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 contradic-
tions, 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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 xii in t ro du c t io n
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 Paki-
stani 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 love-
hate relationship with the West, why the coup-prone army remains
the nation’s most respected institution, and why the feudal mind-
set 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 radi-
cal 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 sem-
inaries, 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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 in t ro du c t io n xiii

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 com-
plicit 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 extrem-
ists. 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 coun-
try 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 sur-
vive 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 feel-
ing 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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 xiv in t ro du c t io n
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 Mum-
bai in 2008, Islamabad denied for weeks that the surviving com-
mando 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 obfus-
cate, 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 citi-
zens 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’ at-
tachment 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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 in t ro du c t io n xv

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 politi-
cal 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 civi-
lizations 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 contin-
ued to filter through society ever since, accompanied by the prolif-
eration of Islamic seminaries, of which there are now more than
twenty thousand across the country, teaching an estimated two mil-
lion students. Many of these establishments are moderate and main-
stream, 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 con-
servative 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 de-
fensive about Islam.
That is how someone such as Faisal Shahzad, a middle-class

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 xvi in t ro du c t io n
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 no-
tions 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 succes-
sive, 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 polit-
ico; 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 some-
one 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 em-
powered 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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 in t ro du c t io n xvii

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 inci-
dents 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 cam-
paign of missile strikes by CIA drone planes on militant targets near
the Afghan border and rumored ground operations to spy on extrem-
ist groups. American officials had long suspected Pakistan of secretly
shielding some militants, despite its adamant denials, thus necessi-
tating 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 im-
mediately 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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 xviii in t ro du c t io n
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 re-
ceived 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 sug-
gested 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 in-
creasingly independent justice system headed by an iconoclastic cru-
sader and champion of popular rights.
The case of Mukhtar Mai, a peasant woman from southern Pun-
jab, had outraged the world nearly a decade earlier. Mai, then thirty-
three, 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 notori-
ously 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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 in t ro du c t io n xix

the defendants, leaving the Supreme Court as Mai’s last hope for
vindication. But on April 21, nearly nine years after the inci-
dent, a high court panel acquitted all but one man of rape. The
two justices in the majority showed a keen understanding of male-
dominated 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 power-
ful local forces. The justices sent a strong, if perhaps unintentional,
signal that the ancient customs of rural and tribal justice in Paki-
stan, as cruel and unfair as they might be, would not be easily dis-
lodged.

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 judi-
ciary, destroyed by military rule and then restored by the extraordi-
nary lawyers’ movement, has set an inspiring example in some cases,
but it has proven hidebound in others or provoked political and in-
stitutional 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 com-
mentary 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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 xx in t ro du c t io n
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 tradi-
tion. 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 lead-
ers 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 opportuni-
ties, 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 demo-
cratic. 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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