This encouraging observation was made by Anatol Lieven, professor of International Relations and Terrorism Studies at the King’s College, London, at a talk titled, “Pakistan: a hard country”, an evaluation of his book with the same title, at the Oxford University Press’s head office on Saturday evening. However, he cautioned that it could become a failed state if the outlook in many spheres of activity, among the powers that mattered, were not geared to present-day realities and pragmatism.
Lieven said that the analysis presented in his book was against the backdrop of the Afghan militancy. The spillover of this militancy into the region, he said, had been analysed in the book in the light of the roots of power in Pakistan which had cultural and religious overtones. This he said was to a considerable extent, responsible for the terrorism and militancy in Pakistan.
Religion, he said, had many different faces in Pakistan which was so evident from the visibly diverse collective psyches of Punjab and Karachi. However, he said, what compensated for this diversity was the resilience Pakistan had always displayed in times of crises.
It was this resilience, he said, which had helped Pakistan contain to some extent the insurgency which could have been much worse. Since 2009, he said, insurgency had become really endemic but still Pakistan contained it well.
Lieven acknowledged that the Taliban and, prior to them the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, had a right to defend themselves and fight to throw off foreign military occupation but he said the course adopted by the Taliban had created lots of dilemmas for the region in that it had been turned into a powder keg.
The US’ military intervention had created lots of anger which in turn had facilitated turning of public attention to Taliban propaganda. The Americans, he said, were determined to fight on indefinitely to the last soldier so as not to be seen as a defeated nation, especially after their humiliation in Vietnam but, he said, such egotistic and shortsighted policies could boomerang on the Americans themselves in the social and economic spheres domestically. In the US, he said, the opposition viewed pragmatic compromise as cowardice. He said he had urged US policymakers to review their policies on Afghanistan. He acknowledged that US policies in the region had been “disastrous”. He said that there could be a mass uprising as a result of US policies but fortunately Pakistan had an in-built mechanism for containing such uprisings—the institution of elections.
The professor said the “hard country” part of the title of his book was because of three main reasons: firstly because Pakistan faced some really hard and decisive choices since the sprouting of the Afghan crisis; secondly, because the resilience in the system could snap at some point if the correct course was not pursued; thirdly, he asked an MNA when he was a journalist here in the 1980s as to why he had had five people killed, to which the MNA in his reply gave a whole lot of justifications, which, he said, reeked of a tribal mindset. He said it was these tribal values which seemed to dominate and could be destructive to the social fabric.
As for Balochistan, he blamed the semi-educated, tribalised set-up and said that under-investment in the social spheres, in his opinion, had caused unrest, and he said the talk of independence against the backdrop of the province’s warring and feuding tribes, could turn the province into another Somalia, given the backdrop of the huge natural resource wealth of the region, especially copper. “Independence is always a dangerous idea to toy with.”
Talking about Lieven’s book, Ameena Saiyid, Managing Director, Oxford University Press (Pakistan), said that at a time when the world was viewing Pakistan as something close to a rogue state, when few good things seemed to be coming out of Pakistan, the book came as a rational and realistic analysis of Pakistan’s troubles. Lieven, she said, seemed to understand the complexities of Pakistan’s culture and experience.
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