Only real understanding can cure Pakistan's problems

Kamila Shamsie
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Observer


I find myself replaying chronology over and over, reflecting that both I, and the Pakistan that exists today, grew up with Benazir Bhutto, political figure. Although 1947 may be the nation's official date of inception, the civil war in 1971 means that the current form of Pakistan is only two years older than I am, with its existence coinciding with the first stage of Bhutto's political education as the daughter and chosen political heir of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

I'm little beyond a spectator in this story of the co-mingling narrative of Bhutto and Pakistan, of course, but as I listen to much that is said, and has been said, in the world these last days and months about both Bhutto and Pakistan, it strikes me that the co-mingled narrative is one that demands three-and-a-half decades of close attention from its spectators if it is to truly reveal its complexities and interlacings.

If you drop in only at the most operatic crescendos - a hanged father; a military dictator who history turns into the closest ally of the guardians of the free world; exile; a triumphant return; faltering democracy; exile again; another military dictator who history turns into the closest etc ...; rising militancy; another triumphant return; a close escape, then no escape - well, then perhaps you get an extraordinary five-act drama, but what you don't get is that rather more murky and tangled story of history as reflected through and acted on by a single individual.

In fact, too often of late it seems even the condensed and simplified version of the story of Bhutto and Pakistan is being replaced by a text message length version doing the rounds: secular, pro-Western woman is sole hope for country which is enveloped by forces of darkness, so they kill her.

But here is the more complicated version: to understand that co-mingled story you need to understand so much more. You need to understand, for instance, nearly six decades of deals, double-deals, broken-deals between the military and the politicians; you need to understand the intricacies of inter-provincial politics in Pakistan, particularly the extent of power concentrated in the Punjab and how that played a part in the story of the Bhuttos from Sindh; you need to understand the feudal structure of which Bhutto was a product and replicated itself in the composition of her political party that concentrated such power in her hands that after her death no one knows how the party will continue or who will take charge (ironically for those who make the democracy versus fundamentalism argument, the only major political party to carry out regular internal elections is the right-wing religious party Jamaat-e-Islami).

You also need to understand how marginalised the Pakistan-Afghan border area has been in the political history of Pakistan, and how post-9/11 policies disrupted a long-standing tacit understanding that the centre and the frontier would remain largely disengaged from each other; you need to understand all the distorted manifestations of religion sown in the Zia years and never uprooted by any succeeding leader - not Benazir, not Nawaz, not Musharraf; you need to understand the secrecy and terror that surrounds the intelligence agencies; you need to understand that reports from parts of the country such as Waziristan strike most Pakistanis as news from a foreign land, one we've never visited and know little of; you need to understand the failure of governments both civilian and military to provide education, health and security to the majority of its citizens. And that's just the beginning of the list.

Let me add just one more item. Any version of the story that says that Pakistan was created as an ideological Islamic state in 1947 and then fast forwards 60 years to suicide bombings as though to say that one inevitably leads to the other ignores the plain awful choices and grotesque events of history that caused history to unfold as it did.

It still surprises me sometimes to discover how many people engaged with world events remain unaware of how little support Pakistan's religious parties had prior to 9/11 (in the 1993 elections the three religious alliances received less than 6.7% of the ballots cast, with the 1997 elections boycotted by the Jamaat-e-Islami, and only the JUI-F managing to secure any presence in parliament with a meagre two seats.) Today, those parties have a much stronger following - directly due to the events of the last six years - but they still trail far behind Bhutto's PPP, Nawaz's PML(N), and the Musharraf-allied PML(Q)at the national level. Trying to understand Pakistan through the sole prism of Islamic fundamentalism, let alone Islamic militancy will not get you tremendously far.

It may sound as though I'm winding up to say, if you understand all these different aspects to the story you'll see things in Pakistan aren't really as bad as they seem. I wish I could. But this has been a year of ever-accelerating horror and violence during which suicide bombings have become weekly, sometimes daily, events that were almost unheard of until a couple of years ago, while those forces of civil society that seemed the counterpoint of light to the darkness have been stamped on, shackled or eliminated entirely. My point here is to place the horror and violence into a vastly complicated web, in which responsibility for the desperate state of the nation does not merely belong to al-Qaeda affiliates and is not the result of having a populace who overwhelmingly support and encourage nihilistic practices and militant extremism.

When I think of how many people have played a part in bringing the nation to this point, I can't help thinking about a documentary I saw a couple of years ago about the demise of the film industry in Pakistan. At the end of it my sister turned to me and said, "It's amazing. Everyone interviewed is so passionate and so articulate, and analytical - and every single person blames absolutely everyone else without accepting any responsibility themselves."

'Ah,' I replied. 'That's Pakistan.'

· Kamila Shamsie is the author of Broken Verses.

Source: The Observer