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Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven – reviewAnatol Lieven's clear-sighted study asks if Pakistan has lost control of its international narrative
Pankaj Mishra The Guardian, Saturday 30 April 2011 Article history
Unblinkered view ... a Pakistani displaced woman in Jalozai camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2009. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
Pakistan, Anatol Lieven writes in his new book, is "divided, disorganised, economically backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism". It is easy to conclude, as many have, from this roll call of infirmities that Pakistan is basically Afghanistan or Somalia with nuclear weapons. Or is this a dangerously false perception, a product of wholly defective assumptions?
Pakistan: A Hard Country
by Anatol Lieven
Buy it from the Guardian bookshopSearch the Guardian bookshop
Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this bookCertainly, an unblinkered vision of South Asia would feature a country whose fanatically ideological government in 1998 conducted nuclear tests, threatened its neighbour with all-out war and, four years later, presided over the massacre of 2,000 members of a religious minority. Long embattled against secessionist insurgencies on its western and eastern borders, the "flailing" state of this country now struggles to contain a militant movement in its heartland. It is also where thousands of women are killed every year for failing to bring sufficient dowry and nearly 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in the previous decade.
Needless to say, the country described above is not Pakistan but India, which, long feared to be near collapse, has revamped its old western image through what the American writer David Rieff calls the most "successful national re-branding" and "cleverest PR campaign" by a political and business establishment since "Cool Britannia" in the 1990s. Pakistan, on the other hand, seems to have lost all control over its international narrative.
Western governments have coerced and bribed the Pakistani military into extensive wars against their own citizens; tens of thousands of Pakistanis have now died (the greatest toll yet of the "war on terror"), and innumerable numbers have been displaced, in the backlash to the doomed western effort to exterminate a proper noun. Yet Pakistan arouses unrelenting hostility and disdain in the west; it lies exposed to every geopolitical pundit armed with the words "failing" or "failed state".
Such intellectual shoddiness has far-reaching consequences in the real world: for instance, the disastrous stigmatisation of "AfPak" has shrunk a large and complex country to its border with Afghanistan, presently a site of almost weekly massacres by the CIA's drones.
Pakistan's numerous writers, historians, economists and scientists frequently challenge the dehumanising discourse about their country. But so manifold and obdurate are the clichés that you periodically need a whole book to shatter them. Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country is one such blow for clarity and sobriety.
Lieven is more than aware of the many challenges Pakistan confronts; in fact, he adds climate change to the daunting list, and he is worried that Pakistan may indeed fall apart if the United States continues to pursue its misbegotten war in the region, thereby risking a catastrophic mutiny in the military, the country's most efficient institution. But Lieven is more interested in why Pakistan is also "in many ways surprisingly tough and resilient as a state and a society" and how the country, like India, has for decades mocked its obituaries which have been written obsessively by the west.
Briskly, Lieven identifies Pakistan's many centrifugal and centripetal forces: "Much of Pakistan is a highly conservative, archaic, even sometimes inert and somnolent mass of different societies." He describes its regional variations: the restive Pashtuns in the west, the tensions between Sindhis and migrants from India in Sindh, the layered power structures of Punjab, and the tribal complexities of Balochistan. He discusses at length the varieties of South Asian Islam, and their political and social roles in Pakistani society.
Some of Lieven's cliché-busting seems straightforward enough. Islamist politics, he demonstrates, are extremely weak in Pakistan, even if they provoke hysterical headlines in the west. Secularists may see popular allegiance to Islam as one of the biggest problems. But, as Lieven rightly says, "the cults of the saints, and the Sufi orders and Barelvi theology which underpin them, are an immense obstacle to the spread of Taliban and sectarian extremism, and of Islamist politics in general."
From afar, a majority of Pakistanis appear fanatically anti-American while also being hopelessly infatuated with Sharia. Lieven shows that, as in Latin America, anti-Americanism in Pakistan is characterised less by racial or religious supremacism than by a political bitterness about a supposed ally that is perceived to be ruthlessly pursuing its own interests while claiming virtue for its blackest deeds. And if many Pakistanis seem to prefer Islamic or tribal legal codes, it is not because they love stoning women to death but because the modern institutions of the police and judiciary inherited from the British are shockingly corrupt, not to mention profoundly ill-suited to a poor country.
