Book Review

(By Gp Capt B S Nayyar)

Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven
There is an old saying east or west home is the best, the fact in the
idiom is visible in the writing of Anatol Lieven. He appears to have
developed special attachment (after staying there) with this obscure nation.
The description of Pakistan by him is at variance with how the international
community views this troubled nation, which in his views is marginally
informed about this complex nation. Even I agree to disagree with his
perspective with a flaw in my argument for not having lived there, while he
has personally visited, even if briefly, almost all the places he writes about.
Pakistan A Hard Country is described by its publisher as a
magisterial investigation. The entire book is proof of that. Lieven has
displayed extraordinary patience & determination while he observes and
records all aspects about this unique nation otherwise known as Pakistan.
After hundreds of pages we realise that actually its not very different from
many countries. It has everything, ranging from good weather to religious
fundamentalism to ethnic tension, only more of it.
Anatol Lieven, a reporter for the Times in Pakistan in the late 1980s
and currently professor of international relations and terrorism studies at
London's King's College, has added his early experience of the country
with extensive recent travels, including to a village of Taliban sympathisers
in the NW Frontier, and conversations with a remarkable cross-section of
Pakistan's population including farmers, businessmen, landowners, judges,
clerics, politicians, soldiers and jihadis.
In this book, Anatol Lieven, sets out to give a strong message about
this complex and troubled nation to often not very well informed public and
usually ignorant leaders. Anatol Lieven has made a genuine attempt to
alter perceptions & overturns prejudices. Although in his point of view
Pakistan is one of those global hotspots where temperatures always
remain high but rarely for constructive reasons.

When Lieven tells us that Pakistan is "tough and resilient as a state

and a society" and that "it is not always as unequal as it looks", he has the
data and the case studies to back up his arguments. Lieven is in no hurry
of winding up hence he gets into the complexities of provincial and caste
relationships. He is a writer bent on documenting everything he encounters,
and then always remembering to cross-reference other countries and other
histories. He cites an exhaustive range of reference Irish tribes, South
Korean dictatorships, and Indian caste violence as he probes into "the
reality of Pakistan's social, economic and cultural power structures".
He gives the readers a lot of fresh concepts with which to think about
a routinely misrepresented country & other societies in the region.
"Pakistan is in fact a great deal more like India or India like Pakistan
than either country would wish to admit," Lieven writes, and there is hardly
a chapter in which he doesn't draw, examples from the socioeconomic
actuality of India. Lieven's book also contains contemporary survey of
"collapsing" Pakistan and some of the most clear-sighted accounts of
"rising" India.
Lieven describes the well-embedded power structures in the country,
devoting separate chapters to Pakistans provinces, its political parties and,
most important, its army. He moves around with Taliban sympathizers and
generals, traces the role of religion and explains the concepts of kinship
and honour at play in the countrys current travails. He does not appear to
be afraid of reaching his own conclusions. Shariah, as per him, is not so
much a strict set of rules as a system for how justice is delivered and
who delivers it.
Lieven's courage lies in his noteworthy, flesh-and-blood portrait of the
nation, ranging across demographic swathes and including a chorus of
voices from farmers to intelligence officers. The picture is one of a semianarchic nation stuck in police savagery, institutional corruption, population
bulges, water shortages and the risk of catastrophic environmental disaster
following last year's floods. The latter challenge, he narrates, poses the
major long-term threat. In Lievens opinion, the West doesnt realize that
the problem in Pakistan is not a lack of democracy, but too much of it, with
many competing parties and interest groups.
Lieven is optimistic regarding repeated failures of democracy and the
rule of law. These institutions, he suggests, were British colonial
impositions that never struck deep roots in Pakistan. Even where the

outward forms persist, they have always been corrupted and manipulated,
usually of course in the interests of the rich. No wonder that both, various
kinds of informal justice and the savage but comparatively swift and
transparent processes of shariah, have so strong an appeal. Pakistans
police forces and local courts emerge from Lievens account as absolutely
unfit for purpose on every imaginable level.
Lieven has attempted to paint a textured, complex portrait of the
military and ISI. The army is the one Pakistani institution that works. It is
organised, disciplined and defined by its post-Partition insecurity towards
India. This is certainly not a new line of thought, but one that is fully
investigated. Pakistan's anti-Indian agenda is still confused for a radical
Islamist agenda in the West and Lieven surgically unravels the details.
Pakistan's apprehension over being swallowed up, or surrounded, if India
begins to involve itself in Afghanistan's affairs has led to the army's union
with the Afghan Taliban. Yet off the home front, the ISI has helped to defeat
the threat of terror in the Western world, its assistance "absolutely vital" to
preventing more attacks on Britain, US and Europe. There exist a point to
argue here i.e. for instance, there is no denial to the fact that Pakistans
military Inter-Services Intelligence is the countrys most important body, the
power behind every throne, Lieven says rather little about it, and where he
does he is notably non-committal about its true role. A fuller discussion of
why he rejects ideas of the ISI as all-powerful would have given better
clarity.
Lieven presents argument about the insurgency in the west of
Pakistan and does not expect the collapse of the state as it is only the
latest in a series of such uprisings that have marked that region over many
centuries. In his perspective it is embedded in the rapid social changes that
have occurred along the porous border with Afghanistan. The war against
the Taliban into which they have been conscripted by the Allies, who might
have been Pakistan's protectors but who now show a clear "tilt towards
India". Another complicating factor is the army's campaign against the
Pakistani Taliban, who are a direct threat to the nation, though officers are
reluctant to wage violence on fellow-Muslims on the orders of the West.
Lieven is perhaps too quick to dismiss the impact that the rapid
urbanisation and growth of the last decades have had on the strength of
organised political Islamism and, perhaps more important, the consolidation
of what could usefully be described as an Islamic-nationalist worldview
across huge sections of Pakistani society. The dismissal does not have

enough arguments on its side as it is the urban middle class that is the
classic constituency of such ideologies.
In the end Anatol Lieven sounds too committed a journalist to let any
story bound fears overpower his comprehensive and perceptive narrative
although he has been almost silent on Pakistans foreign policy and
economy.
Finally subject book is recommended for reading but with few
suggestions, so that authors bias (if any) is identified & analysed enabling
reader to draw his own conclusions. The proposed suggestions are as
follows:

Would I trust the information unsupported by facts or logical

reasoning?

What facts has the author omitted?

What additional information is essential & necessary?

What method(s) have been used to create positive or negative

impressions?
I am sure that each reader may have his own pointers to ensure
reading the book in totality and not as an isolated piece of writing before
forming his opinion. Wishing you an unbiased reading.
Recommended readings:
1.

Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army and the Wars
Within (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008).

2.

Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (Hurst &Co., London, 2005).

3.

Chaudhary, Justice in Practices; Lyon, Anthropological Analysis.

4.

Z.A. Bhutto, Foreign Policy of Pakistan (Pakistan Institute of

International Affairs, Karachi, 1964).

5.

Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in

Pakistan (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004).