The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

And the longer you are here, the more you are convinced that’s the key to the whole problem.’ It was certainly true that the trauma of partition, and the confusions of faith and identity it created, lurked behind the most enduring pathologies I encountered in the land of broken maps. Although Pakistan was built on faith, Islam offered an incomplete identity. Negation of India filled the void. Viewed through this lens, so much of what Pakistan did – the coddling of jihadis, the scheming in Afghanistan – seemed to stem from a gnawing insecurity. Pakistan had to be everything India was, and was not. As we chugged through rush-hour traffic, Maqbool the taxi driver pointed out a quiet stretch of shoreline that recalled a sinister moment. On a calm evening in November 2008, a small boat carrying ten heavily armed Pakistanis landed here. After splitting into pairs, the Pakistanis headed for central Mumbai, where they set about killing as many Indians, Jews and Western tourists as possible. ‘Brothers, make it burn,’ their handler instructed. The gunmen belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, or ‘The Army of the Pure’, the most lethal of several militant groups established by the ISI in the 1980s to carry out attacks in Indian-held Kashmir. After 9/11, Lashkar fighters turned their guns against American troops in Afghanistan. But the jihad against India remained their priority. By the end of the assault on Mumbai, sixty hours later, 166 people lay dead and