Excerpt: Playing With Fire

introduction

paki stan i s a vast and diverse society of some 175 million people who inhabit scattered pockets of clan and class, religion and ethnicity, poverty and power. It has a thousand separate worlds that may coexist at close quarters but never intersect. It is a tribal chief sleeping with an arsenal under his bed; a fashion model strutting across a stage; a beggar gulping soup in a Sufi shrine; a fiery cleric exhorting acolytes to martyr themselves for Islam; a tiny girl making bricks all day in the sun; a society bride in glittering crimson; a colonel watching his son receive a medal for bravery; a family of flood victims waiting in an empty tent. Pakistan is a country of existential as well as cultural contradictions, some of which have not been resolved since it was founded six decades ago. It is a constitutional democracy in which many people feel they have no access to political power or justice. It is an Islamic republic in which many Muslims feel passionate about their faith but are confused and conflicted over what role Islam should play in their society. It is a proud nuclear power that yearns for global respectability but mistrusts its neighbors and resents its allies. It is a teeming hive

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of activity in which many people feel too trapped to move. It is a national security state under siege from terrorists that selectively coddles violent extremist groups. This book is an attempt to explain to Western readers what Pakistani society is like today: what matters to Pakistanis, how they live and work, what frustrations and hopes they harbor, whom they fear and admire, and what forces shape their lives and opinions. It is not an investigative work aimed at ferreting out the secrets of powerful institutions or radical movements. It does not try to keep up with every incremental news development or to predict what lies ahead for the war on terror and the ambivalent relationship between Pakistan and the United States. Rather, it is an attempt to create a backdrop for a dangerous and fluid moment in the history of a troubled but important country, and to explain what is enduring and changing in its life as a nation. It is an attempt to explain such puzzles as why Pakistanis have a lovehate relationship with the West, why the coup-prone army remains the nation’s most respected institution, and why the feudal mindset still dominates politics. It explores why a country with such enormous economic potential has failed to educate and employ a majority of its people, and why a nation founded with such high hopes as a modern Muslim democracy has struggled so painfully to live up to them. In all of these issues lurks the same, central question: why is Pakistan, with its huge military establishment, democratic form of government, and tradition of moderate Muslim culture, failing to curb both the growing violent threat and the popular appeal of radical Islam?

over th e past dec a d e , I have traveled widely in Pakistan and explored many of its worlds, from Sufi shrines to Deobandi seminaries, from fashion shows to flooded villages, from brick quarries to bombed bazaars. The most important thing I have learned is that many Pakistanis

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feel they have no power. They see the trappings of representative democracy around them but little tangible evidence of it working in their lives. They feel dependent on, and often at the mercy of, forces more powerful than they: landlords, police, tribal jergas, intelligence services, politicized courts, corrupt bureaucrats, and legislators tied to local power elites. People do not trust the system, so they feel they need a patron to get around it. This in turn makes everyone complicit in corruption, especially its victims. The feeling of powerlessness and injustice, which people expressed everywhere I went in Pakistan, is perhaps the most significant factor in explaining the appeal of the Taliban and other religious extremists. They appear to offer justice in a society where that is hard to come by, even if people may not understand what the extremists’ brand of justice would look like. They also offer an opportunity for those who feel excluded, especially the young and poor, to join a movement that has elements of a moral crusade or revolution, even if it seems like thuggery from the outside. The second important thing I learned is that in Pakistan, truth is an elusive and malleable commodity. In Afghanistan, another country where I have spent a lot of time, things are often spelled out in black and white: fight or die, eat or starve, guest or enemy. Afghans survive by making hard choices, but they make them with defiant pride. In Pakistan many things are gray and murky, and people survive by playing the angles, ducking their heads, and reinventing themselves. Truth is elastic, fleeting, and subject to endless political manipulation. Major assassinations are rarely solved, and there is often a feeling that it is convenient for them not to be solved. Court cases are chaotic affairs with myriad versions of events, suspects pressured to confess or recant, and innocent people charged or released through bribes. Political promises are easily made and rarely kept. People are considered foolish if they pay taxes, creating a permanent culture of tax evasion. The current president has been accused and jailed in numerous corruption cases but never convicted, and the truth will probably never be known.

