The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

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Furthermore this book feels out of date, and the author should have drawn out his narrative more fully to 2020. Finally, there was a definite feeling of hopelessness with some of the vignettes. Why not distill Pakistan through the persona of Edhi? Or what about some of the more interesting and neglected early pioneers of Pakistan (Mohammad Ali Bogra or Suhawardy?)

A number of foreign correspondents based in Pakistan have made their name by writing insightful books in the last four decades. Emma Duncan’s Breaking the Curfew, Christina Lamb’s Waiting for Allah, and Owen Bennett-Jones’ Pakistan: Eye of the Storm were all published to rapturous praise. Declan Walsh’s perceptive and provocative book The Nine Lives of Pakistan - Dispatches from a Divided Nation is the latest addition to this growing list. Emma Duncan’s pioneering book provided the introduction, and later the framework, to Walsh on writing about Pakistan. Walsh found Pakistan perplexing and fascinating: crowded with places of unmatched natural beauty, inhabited by people with whom he formed deep friendships and yet pierced with danger. Navigating through the labyrinth, he came across various faultiness in Pakistan’s body politic: faith and identity, praetorianism and the oversized role of intelligence agencies, underdevelopment and ethnic nationalism, corruption and tax evasion culture, a self-serving and hypocritical elite which flouts law, violence fueled by religious extremism, and unscrupulous and compromised political parties, mostly dynastic and dependent upon state patronage. The scale of the struggle for women’s rights is encapsulated by Asma Jahangir, a crusading lawyer whose first client – an eloping lover – is murdered in Jahangir’s office by her own mother. (In “our folklore… the man who stops two lovers from meeting is evil,” yet in real life they “may be killed”, Jahangir wonders in sorrow.) Through Abdul Rashid Ghazi, a preacher whose company Walsh “enjoyed, jihad puffery aside”, you learn of the rise of the Pakistani Taliban. In a chapter entitled “The Good Muslim”, Walsh contrasts the life of the senator Salmaan Tasser, a “hard-charging, money-grubbing sinner”, with the bodyguard who assassinated him for trying to save minorities who had been sentenced to death on dodgy blasphemy laws. They provide readers with the chance, if they are willing to read with an open mind, to deeply introspect on their individual and national lives and reflect upon where and how they need to make amends to progress collectively. The Nine Lives of Pakistan is worthwhile reading for those looking to understand an alternate viewpoint and gain an outsider reporter’s perspective on the multiple complexities that make Pakistan, Pakistan.

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Walsh spent nearly a decade living in and covering Pakistan, first for The Guardian, then for The Times. His tenure coincided with some of the country’s most turbulent modern years: fraught elections, assassinations and military rule; a war next door and within; and a tenuous alliance with the United States fraying to the breaking point, particularly after American Special Forces found Osama bin Laden hiding inside Pakistan, and killed him.

Unlike many Western journalists who focus more on a country crippled grappled with terrorism and religious extremism, you have deconstructed Pakistan in an unprecedented way in the book while depicting ethnic and religious identities and their looming threats over the country and the powerful military playing the shots. How do you see the future of Pakistan? WALSH: There have been these questions about Pakistan and its survival really right from the very beginning. The country, of course, was formed in 1947 when then-British India was cleaved in two. And so Pakistan ever since then has faced one crisis after another. And the crises have been the product of identity issues, problems about the role of religion in the country, power struggles between the military and civilian leaders. So Pakistan has really struggled since its creation to have one long period of stability and calm. And for better and for worse, the period that I was there was really one of the most turbulent periods. Declan Walsh: No group of nine, or even ninety-nine, lives could do justice to a country as diverse, tumultuous or intricately fascinating as Pakistan. And the goal is not to represent, but to understand. I chose to write about this group of people because their stories helped me to understand the country, not only through the dramatic events they became swept up in, and in many cases were consumed by — kidnappings, uprisings, assassinations — but also because their experiences were a window on the eternal themes that have dogged Pakistan since its birth in 1947: identity, faith, and a sense of unresolved history. I’m wary of writers who speak about countries in general terms — “Pakistanis think this” or “Egyptians like that” — and, in that sense, there are many potential nine lives. But these were the ones that opened a window on the country for me and, hopefully, for my readers. Apart from his silky prose, Walsh’s accurate portrayal of events and objective evaluation of his characters forces the reader to proceed with breathless attention. His characterizations are spot-on: the Bhutto family saga is described as “part Greek tragedy and part The Godfather”; police officer and encounter specialist Chaudhry Aslam is termed as Karachi’s Dirty Harry; his chapter on Asma Jahangir is titled-the wonderful Senorita; ex-spy “Colonel Imam” saw himself as a “kind of Pakistani TE Lawrence”; Pakistan’s roller-coaster relationship with United States is referred to as a forced marriage based on shared interests rather than values and devoid of any affection- rather punctuated with dispute and betrayal. The Munir Commission report, authored in the aftermath of anti-Ahmedi riots in 1953, could not have been written in today’s Pakistan due to the prevailing religious bigotry.

