The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

It made little sense. The Baloch insurgency posed a puny military threat to Pakistan’s military, the world’s sixth-largest, with 800,000 men under arms. Western apathy toward the plight of the Baloch left Pakistan’s generals free to fight the rebels as they pleased. And yet, Balochistan had become the biggest chip on their shoulders. Why? Certainly, the province had strategic value – vast mineral resources and remote locations suitable for hiding nuclear weapons – and was the focus of a multi-billion-dollar economic corridor funded by China. On top of that, the army had a reflexive contempt for tribesmen it viewed as impudent upstarts. But perhaps, also, it came down to less tangible

factors buried deep in the Pakistani psyche. The secession of East Pakistan in 1971, when a bungled counter-insurgency campaign cost Pakistan half of its territory, shattered the military’s self-image as the guardian of the nation, and furrowed deep scars in its thinking. Subsequent attempts by other ethnic groups to claim greater independence – Baloch, Pashtuns and Sindhis, among others – met with a neuralgic response. Balochistan was the most glaring example of this weakness – a huge chunk of the country’s land mass that, seven decades after independence, was under tenuous central control. And that, in turn, bespoke the psychosis of instability that had plagued Pakistan from the beginning. In a land of broken maps, Balochistan had the most fissiparous borders.

‘It all comes back to India,’ as the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, told me before she left. We were in her office, mulling over why Pakistan’s military continued to play with fire by supporting ‘good’ jihadis. The perceived threat from India lay at the heart of this confounding strategy, she concluded. ‘I don’t think it’s justified, but they do.

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

hundreds were injured. It was a staggering global terrorist spectacle, arguably the most audacious since 2001, and it unfolded live on television, leaving indelible images of a blazing five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel and bloodied bodies strewn around the Leopold Café, which was popular with foreign tourists. And all of it had been remotely directed from a house in the Karachi suburbs. A single attacker survived. Ajmal Kasab was a high-school dropout from a Punjabi backwater who had joined Lashkar a year earlier, seeking fame and adventure. In the iconic image of the massacre, Kasab strides through the packed Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, an assault rifle under his arm, spraying gunfire at helpless commuters. The Indian police captured him two hours later as he drove in a stolen car towards Malabar Hill. The semi-liter...

Just as Pakistan’s pretensions of economic superiority were being shattered, so were India’s notions of itself as a bastion of secular tolerance. The election of Narendra Modi, a populist Hindu nationalist, as prime minister of India in 2014 signalled more than a rightward lurch – it shook India’s ideological foundations to their core. Until then, Indian politicians had prided themselves on being the heirs to Nehru’s vision of India as a country of rich pluralism, where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs co-existed peacefully and shared political power (even if reality often fell short of that goal). The rise of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which surfed to power on a wave of pent-up Hindu resentment, changed all of that. Modi had entered politics through the RSS, the Hindu supremacist group whose member, Nathuram Vinayak Godse,

had assassinated Gandhi in 1948. Within a few years of Modi becoming prime minister, the civil and political rights of India’s Muslim minority came under sustained assault. It started with a symbolic issue. Cows had always been a marker of cultural and religious difference in India: Hindus worshipped bovines; Muslims ate them. ‘The cows I want to eat, the Hindu stops me from killing,’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah remarked. After Modi came to power, that distinction became a pretext for communal violence. Hindu mobs lynched Muslims who worked with cows under the noses of indifferent police officers. The Hindu supremacists turned to other issues. Muslim romantics were accused of waging ‘love jihad’ against Hindu women. State governments curbed their civil liberties. In December 2019, Modi passed a law that blatantly restricted Muslim citizenship. Two months later, Hindu mobs set upon Muslims in New Delhi, in a wave of destruction and arson that left fifty people dead, and had chilling echoes of partition. Such flagrant discrimination was strikingly similar to the intolerance of Pakistan’s Islamists. Modi himself was riding a larger wave, as the South Asian flag-bearer for the wave of right-wing populism washing across the globe. ‘This is extraordinary. This is unprecedented,’ Modi told diaspora supporters in the United States in September 2019, before grasping the hand of President Donald Trump.

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

flocked to the reopened Manghopir shrine, where the sacred crocodiles once again luxuriated in its murky green waters, feasting on small bags of meat. ‘Peshawar opened the world’s eyes,’ said a policeman posted outside the shrine. And yet. The decade of mayhem that followed the Red Mosque siege in 2007 had exacted a fearsome toll. Some 63,000 Pakistanis had been killed and 66,000 injured in violence of various kinds – Taliban bombings, American drone strikes, sectarian bombings, the war in Balochistan and fighting on the border with India, among other causes. Over a thousand schools had been destroyed, and the land’s ancient lattice of religious diversity had been ripped to shreds. Even the glowing, 800-year-old Sufi shrine at Sehwan Sharif did not escape: in 2017, a blast ripped through a crowd of pilgrims gathered before its golden gates, slaughtering ninety people. Although the Taliban were on the run, many other jihadi outfits roamed freely. The ISI’s double games continued. The United States also bore a measure of responsibility for Pakistan’s chaos. The CIA drone campaign in the tribal belt wiped out the top tier of al Qaeda militants, but it also killed hundreds of civilians. The lengthy, inconclusive American intervention in Afghanistan had badly destabilised Pakistan by creating fertile ground for its jihadi groups. No firm evidence was produced, in Washington or elsewhere, to prove accusations that the Pakistanis had been sheltering Osama

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 Invent...

Perhaps. But blame – or adulation – of Jinnah is no longer of much use to those Pakistanis seeking to imagine a better future. Husain Haqqani, a former diplomat, has suggested that its leaders should jettison the ideology of jihad, abandon the pointless pursuit of parity with India, and see Pakistan as a trading nation rather than a warrior one. Already, Pakistanis possess many advantages and strengths: a huge number of educated, ambitious and resourceful young people; an extended family system that provides a social safety net; su...