The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

bin Laden in Abbottabad. But a poisonous distrust endured, demonstrating more than ever that Washington and Islamabad were joined by their hard interests rather than any shared values. Bigger questions loomed. With more than 200 million inhabitants, one-third under the age of fourteen, Pakistan had become the world’s fifth most populous country. The figure was projected to double by 2050. One day, experts joked, Pakistan would be a standing-room-only kind of country. Environmental damage and climate change added to the strain. In the winter, a poisonous smog blanketed Lahore, injuring children and forcing schools to close; in the summer, Karachi laboured under hellish, increasingly frequent heat waves that, in 2015, killed 400 people in a matter of days. Melting ice caps in the Himalayas threatened food production. The economy stumbled on, lagging ever further behind India. It all raised anxious questions. What would those legions of jobless young Pakistanis do in the future, as they chafed at the frustrations of their poverty-stricken lives? Who would they blame it on? And what ideas would guide them? Pakistan’s identity crisis is not unique. In his 1995 book Inventing Ireland, the historian Declan Kiberd traced how the poet W. B. Yeats and other intellectuals purposefully forged an Irish identity in the early twentieth century, before independence from Britain. Was it Jinnah’s fault, as Salman Rushdie has charged, that he insufficiently imagined his creation?