As one of Lieven's intelligent interlocutors in Pakistan points out, many ordinary people dislike the Anglo-Saxon legal system partly because it offers no compensation: "Yes, they say, the law has hanged my brother's killer, but now who is to support my dead brother's family (who, by the way, have ruined themselves bribing the legal system to get the killer punished)?"
Lieven, a reporter for the Times in Pakistan in the late 1980s, has supplemented his early experience of the country with extensive recent travels, including to a village of Taliban sympathisers in the North West Frontier, and conversations with an impressive cross-section of Pakistan's population: farmers, businessmen, landowners, spies, judges, clerics, politicians, soldiers and jihadis. He commands a cosmopolitan range of reference – Irish tribes, Peronism, South Korean dictatorships, and Indian caste violence – as he probes into "the reality of Pakistan's social, economic and cultural power structures".
Approaching his subject as a trained anthropologist would, Lieven describes how Pakistan, though nominally a modern nation state, is still largely governed by the "traditions of overriding loyalty to family, clan and religion". There is hardly an institution in Pakistan that is immune to "the rules of behavior that these loyalties enjoin". These persisting ties of patronage and kinship, which are reminiscent of pre-modern Europe, indicate that the work of creating impersonal modern institutions and turning Pakistanis into citizens of a nation state – a long and brutal process in Europe, as Eugen Weber and others have shown – has barely begun.
This also means that, as Lieven writes, "very few of the words we commonly use in describing the Pakistani state and political system mean what we think they mean, and often they mean something quite different." Democratically elected leaders can be considerably less honest and more authoritarian than military despots since all of Pakistan's "democratic" political parties are "congeries of landlords, clan chieftains and urban bosses seeking state patronage for themselves and their followers and vowing allegiance to particular national individuals and dynasties". (With some exceptions, this is also true of India's intensely competitive, and often very violent, electoral politics; it explains why 128 of the 543 members of the last Indian parliament faced criminal charges, ranging from murder to human trafficking, and why armies of sycophants still trail the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty).
Lieven's book is refreshingly free of the condescension that many western writers, conditioned to see their own societies as the apogees of civilisation, bring to Asian countries, assessing them solely in terms of how far they have approximated western political and economic institutions and practices. He won't dismiss Pakistan's prospects for stability, or its capacity to muddle along like the rest of us, simply because, unlike India, it has failed to satisfactorily resemble a European democracy or nation state. Rather, he insists on the long and unconventional historical view. "Modern democracy," he points out, "is a quite recent western innovation. In the past European societies were in many ways close to that of Pakistan today – and indeed modern Europe has generated far more dreadful atrocities than anything Islam or South Asia has yet achieved."
Busy exploding banalities about Pakistan, Lieven develops some blind spots of his own; they include a more generous view of the Pakistani military than is warranted. He doesn't make clear if Pakistan's security establishment can abandon its highly lucrative, and duplicitous, arrangement with the United States, or withdraw its support for murderous assaults on Indian civilians.
Still, Lieven overturns many prejudices, and gives general readers plenty of fresh concepts with which to think about a routinely misrepresented country. Transcending its self-defined parameters, his book makes you reflect rewardingly, too, about how other old, pluralist and only superficially modern societies in the region work. "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, with bracing accuracy, examples from the socioeconomic actuality of Pakistan's big neighbour. Easily the foremost contemporary survey of "collapsing" Pakistan, Lieven's book also contains some of the most clear-sighted accounts of "rising" India.
Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West is published by Picador.
ref:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/01/pakistan-hard-country-anatol-lieven-book-review
Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven — reviewAnatol Lieven's blend of analysis, history and reporting provides a rare and compelling insight into a complex, troubled nation
Jason Burke The Observer, Sunday 1 May 2011 Article history
Children at a refugee camp in Peshawar, north-west Pakistan. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP
What is it with Pakistan? Currently, our attention is diverted by the Middle East, but there seems little doubt that the country will return to the centre of the geopolitical stage soon. Perhaps it will be another major bombing, a battle with militants, a military coup, another humanitarian disaster such as the floods of last year. Pakistan is one of those global hotspots where temperatures remain perennially elevated – and rarely for positive reasons. Yet, despite the interest in this 64-year-old country constructed in the ruins of the British imperial adventure in south Asia, Pakistan remains opaque, obscure and frequently misunderstood.
