Mr Cameron doesn't understand Pakistan. Sadly, he is not alone
We see the extremes, but ignore those in the middle and our blinkered thinking is not only stupid, but dangerous
A week before her death, travelling through the same lowland towns of the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan that are now half-buried under mud, Benazir Bhutto said to me: "Pakistan has changed Mr Burke, Pakistan has changed. And I need to learn about it once more."
Bhutto had returned to her native land three months earlier and after an eight-year exile, a comeback in large measure due to arm-twisting by the Bush administration's top officials and the British Foreign Office. With characteristic brio, she had thrown herself into campaigning for scheduled elections. Her comments came after she had halted her armoured vehicle to plunge into a market in the scruffy town of Pabbi to buy oranges. "I need to know the price of vegetables," she had told me as we got back into her vehicle. "I need to know about my people."
Bhutto's death, at the hands of a 16-year-old suicide bomber, marked the moment that Pakistan returned to the limelight after several years overshadowed by Iraq and terrorism in Europe and the UK. Since then, it has barely left centre stage. Home to al-Qaida, much of the Afghan Taliban, an astonishing range of indigenous militants, beset by economic and environmental disaster, Pakistan is one of the victims and the villains of the ongoing multidimensional conflict that is the legacy of the 9/11 attacks and the now defunct war on terror. The Wikileaks on the Pakistani security establishment's support for the Afghan Taliban, David Cameron's statement in India that the state must stop sponsoring terrorism overseas and now the visit of Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower and president of Pakistan since August 2008, who arrived in the UK last week, have focused attention on Pakistan again.
Pakistan is usually viewed through three prisms. The first is that of the Orientalists. Experts, officials, spooks and diplomats still frequently cite Winston Churchill or even Kipling as a useful guide to the North-West Frontier. This is roughly equivalent to using Emile Zola to learn about modern France, Joyce about Ireland or Dickens about today's East End. There has probably been deeper and faster social change in Pakistan in recent decades than in the UK. If you think Thatcherism changed Britain, imagine what the roughly contemporaneous rule of General Zia-ul-Haq did to Pakistan. Or the coming of mass broadcast media and telephones to the smallest rural settlement, where high levels of illiteracy still persist, in the last decade.
The second prism is that of the fragmented failing state. Pakistan is yet to fulfil any of the multiple warnings of imminent collapse since its foundation in 1947. With 180 million people, a dozen different ethnicities, languages, Himalayan mountains and Gulf beaches, Pakistan certainly is diverse. But no more so than many other big countries. Its state and social structures may be catastrophically weak but it is astonishingly resilient. In the last decade, Pakistan has suffered several major natural disasters, a coup and a virtual coup, mass civil unrest, a series of insurgencies that amount to a civil war, the killing of its best-known political leader, massive and barely governed economic growth followed by a crash and many other blows. Somehow Pakistan keeps going. It seems likely to in the next decades.
The third prism is the vision of Pakistan as a "battlefield between the moderates and the extremists". This is perhaps the most misleading. It is true that the exact role of Islam within Pakistan has always been debated – is it a country of Muslims? Or a Muslim country? – and that there are both relatively secular "moderates" and religious extremists. But if the religious right is a fringe element, so too are the "moderates". The "battlefield" prism obscures the critical mass in the middle who, while the two fringes exchange brickbats, is quietly forging a coherent, potent and fairly homogeneous identity.
You often hear about the Arab Street but never the Pakistani Street. Yet the Pakistani Street – the man on the Gujranwala omnibus — is not only there but it – and he — is the future of the country.
Break Multan, once a provincial town in arid southern Punjab, is now a city of around 1.5 million where new hotels, shops, offices and religious schools are multiplying with equal rapidity. At a university on its outskirts, I spoke to some of the 14,000 students who, like their counterparts anywhere, sat, books spread around them, on the grass amid the buildings. They were the sons and daughters of the rapidly expanding Pakistani middle class, studying in a middle-ranking college, in a middle-sized town, of mixed ethnic origin, close to the geographic centre of Pakistan and the point where the country's four provinces meet. If anyone was representative of what Pakistan, where the average age is 21, will be and will think in a decade, they were.
The conversations we had were deeply depressing. Their view of the west, coloured by conspiracy theories about the true perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, a visceral anti-Americanism and a deep social conservatism, was overwhelmingly negative. The west's material conditions were undoubtedly attractive, many said, but there was no respect for women or the old and there was pornography, prostitution and Aids too. People should be able to choose whom they marry, they agreed, and women should work. But a balance none the less had to be kept.
Their patriotism was assertive and unabashed. "We are a proud and great country. We have nuclear weapons," said one. In Afghanistan and in Kashmir, Muslims were "as oppressed" as they were in Palestine, I was told. They all wanted "democracy" but said their politicians were corrupt and never helped the poor.
Though no one wanted clerics to rule, the laws of the country should however be in accordance with sharia. The students maintained a strict gender segregation. The girls were veiled. Many of the men were bearded. They were neither members of Jamaat-e-Islami, the big Islamist party, nor the ultra-westernised elite kids who party in Lahore or Karachi. They were "middle Pakistan".
A poll of Pakistanis released last month by the respected Pew Centrereinforced quite how widespread such views are. More people see al-Qaida, the Taliban and homegrown groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba more favourably than the US, it found. More than 80% supported segregating men and women in the workplace, stoning adulterers and whipping or amputation for thieves. Three in four endorse the death penalty for apostasy. And 80% said suicide bombing was unIslamic.
This is not just an issue for Pakistan. All militaries reflect the views and culture of the society that produces them and the half-million strong Pakistani army is no exception. An increasing proportion of soldiers come from the "emerging urban centres" which the historian of the Pakistani army, Shuja Nawaz, has noted are "the traditional strongholds of the growing Islamist parties and conservatism associated with the petit bourgeoisie".
After talking on al-Qaida at the army's headquarters, I was told off by senior officers for repeating the "lies of the western establishment". The "miscreants" against whom their comrades were fighting on the Afghan frontier had been "led astray" by India, the CIA or "the Jews", one colonel said. "We are the army of the nation," said another. It is a statement that is more accurate than many in the west care to think. It also explains policies, such as sponsoring the Afghan Taliban, which bewilder many western observers. This is not to say other values or perceptions do not exist – they do – but just that the views of students in Multan were thus mainstream.
So where does that leave Britain? David Cameron's visit in India last month revealed the vast gulf between how we now view India and Pakistan. We are happy with India's growing power and independence, not least in the hope it will counterbalance the far more frightening Chinese as the global eclipse of Europe accelerates. Yet for Pakistan, a decades-old policy continues. We ignore the increasingly powerful cultural and political influence of an increasingly conservative Middle East in the country. We hope our favoured English-speaking moderates, such as the Bhutto clan, can somehow fashion a new ally and partner out of this troublesome nation.
Yet what Benazir Bhutto had recognised a few days before her death was not just that Pakistan had changed but that the time for changing Pakistan had passed too. And this is the unpleasant new reality that Britain and America need to get used to. Pakistan's identity issues are steadily being resolved. But not how we would like them to be. Shout as much as we like, the man on the Gujranwala omnibus is increasingly unlikely to listen.
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