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In foreign affairs, central aspects of Pakistan’s behavior toward other nations are either covert, duplicitous, or routinely denied, such as the longtime official fiction that Pakistan extended only moral and political support to the insurgency in Kashmir, or the recent official fiction that Pakistan has not maintained links to selected Islamic militant groups as a source of potential pressure on India and strategic depth in Afghanistan. After the terrorist siege in Mumbai in 2008, Islamabad denied for weeks that the surviving commando belonged to a Pakistani militant group that had been officially banned but secretly supported by the state for years. When those at the top of a society routinely prevaricate and obfuscate, hypocrisy becomes a way of life and the state cannot expect or demand that ordinary citizens will behave honestly. When political pressure and corruption filter down to the pettiest legal case or the smallest bureaucratic transaction, a government cannot ask its citizens to rise above them. When Pakistanis today quote Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s speech in 1948, in which the new country’s founding father called on its young civil servants to resist political pressure and serve the people honestly, they do so with chagrin.

the thi rd th i n g I began to understand was the deeply— sometimes frighteningly—emotional nature of many Pakistanis’ attachment to their religion. Pakistan is not a theocracy, but it was founded as a Muslim nation, its laws are written in conformity with Islam, and the vast majority of its inhabitants are Muslims. Yet its citizens receive a barrage of confused messages about what it means to be a Muslim, what is the correct meaning of sharia or jihad, and what is the proper relationship between the state and religion. When there is violence against religious minorities, be they Shiites or Christians or Ahmedis, it is sometimes tacitly condoned by influential people who should know better. When terrorist attacks take place and innocent people are killed, these same influential people—officials, politicians, talk show hosts, religious leaders— often cast blame on vague foreign enemies, rather than acknowledg-

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ing the menace of violent homegrown extremists who harm the society, the state, and the religion of Islam. When a militant group is banned but its leaders are freed time after time, it sends a confusing signal to the public about what the state views as right and wrong. Many Pakistanis are extremely passionate about Islam and easily roused to anger in its defense. To an extent this fervor correlates with class and education. In a society where millions are barely literate, raised to revere rather than question, and exposed to limited sources of information, they can be easily swept up in mob hysteria against anyone accused of insulting their religion. Police, courts, and political leaders are often reluctant to intervene, either from sympathy or from fear of backlash by powerful Islamic groups and their followers. There are also influential people in Pakistan, including highly educated opinion makers, who deliberately equate national pride and patriotism with unquestioned support for Islam, no matter what form it takes. Some seem to be promoting a dangerous clash of civilizations with the West for purely domestic political or religious purposes. This deliberate conflation of religion and state, famously rejected by Jinnah in 1947, was revived and promoted heavily during the Cold War era of the 1980s, when military ruler Mohammed Zia ul-Haq launched a campaign to “Islamize” the nation. It has continued to filter through society ever since, accompanied by the proliferation of Islamic seminaries, of which there are now more than twenty thousand across the country, teaching an estimated two million students. Many of these establishments are moderate and mainstream, but others are unregulated, unregistered nurseries of hate. Since the attacks of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been a growing tendency toward a more muscular or conservative religious attitude among Pakistanis as well as Muslims elsewhere, from pop singers and politicians to cricket players and TV hosts. Many Pakistanis today abhor the punitive extremism of the Taliban, yet they deeply resent the West and feel stridently defensive about Islam. That is how someone such as Faisal Shahzad, a middle-class

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college graduate and air force official’s son living in Connecticut, could be persuaded to plant a bomb in Times Square—just as easily as someone such as Ajmal Kasab, an urban lower-class dropout with no prospects or heroes, could be persuaded to launch a jihad against the city of Mumbai.

