together.

More concept than country, Pakistan strained under the centrifugal forces of history, identity and faith. Could it hold? Pakistanis themselves seemed unsure. Some took refuge in conspiracy theories, hoping to make sense of the paradoxes through lurid accounts of Indian, American or Israeli meddling.

Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, a writer from Lahore, noted that Pakistan recalls Julian Barnes’s definition of a net as ‘a collection of holes tied together with string … less a country than a mesh of voids, bound by coils of self-interest’.

In my darker moments, it seemed the only thing holding it all together was blind faith. ‘Insha’Allah it will happen,’ people said, all the time. Insha’Allah translates as ‘If God wills it’, and I heard it everywhere. On my first trip to Pakistan, as the plane descended to Islamabad, the pilot addressed the cabin: ‘Insha’Allah we will be landing shortly,’ he announced, somewhat disconcertingly. The phrase was hardwired into the national psyche – a code, a philosophy, a comfort blanket to get through tough times. Sure, things were hard, people admitted. But Pakistan would stumble through, as it had always done – Insha’Allah.

Paradoxically, the creation of Pakistan, in 1947, diminished the clerics’ importance. Although the new nation was a homeland for Muslims, religious leaders rejected the notion that the nation-state, then a new-fangled concept, could contain the grandeur of the Muslim ummah, or community of believers. They sought a caliphate. Their rejectionism was a grave strategic mistake. In the early decades of Pakistan’s existence, army generals and powerful bureaucrats ruled the roost, leaving the clerics in the cold. The power of mullahs slipped. By the early 1970s, they had come to occupy a modest place on the social ladder in towns and villages, somewhere between the tailor and the teacher. Clerics instructed children in the Qur’an; officiated at births, weddings, and funerals; and were the object of gentle mockery for their fondness for halwa, a syrupy dessert.

Their fortunes were transformed, in 1977, by the arrival in power of General Zia. Born into a modest, socially conservative family in southern Punjab, Zia rejected the whisky-swilling ways of the aristocratic, pseudo-British officers who had led the army since 1947. ‘I said prayers instead,’ he said. After ousting Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in July 1977, the military dictator embarked on an ambitious drive to reshape Pakistani society. Zia introduced a slew of harsh Islamic laws that sought to turn Pakistan away from its roots in the rich cultural soil of South Asia in favour of a harsh, unyielding brand of Islam imported from the sands of Saudi Arabia. Criminals were flogged in public, female television presenters had to cover their heads, and the crime of blasphemy – any perceived insult to the Prophet Muhammad – became a capital offence. In the courts, women became second-class citizens whose testimony was devalued to half the worth of a man’s, which made it impossible to prosecute for rape. Muslim preachers turned up on military bases, giving sermons to officers and rank-and-file alike, and Zia turned for political support to religious parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami – Pakistan’s version of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – which usually won only a small fraction of the vote.

The jihad wrought tremendous change inside Pakistan. A countrywide network of radical mosques and madrassas, funded by Saudi Arabia, sprang up across the country. The mosques served as way stations for the thousands of foreign volunteers who were arriving in Pakistan from across the Muslim world, in the hope of joining the righteous fight against the godless communists. Many viewed the jihad as a moral cause, much like the European volunteers who went into Spain to fight Franco in the 1930s. They included Osama bin Laden, the callow, twenty-three-year-old son of a Saudi billionaire, who landed in Pakistan at the start of the war, straight from college.

The Afghan war forged a new generation of Pakistani jihadis – fired-up young fighters, driven by a hardline Islamist ideology and burning with a new sense of purpose. And it left behind a network of radical mosques and madrassas, led by emboldened clerics, where a new generations of jihadis could be shaped. An Ivy League of hard-line institutions sprang up in the big cities. In Karachi, there was Binori Town, memorably described by the French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy as ‘the house of the devil’. Not far from Peshawar stood the Darul Uloom Haqqania, the gigantic seminary run by the ‘Father of the Taliban’, Maulana Sami ul Haq. Islamabad had the Red Mosque.

