Anatol Lieven - Pakistan, A Hard Country

Anatol Lieven is a professional journalist turned policy-wonk, and this book is his passionate plea for Americans to get out of the Islamic world or at least leave Pakistan alone.


So it focuses on the Taleban, currently the most successful fundamentalist Sunni militancy in the Islamic world.

As Lieven details it, Pakistan is such an ethnically and religiously fragmented country, the Taleban's only chance of toppling the national government is an American invasion -- and even then, their chance of replacing it with themselves is about zero. So there would just be chaos, similar to the collapse of Yugoslavia.


A summary of his argument can be found here


I never could figure out the landscape of political parties or dynasties that he maps out -- that would require a second reading accompanied by many searches on the internet.


Suffice it to say that the country is a crazy-quilt of local and sectarian interests. Islam offers the most widely shared kind of idealism, but its profoundly anti-democratic nature makes it more compatible with the warlords who first established it 1300 years ago than with the dynamics of a modern economy.


Pakistan seems to exemplify what a country would look like if it were run by competing Mafia dons. It certainly gives me a greater appreciation for the Chinese revolution -- which may have left 30 million dead, but at least left a united, prosperous, relatively peaceful body politic.


It also gave me a better appreciation for the Partition, which also left up to a million casualties, but also left a strong central power in Pakistan, the army, and something like a central government in India. As Lieven suggests, if Muslims had not had the opportunity to create their own neighboring state, India's national government would be much weaker than it is. BTW - most of the local corruption that he describes in Pakistan he attributes to India as well.


Most depressing is his description of the utterly corrupt condition of the Pakistani judiciary. It's so bad that even the unofficial courts of the Taleban are better. Every case is decided by money and political influence. And then there's the professional journalists who proliferate conspiracy theories as enthusiastically as the craziest American nut case.


The central government is also helpless to improve infrastructure -- every project is a scam -- so the electrical grid is a disaster and nothing is being done to fend off the even more serious disasters of drought and flood, the consequences of climate change and deforestation -- all while the population continues to skyrocket.


The best part of this book is its anecdotal detail, accumulated over 20 years of periodic visits.


For example the last ruler of the princely state of Swat is still remembered as doing a much better job of ruling than the Pakistani bureaucrats who replaced him. He was definited not the febrile, womanizing idiot described in this novel