i n th e fi rst four months of 2011, a series of events brought Pakistan’s internal contradictions into sharply dramatic relief. They highlighted the violent divergence of religious convictions among ordinary Muslims, the cultural divide between rural and urban notions of justice, the abysmal level of mistrust between allied military and intelligence establishments in Islamabad and Washington, and the official incompetence or perfidy that allowed al Qaeda’s fugitive leader, Osama bin Laden, to live for years just a few blocks from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, where he was killed in a secret raid by U.S. Navy Seals. The first issue exploded just after the New Year, with the successive, hate-driven assassinations of two liberal Pakistani officials, Punjab Province governor Salman Taseer and Federal Minister for Minority Religious Affairs Shabbaz Bhatti. The two men had little in common: Taseer was a brash, wealthy, and secular Muslim politico; Bhatti a devout Christian advocate from a Punjabi village. What they shared was an outspoken commitment to religious tolerance, a cornerstone of Jinnah’s founding vision for Pakistan. Taseer was gunned down by one of his own police guards, who proudly confessed he had acted out of righteous anger against someone he considered an infidel and a blasphemer. Instead of revulsion, the crime generated a perverse groundswell of popular support for the jailed killer. Religious groups hailed him as a hero of Islam and passed out his posters at exuberant rallies. The civilian government, stunned by the backlash, hastily distanced itself from proposals to reform the draconian blasphemy law and promised the newly empowered forces of intolerance that not a word of it would be touched. Six weeks after Taseer’s murder, unknown assailants shot Bhatti to

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death in what appeared to be a Taliban hit. His slaying silenced the leading voice of Pakistan’s 20-million-strong Christian minority, which had come under increasingly frequent harassment, ostracism, and violent attacks as the growing ranks of Islamic extremists spread poison between Muslim and Christian neighbors in working-class communities. This time there was more public indignation, but it was soon overshadowed by outrage over Koran-burning incidents in the United States, which stoked Muslim fears of a Western assault on Islam. Another growing source of suspicion and tension between the United States and Pakistan—despite their official partnership in the war on Islamic terrorism—was the role of covert American military and intelligence operations inside Pakistan. This included a campaign of missile strikes by CIA drone planes on militant targets near the Afghan border and rumored ground operations to spy on extremist groups. American officials had long suspected Pakistan of secretly shielding some militants, despite its adamant denials, thus necessitating covert action. These tensions erupted in a nationwide furor in January, when Raymond Davis, a burly CIA contractor, shot dead two young men who were following his vehicle on motorbikes in Lahore; a third was struck and killed by a U.S. embassy vehicle. The incident confirmed Pakistanis’ worst suspicions about U.S. spy activities and created an awkward dilemma for Washington, which needed to placate its allies in Islamabad but prevent Davis from being publicly tried in Pakistan. After weeks of wrangling over his diplomatic status, the problem was solved in a way that protected U.S. spycraft but exposed both governments as uncomfortable coconspirators. Under Islamic laws that allow blood money to forgive crimes, the families of the three victims were paid off just as Davis’s trial was due to start, and he was whisked out of the country. This humiliating denouement was immediately followed by a major CIA drone strike that killed dozens of villagers, provoking a rare public protest by Pakistan’s army chief and a derisive retort from U.S. intelligence agents, who suggested

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the army was posturing to protect its ties with Islamic militant groups. The depth of U.S. suspicions became much clearer on the night of May 2, when President Obama suddenly called a news conference and announced that Osama bin Laden had just been killed in a secret raid by U.S. Special Forces on his guarded mansion in Abbotabad, Pakistan, a garrison city near the capital. For the United States, the death of the iconic al Qaeda leader was a triumphant and cathartic ending to a multiyear manhunt for the figure behind the 9/ii terror attacks. For Pakistan, it was a huge embarrassment. The location of bin Laden’s hideout suggested that the country’s military-intelligence establishment, which had received many millions of dollars in U.S. aid to fight terrorism, was either grossly incompetent or complicit in hiding the world’s most wanted terrorist. The elaborate secrecy of the American raid suggested the latter, and no amount of defensive spluttering seemed likely to repair the damage to relations between the United States and its nuclear-armed ally. The third setback for Pakistan’s pretensions as a moderate, modernizing society came in an equally sensitive domestic arena. It pitted the stubborn power of traditional rural mores—with their primitive forms of justice, stratified social hierarchy, and routine abuse of women—against the hopes for change embodied in an increasingly independent justice system headed by an iconoclastic crusader and champion of popular rights. The case of Mukhtar Mai, a peasant woman from southern Punjab, had outraged the world nearly a decade earlier. Mai, then thirtythree, told police she had been gang-raped by a group of men, on the orders of a village council, in crude retaliation for an alleged tryst in a sugarcane field between her thirteen-year-old brother and a girl from a higher landowning caste. Fourteen men were initially charged in the crime, and the case wound its way through Pakistan’s notoriously slow court system while Mai was internationally acclaimed as a heroine for women’s rights. Over the years, lower courts and appeals panels acquitted most of

