by JO JOHNSON
Pakistan: A Hard Country, by Anatol Lieven, Allen Lane, RRP£30, 576 pages
Take any investment bank’s list of the top 10 geopolitical risks compiled at any point over the past decade and state failure in Pakistan will feature prominently. This is partly because it is a nuclear power, has one of the largest armies in the world and has been a source of numerous terrorist plots unleashed in the west. It is also because of its strategic location at the junction of Iran, China and India, its ability to influence the outcome of the west’s decade-long war against the Afghan Taliban and its sheer size. With more than 180m people, its population is six times that of Afghanistan, twice that of Iran and almost two-thirds that of the entire Arab world.
By the middle of this century, according to the World Bank, Pakistan’s population might reach 335m – 10 times the level recorded in the 1951 census. With such numbers, the consequences of state failure would inevitably cross borders, to the detriment of India and the rest of south Asia, home to a fifth of humanity, but also to the west and China. Long after western forces have departed Afghanistan, they will retain a vital interest in the stability of Pakistan. As the floods of 2010 showed, the challenges for Pakistan extend far beyond the Islamist insurgency: the devastating effects of ecological change pose an equally serious existential threat.
Yet it is always a mistake to underestimate the resilience of Pakistan. This struck me forcefully in the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The People’s party had lost its princess and Washington its best hope for a civilian veneer over military rule, but predictions of state collapse, of the country’s fragmentation along ethnic or sectarian faultlines and of a jihadi takeover of the nuclear arsenal were overblown. The next day, for its prime lunchtime slot, the main English-language television station, Dawn News, could offer viewers nothing more exciting than a talk-show debate on Karachi’s transport system. Pakistan, as Anatol Lieven explains in this thorough analysis of the internal sources of this resilience, will not disintegrate easily.
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(Thanks to reader)