Pakistan: A Hard Country
by Anatol Lieven
Buy it from the Guardian bookshopSearch the Guardian bookshop
In this truly excellent work, Anatol Lieven, former journalist and currently professor of international relations and terrorism studies at London's King's College, sets out to teach an often ignorant public, and their usually ignorant leaders, about this complex, crucial and troubled nation. The result is a highly readable and invigorating mix of academic analysis, history and ground reporting. It should become, if not a bestseller, certainly the text of reference.
There has always been a dichotomy between the impressions of those outsiders who have spent time in Pakistan and those writing from far away. The latter often describe the country as run by Islamic militants or rogue militaries and point to its nuclear weapons, ongoing internal civil wars, support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and deep hostility to India to justify a reputation, according to Newsweek, as the "world's most dangerous country".
This is where Lieven comes in. A longtime visitor to Pakistan, he appears to have read every major work on the country and to have personally visited, even if briefly, almost all the places he writes about. Spending a month in the rough border city of Peshawar in the summer of 2008 involves a degree of personal courage that is not normally demanded of political scientists. And this ground research pays dividends. 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.
Pakistan's resistance to any political cause, as much as to the constant body blows which fate and politics deliver, is rooted in the "ever present tendency to political kinship and its incestuous sister, the hunt for state patronage", Lieven says. The country's resistance to "democracy" stems from a similar source. This poses problems for western analysts, who tend to treat departures from "supposed western 'norms' as temporary aberrations, diseases to be cured or tumours to be cut out of the otherwise healthy patient's system". In fact, Lieven convincingly argues, these supposed "diseases" are the system. The only radical solution to the malady is that offered by the Islamists – though this would probably kill the patient. If Pakistan is to follow western models of progress, it will have to do so incrementally and organically, in accordance with its own nature and not western precepts. As the contrast between stymied western efforts to impose pluralist democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and the grassroots revolts in the Middle East is showing us, it is only when an idea is not tainted with an association with the alien and foreign that it can be taken up and happily integrated into a pre-existing identity, be it Arab, Pakistani, Muslim or, say, Pashtun.
Much of the latter part of Pakistan: A Hard Country – the title comes from one of many useful quotes gathered by Lieven on his travels – is devoted to the Pashtun ethnic minority in the country and the ongoing militancy. That there is a very serious problem in the western regions is without doubt. Back in the late 1990s, when based in Pakistan for several years, I travelled regularly into the federally administered tribal areas (or Fata) for both work and, bizarre though it now seems, recreation. To try to do this now would be to risk decapitation. My most recent trip into the Fata was with the Pakistani army, who took me with them and their tanks and American-supplied attack helicopters as they expelled militants from a medium-sized town close to the Afghan border. This they achieved, but only at the cost of a few dozen soldiers' lives and the effective destruction of the town they were trying to save.
Lieven makes several useful points about the insurgency in the west of Pakistan: it is not going to force the collapse of the state; it is only the latest in a series of such uprisings that have marked that region over many centuries; it is rooted in the rapid social changes that have occurred along the porous border with Afghanistan and is thus profoundly contemporary. Lieven also raises other elements often forgotten when talking about a supposedly religious movement – such as class, land distribution and status within tribal societies. He even, usefully, cites Weber and the concept of "rational" rebels.
There are one or two flaws in this impressive work. 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 Islamo-nationalist worldview across huge sections of Pakistani society. It is the urban middle class that is the classic constituency of such ideologies (as well as the main recruitment reservoir for military officers). Some of Lieven's references are slightly jarring in their cultural specificity – an officer is described as looking like a middle-aged David Niven – although this isn't too high a price to pay for the colourful analogies he draws with 19th-century Russia or 17th-century England. The more people who read, enjoy and learn from this book, the better.