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the defendants, leaving the Supreme Court as Mai’s last hope for vindication. But on April 21, nearly nine years after the incident, a high court panel acquitted all but one man of rape. The two justices in the majority showed a keen understanding of maledominated village mores and power politics—yet they expressed little empathy for Mai, suggesting her story was “flimsy” or had been concocted by others. Only the lone dissenting judge seemed to understand what was at stake, and what it had taken Mai to report the crime in the first place. “An illiterate woman of rural humble background mustered tremendous courage to stand up against powerful influential culprits to bring them to justice,” he wrote. But in the end the justice system failed her, and all rural women facing abuse at the hands of powerful local forces. The justices sent a strong, if perhaps unintentional, signal that the ancient customs of rural and tribal justice in Pakistan, as cruel and unfair as they might be, would not be easily dislodged.

yet for every end u r ing problem in Pakistan—feudalism or corruption, militancy or injustice—there are signs of change and pockets of hope. Unfortunately forces for change can also become compromised or work against themselves. The independent judiciary, destroyed by military rule and then restored by the extraordinary lawyers’ movement, has set an inspiring example in some cases, but it has proven hidebound in others or provoked political and institutional confrontations that Pakistan can ill afford. The remarkable rise of the independent media, especially private TV news channels, has exposed scandals and abuses, and it has made officials more accountable than ever before. Yet often news and commentary stray into sensationalism and ad hominem attacks, and influential talk show hosts frequently pander to public fears and prejudices rather than calling for fairness and facts. Civil society movements, once confined to the small urban elite, are beginning to spread. In towns all over Pakistan, lawyers and

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journalists and educators are working, often alone and in danger, to bring social justice and progress to people who have been neglected by the state, trapped by debt peonage, or imprisoned by tribal tradition. The devastating floods of 2010 exposed the extremes of rural poverty and provoked a crise de conscience among wealthy elites. The influence of Sufi shrines and culture has also provided oases of compassion and serenity, and a crucial antidote to the forces of hate, exclusivity, and aggression that increasingly thrive in a defensive and emotionally charged religious environment. Access to technology and higher education is beginning to trickle down the social scale, offering the fast-growing younger generation an alternative to the rote learning of madrassas. The new phenomenon of grassroots leaders and women becoming involved in politics is beginning to shake the complacency of a top-down political party system. But change is not coming fast enough. The majority of poor Pakistanis still feel excluded from politics, educational opportunities, jobs, and justice. They have become accustomed to paying bribes instead of taxes, and to seeking favor from corrupt politicians instead of demanding service from the state. They look for someone to blame for their plight, and it is easy for them to be persuaded that foreign enemies of Pakistan and Islam are the cause, when often the problem starts at home. Pakistan has more potential than many other developing nations to thrive and progress, to become stable and prosperous and democratic. It is not a failed state, as some have asserted. But unless its military leaders retrain their sights from rivalry with India to the far greater threat of Islamic extremism, and unless its civilian leaders work harder to educate, employ, and engage a frustrated young populace that soon will be the largest in the Muslim world, they may be condemning a new generation of Pakistanis to make bricks, mop floors, or put on suicide vests. —Arlington, Virginia, May 2011

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