FIRST for the good news: Pakistan is not about to explode. The militants are not going to take power tomorrow; the nuclear weapons are not about to be trafficked to Al-Qaeda; the army is not about to send the Afghan Taleban to invade India; a civil war is unlikely.
The bad news is that Pakistan poses us questions that are much more profound than those we would face if this nation of 170 million, the world’s second biggest Muslim state, were simply a failed state. If Pakistan collapsed, we would be faced by a serious security challenge. But the resilience of Pakistan and the nation’s continuing collective refusal to do what the West would like it to together pose questions with implications far beyond simple security concerns. They are about our ability to influence events in far-off places, our capacity to analyze and understand the behavior and perceived interests of other nations and cultures, about our ability to deal with difference, about how we see the world.
Pakistan has very grave problems. In the last two years, I have reported on bloody ethnic and political riots, on violent demonstrations, from the front-line of a vicious war against radical insurgents. I spent a day with Benazir Bhutto a week before she was assassinated and covered the series of murderous attacks committed at home and abroad by militant groups based in Pakistan with shadowy connections to its security services. There is an economic crisis and social problems — illiteracy, domestic violence, drug addiction — of grotesque proportions. Osama Bin Laden is probably on Pakistani soil.
For many developing nations, all this would signal the state’s total disintegration. This partly explains why Pakistan’s collapse is so often predicted. The nation’s meltdown was forecast when its Eastern half seceded to become Bangladesh in 1971, during the violence that preceded Gen. Zia ul-Haq’s coup in 1977, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, when Zia was killed in 1988, during the horrific sectarian violence of the early 1990s, through sundry ethnic insurgencies, after 9/11, after the 2007 death of Bhutto and now after yet another political crisis. These predictions have been consistently proved wrong. The most recent will be too. Yesterday, tempers were already calming.
Some of the perpetual international hysteria is stoked by the Pakistanis themselves. Successive governments have perfected the art of negotiating by pointing a gun to their own heads. They know that their nation’s strategic importance guarantees the financial life support they need from the international community. More broadly, our understanding of Pakistan is skewed. This is in part due to centuries of historical baggage. Though few would quote Emile Zola on contemporary France, Winston Churchill, who as a young man fought on the Northwest Frontier, is regularly cited to explain today’s insurgency. This legacy also includes stereotypes of “Mad Mullahs” running amok, an image fueled by television footage that highlights ranting demonstrators from Pakistan’s Islamist parties though they have never won more than 14 percent in an election.
For many Britons, Pakistan represents “the other” — chaotic, distant, exotic, dirty, hot, fanatical and threatening. Yet at the same time, Pakistan seems very familiar. There is the English language, cricket, kebabs and curries and figures such as Imran Khan. There are a million-odd Britons of Pakistani-descent who over four decades have largely integrated far better in the UK than often suggested.