The brother’s sense of purpose was galvanised by the 2001 attacks on America. The Red Mosque instantly became a platform for popular fury over the American invasion of Afghanistan. On Fridays, Abdul Aziz rose to the pulpit to denounce Musharraf, hail bin Laden and propagate anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like the claim that Jews had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. For some Western correspondents, rowdy demonstrations that erupted outside the mosque embodied the widening gulf between Pakistan and the West. ‘Their faces were drawn narrow with hate, and they were all looking at me,’ wrote one Canadian journalist.

What some histories omit to mention, though, is that bin Qasim departed India soon after his conquest, and that

Islam only truly took root on the subcontinent many centuries later, with the arrival of ambulatory mystics of a more peaceable disposition. The Sufis, as the mystics were known, focused on the spiritual aspect of their Muslim faith, emphasising closeness to God over outward displays of piety, and preached coexistence with other religions. Hindus and Sikhs worshipped at their glittering shrines, where a relatively tolerant version of Islam took deep roots that endure today.

If Sehwan offered a powerful repudiation of the steel-edged versions of Islam that had been imported into Pakistan under General Zia, the tide was turning against it. Extremist seminaries such as the Red Mosque had proliferated since the 1980s, funded by donations from oil-rich Gulf countries. The seminaries were a magnet for the poor, offering children as young as five free food, clothing and a rudimentary education. Students woke at dawn and learned the Qur’an by heart, rocking back and forth for hours on end, parroting an Arabic that few could understand. Sexual abuse, a horrifically common crime, was swept under the carpet.

Yet for the poor, these madrassas were better than the alternative. Pakistan’s public schools consistently ranked among the worst in South Asia, and the countryside was littered with ‘ghost schools’, where teachers

collected a wage but never showed up. The madrassas tapped into a powerful vein of discontent, offering their impoverished students an intoxicating promise: that the shimmering pleasures enjoyed by Pakistan’s dissolute elite also could be theirs – although not until the next life. ‘All the major institutions of our country have failed to solve its problems,’ Abdul Aziz told a journalist at the Red Mosque. ‘Military rulers failed. Democratically elected leaders failed. And the judicial system has failed too. Everyone failed, and because of that, there is a vacuum. Somebody’s got to fill it.’

As the siege deepened, I walked through a nearby working-class neighbourhood with Griff Witte, a correspondent with the Washington Post. We happened upon a government clerk at the modest house he shared with two brothers. Traumatised after days of gunfire, they visibly struggled to make sense of events. ‘This is the cause of the Jews in your country,’ Rabbani said, stabbing a finger at Griff. ‘Everything is in the control of the Jews.’ It struck me that he wasn’t necessarily a fanatic – just a poor, disillusioned man with limited prospects, prone to prejudice and conspiracy theories, who, confronted with the great inequalities around them, saw in Islam an expression of rebellion. I thought of the socialist undercurrent in many of Ghazi’s arguments and realised that was part of their genius.

The Red Mosque siege would prove to be a watershed in the history of modern Pakistan, the first flame of a jihadi firestorm that within a few short years would threaten to consume the country.

The British anticipated trouble. An eruption of citywide violence between Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta a year earlier left 4,000 people dead and presented an ominous portent. ‘Grave communal disorder,’ wrote Norman Smith, the director of the Intelligence Bureau, in January 1947, ‘is a natural, if ghastly process tending in its own way to the solution of the Indian problem.’ The partition plan of 3 June allowed just seventy-two days for the transition to independence, during which time three provinces had to be divided, civil and armed services bifurcated, assets shared out. Intelligence reports warned that entire communities were arming themselves. Whatever happened, the British were determined to stay out of it. Thousands of British troops stationed in India were packed onto steamships headed for Europe; those left behind were ordered to avoid any trouble unless British lives were at risk.

