The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

There have been so many hollow predictions of Pakistan’s demise – Tariq Ali’s fine book from 1983, for example, was titled Can Pakistan Survive? – that the most pertinent question might be not whether Pakistan will fail, but how it has survived this long. The doom-tinged forecasts of my early years in Pakistan did not come to pass. Militants did not seize power or snatch a nuclear warhead. War with India was averted. Pakistan’s relationship with the United States stumbled on. The state did not collapse and, best of all, the Taliban were pushed into retreat. A high-school massacre proved a turning point. In December 2014, six militants rampaged through the Army Public School in Peshawar, flinging grenades and spraying gunfire that killed 149 people, mostly children. Under intense public pressure, the military jolted into a higher gear. A wave of unremitting anti-Taliban operations cleared the militants from their strongholds in the tribal belt and Karachi. The rate of violence plunged. In 2013, Pakistan had forty-six suicide attacks and 2,400 deaths from militant attacks; in 2019, there were four suicide attacks and 350 deaths. In Karachi, pilgrims