The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

Product Information

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.

There was nothing inevitable about Pakistan’s association with extremism. After wrestling with the issue, Jinnah recommended a secular republic from his deathbed. After Partition in 1947, Walsh explains, imams lost their sway in society, sinking to a status somewhere between a teacher and a tailor in the villages.

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. 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. The subtitle of the book is Dispatches from a Divided Nation and the author criss-crosses those political, religious, ethnic and generational fault lines, assembling a portrait of the vast country of 220 million people through his travels and the lives of the nine compelling protagonists. While Walsh tries his best to acclimate himself to the ethos of each place he visits, at times he emphasises exoticism over nuance. Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan’s most important Sufi shrine, is a place straight out of a fantasy novel, teeming with snake charmers, circus dancers, drummers and pilgrims, most of them high on hashish. One of the time-honoured practices there is dhamaal, the practice of whirling to the sound of music performed by devotees to honour Sufi saints. 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.

The former New York Times Pakistan bureau chief paints an arresting, up-close portrait of a fractured country. 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. 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.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 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.

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 And so Asma Jahangir with this small, formidable, fiery woman who was willing to stand up for the most dispossessed people in her country and was also willing to stand up loudly to the most powerful ones. On the eve of the 2013 national election, Irish journalist Declan Walsh was unceremoniously expelled from Pakistan, after spending a decade there, on suspicion of “undesirable activities”. The New York Times’s Pakistan bureau chief logs his intimate account of that tumultuous period in this book.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. He goes into the details of these individuals’ lives and their work. Some of them he met in person and directly observed, including Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf, while others, like Quaid-e-Azam, passed away long ago. Chapter by chapter, he attempts to break down the religious extremism, terrorism, and parochialism Pakistan has long been plagued by. In 2013, Pakistan was gearing up to witness its first civilian transfer of power, having been ruled over for more than half the years since independence by the military. Blending journalism, history and travelogue, Walsh, who has covered Pakistan for over a decade for The Guardian and The New York Times, has penned a riveting account of the tumultuous but memorable time he spent in Pakistan, ending in his dramatic expulsion on the election day in 2013 on the basis of “undesirable activities.” Walsh is an accomplished story-teller who keeps the reader spellbound with well-crafted pen-portraits and fast-paced narrative, embellished with interesting anecdotes and pithy judgments. Although mostly anecdotal, the book offers a potted history of the country and its historical figures.