Salaam....
Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven – reviewAnatol Lieven's clear-sighted study asks if Pakistan has lost control of its international narrative
Pankaj Mishra The Guardian, Saturday 30 April 2011 Article history
Unblinkered view ... a Pakistani displaced woman in Jalozai camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2009. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
Pakistan, Anatol Lieven writes in his new book, is "divided, disorganised, economically backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism". It is easy to conclude, as many have, from this roll call of infirmities that Pakistan is basically Afghanistan or Somalia with nuclear weapons. Or is this a dangerously false perception, a product of wholly defective assumptions?
Pakistan: A Hard Country
by Anatol Lieven
Buy it from the Guardian bookshopSearch the Guardian bookshop
Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this bookCertainly, an unblinkered vision of South Asia would feature a country whose fanatically ideological government in 1998 conducted nuclear tests, threatened its neighbour with all-out war and, four years later, presided over the massacre of 2,000 members of a religious minority. Long embattled against secessionist insurgencies on its western and eastern borders, the "flailing" state of this country now struggles to contain a militant movement in its heartland. It is also where thousands of women are killed every year for failing to bring sufficient dowry and nearly 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in the previous decade.
Needless to say, the country described above is not Pakistan but India, which, long feared to be near collapse, has revamped its old western image through what the American writer David Rieff calls the most "successful national re-branding" and "cleverest PR campaign" by a political and business establishment since "Cool Britannia" in the 1990s. Pakistan, on the other hand, seems to have lost all control over its international narrative.
Western governments have coerced and bribed the Pakistani military into extensive wars against their own citizens; tens of thousands of Pakistanis have now died (the greatest toll yet of the "war on terror"), and innumerable numbers have been displaced, in the backlash to the doomed western effort to exterminate a proper noun. Yet Pakistan arouses unrelenting hostility and disdain in the west; it lies exposed to every geopolitical pundit armed with the words "failing" or "failed state".
Such intellectual shoddiness has far-reaching consequences in the real world: for instance, the disastrous stigmatisation of "AfPak" has shrunk a large and complex country to its border with Afghanistan, presently a site of almost weekly massacres by the CIA's drones.
Pakistan's numerous writers, historians, economists and scientists frequently challenge the dehumanising discourse about their country. But so manifold and obdurate are the clichés that you periodically need a whole book to shatter them. Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country is one such blow for clarity and sobriety.
Lieven is more than aware of the many challenges Pakistan confronts; in fact, he adds climate change to the daunting list, and he is worried that Pakistan may indeed fall apart if the United States continues to pursue its misbegotten war in the region, thereby risking a catastrophic mutiny in the military, the country's most efficient institution. But Lieven is more interested in why Pakistan is also "in many ways surprisingly tough and resilient as a state and a society" and how the country, like India, has for decades mocked its obituaries which have been written obsessively by the west.
Briskly, Lieven identifies Pakistan's many centrifugal and centripetal forces: "Much of Pakistan is a highly conservative, archaic, even sometimes inert and somnolent mass of different societies." He describes its regional variations: the restive Pashtuns in the west, the tensions between Sindhis and migrants from India in Sindh, the layered power structures of Punjab, and the tribal complexities of Balochistan. He discusses at length the varieties of South Asian Islam, and their political and social roles in Pakistani society.
Some of Lieven's cliché-busting seems straightforward enough. Islamist politics, he demonstrates, are extremely weak in Pakistan, even if they provoke hysterical headlines in the west. Secularists may see popular allegiance to Islam as one of the biggest problems. But, as Lieven rightly says, "the cults of the saints, and the Sufi orders and Barelvi theology which underpin them, are an immense obstacle to the spread of Taliban and sectarian extremism, and of Islamist politics in general."
From afar, a majority of Pakistanis appear fanatically anti-American while also being hopelessly infatuated with Sharia. Lieven shows that, as in Latin America, anti-Americanism in Pakistan is characterised less by racial or religious supremacism than by a political bitterness about a supposed ally that is perceived to be ruthlessly pursuing its own interests while claiming virtue for its blackest deeds. And if many Pakistanis seem to prefer Islamic or tribal legal codes, it is not because they love stoning women to death but because the modern institutions of the police and judiciary inherited from the British are shockingly corrupt, not to mention profoundly ill-suited to a poor country.
