The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

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WALSH: Well, you know, I've just spent a five-year assignment in Egypt. And on the basis of that, I can certainly tell you that every country is not the same. And there are countries where people are really afraid to speak out and really feel constrained. And it can be much harder to be a journalist. But in Pakistan, even though there were a lot of forces that could threaten people's lives or that exerted a lot of pressure on them - and yet there was this natural impulse to speak. At first glance, Pakistan seems to be filled with stark contradictions. An observant Muslim may say his or her prayers then guzzle whiskey after dinner; even socially liberally people might hide important details about their lives from their own families. Westerners often take these contradictions for hypocrisies. But after a while, I started to see them through the lens of public and private spheres that allow a kind of tolerance. In Pakistan, and perhaps South Asia more generally, many people enjoy greater freedoms and more permissive lives than outward appearances suggest. Their neighbors or parents or village mullah may well be aware of this – the important thing is not to rub it in everyone’s face. This isn’t always a force for good, and it can certainly retard social progress, but it’s not all bad either. DECLAN WALSH: When I started to write the book, I thought, of course, about the big characters, the Pervez Musharrafs, the Benazir Bhuttos, the people that I had really covered intensively over the years. But then I realized that I had learned most, actually, in a way from what I called the sort of second-tier characters of the country's dramas - police chiefs, spies, a tribal chief. These were people who lived dramatic lives and were willing to open up those lives to a stranger like me.

The demise of Pakistan – a country with a reputation for volatility, brutality and radical Islam – is regularly predicted. But things rarely turn out as expected, as renowned journalist Declan Walsh knows well. Over a decade covering the country, his travels took him from the raucous port of Karachi to the gilded salons of Lahore to the lawless frontier of Waziristan, encountering Pakistanis whose lives offer a compelling portrait of this land of contradictions. 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. 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.” 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? 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.WALSH: So that's a chapter about Asma Jahangir. She was Pakistan's most prominent human rights activist. She came from a fairly well-to-do family in Lahore but had spent her life on the streets of the country, standing up for the dispossessed, for minorities who are being discriminated against, for women who had suffered and still suffer heinous crimes. And more generally, she stood for civilians against the country's military. This is - Pakistan's a country where the army has been in charge directly for about half of the country's history. And for the rest of the time, frankly, the military has pulled the levers of power, indirectly. The Diplomat’s Shah Meer Baloch interviewed Declan Walsh about his latest book, Pakistan, regional politics, media freedom, and more. Below are excerpts.

SHAPIRO: So what does her story tell you about the ability of civilians to stand up to the military in Pakistan?This book came well recommended by several colleagues and so I was eager to read it when I had an opportunity That all changed when a pious general, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, seized power in 1977, hanging the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and opening the door to a “harsh unyeielding brand of Islam” imported from Saudi Arabia, whose princes and clerics Zia allowed to seed his country with madrassas. 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. One of the most problematic chapters for me was the portrayal of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. A stoic, enigmatic figure compared to his flashy contemporaries Nehru and Gandhi, Jinnah’s legacy had suffered the repercussions of his reticence, leading his countrymen to recast everything from his attire to his speeches for self-serving motives. The common denominators in the chaotic events that Walsh recounts are also what constitutes the Achilles' heel of Pakistan – religion and army. This book charts the trajectory of the creeping post-9/11 radicalisation and the rising Deep State, “the semi-visible iceberg of army garrisons, military spies and their political satraps”. Exocitism over nuance

Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times’s most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. Dhamaal is a form of spiritual rapture, but Walsh describes it as “a kind of religious rave” and regards the shrine as having a Las Vegas aesthetic, which has extremely different connotations. He seems to be overstretching analogies here to make foreign customs palatable to western readers. Lastly, can you share any memories of the senorita, as you call her in her profile, the prominent human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir who called spade a spade? After she passed away following a stroke in 2018, how big a vacuum did her death create in Pakistani civil society? Generally it was an interesting read with some well drawn out vignettes of some well and some lesser well-known figures through Pakistan’s history. Walsh is an engaging writer who can hold the readers attentions.Since its inception, many volatile issues have been exacerbated by ethnic and sectarian conflict, frequently turning Pakistan into a tinderbox. While Pakistan’s image abroad is sustained by a generic hardline approach, Walsh found it hard to square it with the permissiveness he saw in other parts of society, where the rich did as they pleased and organised “lavish, boozy parties inside high walls (and, later, a lot of cocaine consumption)”. Upon close scrutiny, Walsh struggles with the jarring double standards between the rigid, de jure policies of the state and the de facto societal practices. Many extremist groups looked on western journalists as legitimate targets, for kidnapping at least, and at one point Walsh is saved by the man he has hired a car from. Overhearing a group of men discussing the logistics of grabbing Walsh, the rental man bundled the Irish journalist into the vehicle and sped away. Islam or the army were supposed to be the glue holding the place together. Yet both seemed to be tearing it apart Declan Walsh The former New York Times Pakistan bureau chief paints an arresting, up-close portrait of a fractured country. A country long viewed globally as terribly volatile and ever on the brink of collapse, Pakistan is, in fact, despite all odds, incredibly resilient and has proved much tougher to disintegrate than was believed. This is the idea Declan Walsh attempts to drive home in the Nine Lives of Pakistan. The People of Pakistan I find “valiant” dispatches by foreign correspondents, who visit Pakistan while wearing bulletproof vests and staying at five-star hotels, unwittingly amusing. Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif made a pertinent point about writing on Pakistan from the standpoint of a foreigner. “If you spend enough time with Pakistan’s military and civilian elite, you catch some of their paranoia, and start seeing yourself drowning in rivers of blood.” Hence, while reading this account, I found myself surgically dissecting the text for any hint of confirmation bias or preconceived notions.

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. 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. In this vein, Walsh had the gruelling task of culling anecdotes from these events that took place in 2010 within one month. SHAPIRO: I'm just thinking - it takes so little to make a journalist happy. Just return our phone calls. Talk to us. That's all we ask.

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: Well, it was this - you know, it was a mystery. When I was being expelled, I remember sitting in a hotel in Lahore. The intelligence service had posted people outside my door to make sure I didn't leave until I was driven to the airport later that night. And even though it was this moment of democratic flourishing for Pakistan - they just had an election. The vote had gone fairly smoothly. The results were coming in. People were hailing this as a milestone for the country. I realized that despite all of that, at the end of the day in Pakistan, the military and its intelligence services - on certain issues, at least - ultimately call the shots. And no matter who I tried to get to help me, no matter what position they occupied in the country, how senior they were, what sort of influence they had, they were unable to reverse that decision. And for me, that was a very striking moment. It really taught me a lot about how the country really works.