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Mary Anne Weaver, a journalist who has covered the Islamic world for The New Yorker for over 20 years, has produced a timely book that is as captivating as it is informative. Recognizing that I knew almost nothing about this part of the world, which is currently and negatively impacting my long-held hope to see peace in the world in my lifetime, I was glad to be given a chance to read PAKISTAN.
Pakistan is an artificially created state. By this I mean the country wasn't allowed to develop within naturally delineated geographic boundaries over hundreds, much less thousands, of years. (It's impossible not to note that we have other such artificially created states, and they've all been, or still are, trouble.) There was no Pakistan until 1947, when the former British Empire withdrew from India. At that time within The Raj, Britain's larger India, there was pressure to create a separate state for the followers of Islam. Acceding to that wish, as a kind of good-bye wave to imperialism, Britain created Pakistan for the Muslims. The Hindus got to keep the rest of India, and both have been fighting over Kashmir, and a couple of other things, ever since (a great oversimplification but for a starting-off point, it will do.) The territories that became the new country weren't asked if they wanted to be Pakistan, or not, and therein lies a clue to the various behaviors we have today.
Publishers Weekly and Kirkus called this book "geo-political" and "a work of political geography," respectively. With the exception of the opening chapter and the second chapter, which is about current Pakistani ruler General Pervez Musharraf, Weaver's writing seems more in-depth social commentary than political analysis, which I think is why she is so readable. Her long (albeit part-time) residency in the countries of which she writes --- together with her entry to the highest levels of their society --- gives her a unique view.
On Musharraf, she is unable to enlighten us much; instead she gives us a number of keenly observed examples, over a long period of time, of all the contradictions that make Musharraf a chameleon and an enigma. He is a military dictator who says he will no longer be a dictator once he has solved certain problems. Those problems, when detailed, make any U.S. mess seem negligible by comparison. Considering Pakistan's difficulties probably are worse than Weaver knows --- because let's face it, what Islamic country is going to let its secrets out to a woman journalist --- the situation is mind-boggling indeed. This is where a chill sets in, because the lives of Americans have already been impacted by this country about which we know so little, in ways we have never heard of, and we haven't wanted to think about it. Until now.
Read on, and read between the lines. Soon a one-word subtext appears. The subtext is spelled O - I - L.
No, Pakistan itself does not have any. But look at the map following the Contents page: this artificially created country occupies a crucial gateway --- between the Persian Gulf and all those exotic-sounding countries that are hard to spell and harder to pronounce, which used to be part of the Soviet Union; countries beneath which there are untapped, unexplored reserves of black gold, AKA oil. Aha! No wonder the United States has had people here trying to build roads and to act as "advisors" long before most of us were paying any attention. On the other side of the Persian Gulf, there's Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and some tiny countries whose names ring a bell even to the geographically uninitiated: Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait. And to the Northwest, Iran.
Closest of all, so close that to the tribes who live in the mountains of northern Pakistan there is no geographical division at all, there's Afghanistan. All these countries are Islamic. Some are fundamentalist and support the Taliban, which the United States also supported during the first Afghan war, when we wanted to help drive out the Russians. The Taliban which grew up to bite the hand that fed it.
Now just when things begin to get heavy, Weaver redirects our thoughts in a masterful stroke, taking off into a chapter that reveals her greatest skills. She writes of the tribal lands, of Balochistan, which is in area the largest state within Pakistan. She brings us new words, nawab and sardar (tribal princes, nawabs of the larger tribes and sardars, smaller, all of them powerful in their own places); slips us into an older, bigger picture that she illuminates with vivid tales from her own experience. Before we know it, we've entered another world, a world that has existed parallel with the one where we live day to day, all this time, but little did we know. Then she takes us deeper inward, with a breathtaking chapter in which we observe an ancient tradition: Saudi princes hunting a fabled bird, the houbara bustard, with falcons -- hunting in Pakistan, because they've hunted the houbara to near-extinction in their own land. Her description of the fabulously wealthy Saudis, who hunt now from specially modified Mercedes instead of the camels of their forefathers, will linger long in my mind --- as will the implications of these hunts, which last for six months on lands not their own.
There is more: a chapter on Benazir Bhutto ("Daughter of Pakistan"), which is fascinating but hard to read, especially if you are female yourself and wish the outcome could have been different; one titled "Deja Vu" that is a collection of learned, provocative what-ifs about Osama Bin Laden, who couldn't have done what he did without his years of support from Pakistan and individual Pakistanis. The well-rounded and provocative picture concludes with a chapter on Kashmir.
Mary Anne Weaver is a very fine reporter. She writes what she has seen and heard, and doesn't burden her readers with interpretations or with her own agenda. If I were to nit-pick, I would wish that she could have been a little more careful to always let us know what year she's writing about; the imprecise "a few years earlier" occurs too often. That's a minor point.
Though Weaver does not come right out and say so in PAKISTAN, one conclusion is obvious from the material she presents: if it comes to a battle between the forces of Islam and the forces of "the West", the Muslims already have all the oil, therefore most of the money, and Pakistan has had nuclear weapons for a long time ... and that's before even thinking about which side God is on, as the Muslims most certainly will.
Readers will have to draw their own conclusions. May you sleep better than I did last night.
--- Reviewed by Dianne Day
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