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But I came to realize that the conflict had an importance greater than its size. It was a product of a powerful fault line that runs deep across the length of Pakistan – the tension between the marginalized people of the peripheries and a powerful, army-dominated center. There’s been periodic uprising by disgruntled Sindhis, Pashtuns, and Balochs, always directed at Punjab and military-centric governments. And that, in turn, stems from the great unresolved question: what do they all share, as Pakistanis? The original idea – Islam – is clearly not enough. SHAPIRO: You know, beyond the violence and struggle that you chronicle in the book, what made you love Pakistan enough to devote a decade of your life to telling its story?

I found this claim glaringly assumptive. This quote is in fact in direct accordance with The Charter of Madina, widely considered the first civil constitution to set the basis of a multi-religious Islamic state in Medina, drawn up on behalf of the Prophet Muhammad. A vital clause of the document granted non-Muslim members autonomy and freedom of religion. It goes without saying that this religious liberty granted by Islam has often been undermined by political and sectarian motives in Pakistan. Turbulent events Walsh is a wonderful writer, with a gift for sketching an impression of a place, time and ambience with a few brief lines. He knows how to interweave travelogue with an account of the relentless tensions that always threaten to burst through each vignette in the book. What also shines through is the relish with which Walsh throws himself into the far corners of Pakistan, into crowds, celebrations and rites, with a drive born of fascination with the land and its people.He makes some very basic factual errors (Jinnah was born a Shia [he was born Ismail’i] the religious establishment didn’t want an independent Muslim state but a pan national caliphate [the deobandis where opposed to the creation Pakistan and there were no calls for worldwide caliphate amongst the Indian ulema], and his comments on Sufism are orientalist ['mystics', mystical, liberal and so on ]). If you live in Pakistan, the relentless onslaught of turbulent events and ensuing incessant high drama leaves one with a permanent case of deja vu Walsh is a gifted writer with the talent of a smart-bomb. His timely and trenchant book has significantly set the bar higher for future foreign correspondents interested in writing about Pakistan.

Manto is best known for his short story “Toba Tek Singh,” a powerful parable about the absurdities of Partition in 1947. But Manto’s other writings, and many of his real-life experiences, foreshadowed the issues that still loom large. He wrote fearlessly about the country’s troubled nationalism, the instrumentalization of blasphemy, and the schisms that cut across society, in stories and essays that, with some tweaks, could have been written today. His work is also graphic, earthy, and filled with a cheeky and subversive humor that is true to the best work on Pakistan. Manto is the ultimate antidote to the saccharine portraits of what Pakistan is, or could be, that are favored by Pakistanis ideologues. Intimate and complex, unravelling the many mysteries of state and religion, this formidable book offers an arresting account of life in a country that, often as not, seems to be at war with itself. From Salman Taseer to Anwar Kamal Khan, as you showed, most Pakistani politicians have contradictory public and private identities. What are the consequences of these contradictions on Pakistani politics and society? Although he correctly assumes that Jinnah cuts an elusive figure in Pakistan, remembered yet unknown, he then proceeds to fill in the gaps with incomplete or embellished facts. Case in point: he postulates based on the following line from Jinnah’s speech that he wanted a secular, not a theocratic homeland. “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”But despite the rhetoric about a boundless China-Pakistan relationship — “higher than the mountains, deeper than the seas” — I suspect there are limits, and I think they are becoming more apparent. Chinese loans and other financial assistance can carry a high cost, and as the coronavirus pandemic exacts a stiff economic price in the coming years, we may see China call in its chips with countries like Pakistan. China’s harsh treatment of its own Muslim citizens in western Xinjiang province is likely to strain relations, no matter how much Prime Minister Imran Khan tries to glass over the story (or pretend he hasn’t read the reports of those abuses). Peppered throughout are reminders that this work is not easy. It is telling that among the nine profiled in the book, only one subject remains alive; more than half were killed. Walsh functions with the assumption that his lines are tapped, works to avoid intelligence tails and continues to pry into the dark corners that those in power wish he wouldn’t. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{