The Punjab Boundary Force, a hastily assembled, ad hoc unit intended to keep the peace, collapsed and was quickly disbanded.

By October, at least half a million people were dead and the greatest refugee exodus in human history had been unleashed – a vast tide of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims washing back and forth across Radcliffe’s cursed line. (Historians argue over the final death toll, with some estimates as high as two million.)

In retrospect, it is striking that Britain’s shameful role in partition has not received harsher scrutiny. Certainly, it was the end point of an empire rooted in violence and sectarianism. British officials had long exploited India’s religious fissures to divide and rule, pitting Muslim against Hindu. Their rule was underwritten by pitiless counter-insurgency campaigns and periodic massacres, such as the shooting of unarmed protesters at Amritsar in 1919 and Peshawar in 1930. But the sheer ineptitude and cynical abandonment of partition – more hit-and-run than divide-and-rule – meant that whatever exalted idea the British had of their empire, or themselves, drained into the blood-soaked fields of Punjab.

The prospect of independence posed a thorny dilemma for India’s Muslims. They had suffered crippling discrimination for almost a century, sidelined in India’s civil service and under-represented in its colonial assemblies since Muslim officers led the failed anti-colonial uprising of 1857 (still

known to some as ‘the mutiny’). In an independent India, Muslims should advance on merit. But there was equally a danger that democracy could deepen the discrimination, or even make it permanent. Hindu voters outnumbered Muslims by two to one in India. With religion emerging as the organising force of politics, Muslims worried about being permanently marginalised. The British Raj, the fear went, would become the Hindu Raj. The nominally secular Congress Party often employed the symbols of Hindu spirituality in the cause of nationalist politics.

But the students had called it right. A clamour for Muslim representation was surging across India, and it was about to sweep Jinnah away. After his return to Bombay in the mid-1930s, Jinnah became leader of the Muslim League and established himself as the self-styled ‘sole spokesman’ of India’s Muslims. He came under the spell of Allama Muhammad Iqbal, a poet and philosopher who floated the idea of a Muslim homeland in 1930, and began to sprinkle his speeches with Islamic references. In 1940, Jinnah presided over a meeting in Lahore that formally called for an independent Muslim state.

But Muslims were also divided among themselves. Some clerics welcomed a Muslim homeland as a chance to restore

the Muslim caliphate that collapsed with the Ottoman Empire in 1924; others spurned the notion that the Muslim ummah could be contained in this new-fangled thing called a nation-state. Then there were those who viewed Islam as a cultural, rather than a political identity, and yearned for a secular democracy.

Confusingly, Jinnah spoke to both sides of the argument. In addresses to Muslim community leaders, the Quaid spoke of an ‘Islamic state’ and embraced the ‘Two-Nation Theory’ – the idea that Islam and Hinduism were distinct social and cultural orders that could never coexist. ‘La ilaha il-Allah!’ chanted his supporters. ‘There is no God but Allah!’ But in newspaper interviews, Jinnah was far vaguer about the role of religion in any future state, and he appeared to shield his true intentions and personal beliefs behind lawyerly formulations. Jinnah’s ideological tango on Islam foreshadowed an ambiguity that would become the refuge of Pakistani leaders for decades to come, mostly to disastrous effect. And Jinnah may not even have wanted a country at all. The historian Ayesha Jalal has unearthed evidence that, for many years, the demand for Pakistan was little more than a bargaining ploy, a threat to wring concessions from the reluctant Congress Party. It was a risky strategy. The talks with Nehru spluttered, stalled, and then were rapidly overtaken by events on the ground. The Calcutta riots, in August 1946, sounded the alarm for India’s slow-boil political tensions. Four thousand people died in frenzied clashes between Muslims and Hindus; foreign reporters arriving in Calcutta compared the heaped corpses with the horrors they had recently witnessed at Auschwitz. The unrest spread, and soon the poison of communal hatred was pumping through the veins of British India. Hindus c...