As one of Lieven's intelligent interlocutors in Pakistan points out, many ordinary people dislike the Anglo-Saxon legal system partly because it offers no compensation: "Yes, they say, the law has hanged my brother's killer, but now who is to support my dead brother's family (who, by the way, have ruined themselves bribing the legal system to get the killer punished)?"
Lieven, a reporter for the Times in Pakistan in the late 1980s, has supplemented his early experience of the country with extensive recent travels, including to a village of Taliban sympathisers in the North West Frontier, and conversations with an impressive cross-section of Pakistan's population: farmers, businessmen, landowners, spies, judges, clerics, politicians, soldiers and jihadis. He commands a cosmopolitan range of reference – Irish tribes, Peronism, South Korean dictatorships, and Indian caste violence – as he probes into "the reality of Pakistan's social, economic and cultural power structures".
Approaching his subject as a trained anthropologist would, Lieven describes how Pakistan, though nominally a modern nation state, is still largely governed by the "traditions of overriding loyalty to family, clan and religion". There is hardly an institution in Pakistan that is immune to "the rules of behavior that these loyalties enjoin". These persisting ties of patronage and kinship, which are reminiscent of pre-modern Europe, indicate that the work of creating impersonal modern institutions and turning Pakistanis into citizens of a nation state – a long and brutal process in Europe, as Eugen Weber and others have shown – has barely begun.
This also means that, as Lieven writes, "very few of the words we commonly use in describing the Pakistani state and political system mean what we think they mean, and often they mean something quite different." Democratically elected leaders can be considerably less honest and more authoritarian than military despots since all of Pakistan's "democratic" political parties are "congeries of landlords, clan chieftains and urban bosses seeking state patronage for themselves and their followers and vowing allegiance to particular national individuals and dynasties". (With some exceptions, this is also true of India's intensely competitive, and often very violent, electoral politics; it explains why 128 of the 543 members of the last Indian parliament faced criminal charges, ranging from murder to human trafficking, and why armies of sycophants still trail the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty).
Lieven's book is refreshingly free of the condescension that many western writers, conditioned to see their own societies as the apogees of civilisation, bring to Asian countries, assessing them solely in terms of how far they have approximated western political and economic institutions and practices. He won't dismiss Pakistan's prospects for stability, or its capacity to muddle along like the rest of us, simply because, unlike India, it has failed to satisfactorily resemble a European democracy or nation state. Rather, he insists on the long and unconventional historical view. "Modern democracy," he points out, "is a quite recent western innovation. In the past European societies were in many ways close to that of Pakistan today – and indeed modern Europe has generated far more dreadful atrocities than anything Islam or South Asia has yet achieved."
Busy exploding banalities about Pakistan, Lieven develops some blind spots of his own; they include a more generous view of the Pakistani military than is warranted. He doesn't make clear if Pakistan's security establishment can abandon its highly lucrative, and duplicitous, arrangement with the United States, or withdraw its support for murderous assaults on Indian civilians.
Still, Lieven overturns many prejudices, and gives general readers plenty of fresh concepts with which to think about a routinely misrepresented country. Transcending its self-defined parameters, his book makes you reflect rewardingly, too, about how other old, pluralist and only superficially modern societies in the region work. "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, with bracing accuracy, examples from the socioeconomic actuality of Pakistan's big neighbour. Easily the foremost contemporary survey of "collapsing" Pakistan, Lieven's book also contains some of the most clear-sighted accounts of "rising" India.
Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West is published by Picador.
ref:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/01/pakistan-hard-country-anatol-lieven-book-review
Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven — reviewAnatol Lieven's blend of analysis, history and reporting provides a rare and compelling insight into a complex, troubled nation
Jason Burke The Observer, Sunday 1 May 2011 Article history
Children at a refugee camp in Peshawar, north-west Pakistan. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP
What is it with Pakistan? Currently, our attention is diverted by the Middle East, but there seems little doubt that the country will return to the centre of the geopolitical stage soon. Perhaps it will be another major bombing, a battle with militants, a military coup, another humanitarian disaster such as the floods of last year. Pakistan is one of those global hotspots where temperatures remain perennially elevated – and rarely for positive reasons. Yet, despite the interest in this 64-year-old country constructed in the ruins of the British imperial adventure in south Asia, Pakistan remains opaque, obscure and frequently misunderstood.
Pakistan: A Hard Country
by Anatol Lieven
Buy it from the Guardian bookshopSearch the Guardian bookshop
In this truly excellent work, Anatol Lieven, former journalist and currently professor of international relations and terrorism studies at London's King's College, sets out to teach an often ignorant public, and their usually ignorant leaders, about this complex, crucial and troubled nation. The result is a highly readable and invigorating mix of academic analysis, history and ground reporting. It should become, if not a bestseller, certainly the text of reference.
There has always been a dichotomy between the impressions of those outsiders who have spent time in Pakistan and those writing from far away. The latter often describe the country as run by Islamic militants or rogue militaries and point to its nuclear weapons, ongoing internal civil wars, support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and deep hostility to India to justify a reputation, according to Newsweek, as the "world's most dangerous country".
This is where Lieven comes in. A longtime visitor to Pakistan, he appears to have read every major work on the country and to have personally visited, even if briefly, almost all the places he writes about. Spending a month in the rough border city of Peshawar in the summer of 2008 involves a degree of personal courage that is not normally demanded of political scientists. And this ground research pays dividends. 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.
Pakistan's resistance to any political cause, as much as to the constant body blows which fate and politics deliver, is rooted in the "ever present tendency to political kinship and its incestuous sister, the hunt for state patronage", Lieven says. The country's resistance to "democracy" stems from a similar source. This poses problems for western analysts, who tend to treat departures from "supposed western 'norms' as temporary aberrations, diseases to be cured or tumours to be cut out of the otherwise healthy patient's system". In fact, Lieven convincingly argues, these supposed "diseases" are the system. The only radical solution to the malady is that offered by the Islamists – though this would probably kill the patient. If Pakistan is to follow western models of progress, it will have to do so incrementally and organically, in accordance with its own nature and not western precepts. As the contrast between stymied western efforts to impose pluralist democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and the grassroots revolts in the Middle East is showing us, it is only when an idea is not tainted with an association with the alien and foreign that it can be taken up and happily integrated into a pre-existing identity, be it Arab, Pakistani, Muslim or, say, Pashtun.
Much of the latter part of Pakistan: A Hard Country – the title comes from one of many useful quotes gathered by Lieven on his travels – is devoted to the Pashtun ethnic minority in the country and the ongoing militancy. That there is a very serious problem in the western regions is without doubt. Back in the late 1990s, when based in Pakistan for several years, I travelled regularly into the federally administered tribal areas (or Fata) for both work and, bizarre though it now seems, recreation. To try to do this now would be to risk decapitation. My most recent trip into the Fata was with the Pakistani army, who took me with them and their tanks and American-supplied attack helicopters as they expelled militants from a medium-sized town close to the Afghan border. This they achieved, but only at the cost of a few dozen soldiers' lives and the effective destruction of the town they were trying to save.
Lieven makes several useful points about the insurgency in the west of Pakistan: it is not going to force the collapse of the state; it is only the latest in a series of such uprisings that have marked that region over many centuries; it is rooted in the rapid social changes that have occurred along the porous border with Afghanistan and is thus profoundly contemporary. Lieven also raises other elements often forgotten when talking about a supposedly religious movement – such as class, land distribution and status within tribal societies. He even, usefully, cites Weber and the concept of "rational" rebels.
There are one or two flaws in this impressive work. 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 Islamo-nationalist worldview across huge sections of Pakistani society. It is the urban middle class that is the classic constituency of such ideologies (as well as the main recruitment reservoir for military officers). Some of Lieven's references are slightly jarring in their cultural specificity – an officer is described as looking like a middle-aged David Niven – although this isn't too high a price to pay for the colourful analogies he draws with 19th-century Russia or 17th-century England. The more people who read, enjoy and learn from this book, the better.