Still today, exactly what transpired in those tortured negotiations is a matter of heated debate. Indians portray Jinnah as the great spoiler, a stubborn megalomaniac who, faced with a losing wager, insisted on doubling down. Pakistani scholars point to the intransigence of Nehru and the Congress Party, which stubbornly refused to make concessions to Muslim concerns.

The origins of the Pashtun have long since melted into a genealogical fog. Some speculate they are ‘lost Jews’ descended from Saul, king of the Israelites – an odd theory, given the anti-Semitism of many Pakistanis. Others trace their roots to the invading armies that passed through, led by Arabs, Persians, Central Asians and Greeks. Simply being a Pashtun is a less complicated matter. Traditionally, there are two requirements: to speak Pashto, an ergative language considered harder to learn than Urdu, and to observe Pashtunwali, the Pashtun code of conduct – literally, ‘the way of the Pashtun’. The bedrock of Pashtunwali is nang, or honour. Nang faces a multitude of threats – a murdered relative, a cheating wife, a casual insult – and is most simply remedied with badal, revenge. Hence the profusion of feuds in places like Lakki Marwat. But Pashtunwali also has many peaceful obligations – such as melmastia, hospitality to a stranger, and nanawatai, sanctuary to a fugitive – that must be equally fastidiously observed.

The word talib means student; the original Taliban were born in the chaos of the Afghan civil war that followed the defeat of the Soviet occupiers. In 1994, a group of righteous Pashtun students rose from the countryside around Kandahar to challenge the predatory warlords then ripping Afghanistan apart. Led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, an enigmatic, one-eyed cleric who refused to be photographed, they announced themselves by hanging an accused rapist from the barrel of a tank. Such savage theatrics would become the Taliban’s hallmark as they fought their way to power in Kabul. Kite-flying, shaving and music were banned; accused adulterers were stoned to death; in 2001, they gained global infamy for blowing up the ancient Buddha statues at Bamiyan. Pakistan’s ISI provided discreet support, viewing the Taliban as a useful proxy in its longstanding struggle for supremacy along the Durand Line.

Pakistan’s Taliban, on the other hand, was born of the tumult that followed the September 2001 attacks. As American warplanes bombed the mountains of Tora Bora, hundreds of al Qaeda jihadis who had been sheltering under the Taliban in Afghanistan – Arabs, Uzbeks and Chechens, mostly – fled across the border into Pakistan’s tribal areas. Most ended up in North Waziristan and South Waziristan, where local Pashtun tribesmen flung open their doors in a warm welcome – partly out of nanawatai, Pashtunwali’s obligation of sanctuary to needy strangers, and partly out of more earthly considerations: bin Laden’s Arab disciples paid for their bed-and-breakfast with thick wads of American dollars. The Americans, realising that their al Qaeda foe – the very reason they invaded Afghanistan – had slipped the net, pressured the Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf to deploy troops to Waziristan. The operation quickly turned to disaster. Pashtun tribesmen, enraged by the intervention, defended their guests with gunfire. Dozens of Pakistani soldiers were killed. A revolt stirred. Gangs of tribal militants seized control of Waziristan and imposed a new order. Video stores were torched and barbers were forbidden to shave men’s beards. Disputes were no longer settled in jirgas but in Saudi-style sharia courts. The maliks – pro-government elders who upheld the old social order – were assassinated or forced to flee. Many of the rebels hailed from the tribal underclass: barbers, small farmers

and day labourers who had grown up in penury watching corrupt neighbours grow rich through government connections. Now, thanks to al Qaeda funding, they were being paid five times more than the militar...

They grew in strength and, by the end of that year, had coalesced into a single movement that formally announced itself as Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan: the Pakistani Taliban.

The cheeky commando ruthlessly exploited what the academic Fouad Ajami called Americans’ ‘weakness for dictators with charm and guile and a “modernist” veneer who rule exotic, dangerous lands.’

The British called Punjab ‘the sword army of the Raj’, the principal recruiting ground for the colonial army, prompting fanciful myths about Punjabis as a ‘martial race’.

Pakistani men in public life flaunted their wealth, dodged their taxes and even fathered children out of wedlock. Yet a

woman could only be a hero, it seemed, only if she adhered to rigid standards of piety, virtue or nationalism on terms set by men.

What shocked outsiders, though, was not the killing itself. A relentless wave of Taliban attacks over the previous year had rocked the country; few Pakistanis doubted that their country was generously stocked with homicidal fanatics. What shocked was the public reaction. In any other country, Qadri might have been instantly vilified, shunned by decent folk as a delusional madman, castigated as an aberration of society. In Pakistan, he was celebrated as a hero.

In that moment of crowning vainglory, Qadri also looked physically exposed. It struck me that, in other circumstances, a man responsible for such an egregious act might have feared retribution from an outraged member of the public. But Pakistan had no Jack Ruby.

Across Pakistan, beleaguered progressives watched on television in horror. Some lamented the passing of ‘Jinnah’s Pakistan’ – the tolerant and pluralist country that was envisaged by their founding father. Others, perhaps more honestly, tried to remember whether such a place had ever existed.

In the spring of 1953, Punjab was swept by riots that targeted the Ahmadis – a small Muslim sect that was barely half a century old. Egged on by rabble-rousing clerics, mobs attacked Ahmadis in the streets, torched their homes and places of worship, and clashed with the riot police. In speeches, the clerics painted the Ahmadis as members of a secretive cabal that they claimed wanted to seize control of Pakistan – an ugly tale with disturbing echoes of the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, only years earlier. In truth, the Ahmadis were despised for their reverence of Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, a preacher who emerged from the Punjab countryside in the late nineteenth century, claiming to be a prophet

from God. That belief enrages orthodox Muslims for whom Muhammad, who died in AD 632, was God’s last prophet on earth. The upheaval ended, that summer, when the government declared temporary martial law in Lahore – the Pakistan military’s first taste of direct rule.

Munir had hit upon the identity crisis at the heart of Pakistan: how to forge a nation state, respectful of all citizens, on Islamic foundations? In his final report, the judge urged Pakistan’s leaders to engage urgently with this conundrum because, he said, the issues raised were so fundamental that they could ‘make or mar the new state of Pakistan’. The report was a masterful piece of work – clearly written, lucidly argued, even lyrical in places. It could never be written

today. In the intervening decades, Pakistan’s leaders, instead of resolving the role of Islam, sought to use it to their own ends. Generals urged their troops into war with the battle cry of jihad. Politicians appealed to religious sentiment to win votes. Powerful interests cynically used Islamic laws to silence critics, quash dissent or, literally, get away with murder. Under a provision known as qisas and diyat (an eye for an eye), a killer can escape justice if he pays ‘blood money’ to the family of his victim – a useful loophole in cases of honour killings, or even killing American spies.

Officially, Christians are equal citizens of Pakistan, represented by the white band on the national flag; in reality, they are treated as an undeclared lower caste. The ‘Christian colony’, near my house in Islamabad, was a cluster of ramshackle houses perched over a foul-smelling sewer and jammed between the spacious homes of the well-to-do. Its residents cleaned houses, swept the streets and cleaned drains – work shunned by Muslims. A friend told of how his landlord, an elderly civil servant, refused to accept a glass of water from a Christian domestic worker because it was ‘unclean’. In Itanwali, Asia Bibi was familiar with such attitudes. She tugged a dupatta over her head during the call to prayer, attended church in a town twenty miles away, and politely resisted pressure from Muslim neighbours to convert. ‘When you’re a Christian in Pakistan, you have to keep your head down,’ she would say.