Nine Lives of Pakistan: Scrupulously layered portrait of complicated nation

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Divided Nation

Author: Declan Walsh

ISBN-13: 978-1408868461

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Guideline Price: £20

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.

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.

For the most part Walsh avoids these pitfalls, stitching together a variegated collage of an oft misunderstood country through in-depth profiles of nine Pakistanis. The common threads between this diverse lot are their contribution to the country’s shifting political tectonic plates and the fact that most died violent deaths. It is somewhat ironic how in the world’s fifth most populous country most of the lives the book traces were tragically cut short.

This eponymous motley crew includes Asma Jahangir, a trailblazing human rights lawyer who died of a stroke in her 60s. She fiercely championed minority rights and brazenly opposed the most powerful men of the country, the generals.

The common denominators in the chaotic events that Walsh recounts are also what constitutes the Achilles' heel of Pakistan – religion and army

Abdul Rashid Ghazi, a cleric at the Red Mosque, was killed by Pakistani troops. His life story mimics that of the anti-hero of Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist – a worldly Pakistani student radicalised after 9/11. Walsh recounts his surprise upon meeting Ghazi: instead of a dour Islamic militant, he was mild-mannered, spoke fluent English, read Nietzsche and idolised Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

Other fascinating Pakistanis profiled include “Colonel Imam”, a retired ISI official famous for having close ties with the Taliban and CIA; and Akbar Bugti, a Baloch chieftain who would devour works by English Romantics and French philosophers at his desert fort.

A highlight for me was the profile of Chaudary Aslam Khan, notorious as Karachi’s toughest cop. In a career spanning almost three decades, Khan targeted the dark underbelly of the “brooding megalopolis” dominated by crime lords and undercover spies. Having survived eight assassination attempts, he used to joke that one day his trademark white shalwar kameez would become his funeral shroud. This prophecy came true in 2014 when he was killed in a bomb targeting his convoy.

The common denominators in the chaotic events that Walsh recounts are also what constitutes the Achilles' heel of Pakistan – religion and army. This book charts the trajectory of the creeping post-9/11 radicalisation and the rising Deep State, “the semi-visible iceberg of army garrisons, military spies and their political satraps”.

Exocitism over nuance

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.

Dhamaal is a form of spiritual rapture, but Walsh describes it as “a kind of religious rave” and regards the shrine as having a Las Vegas aesthetic, which has extremely different connotations. He seems to be overstretching analogies here to make foreign customs palatable to western readers.

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.

A prerequisite to making sense of Pakistan is to desist from labelling things black or white, since most of the country exists in the grey zone. This goes true for its founder. Walsh’s musings after seing a portrait of Jinnah grow increasingly presumptuous. Jinnah was one of London’s most sought-after barristers, and Walsh claims that his faith in Pakistan wavered wildly in the mid-1940s as “he seemed unsure about what kind of country he wanted – or whether he wanted a country at all”. He backs this claim with insufficient evidence, mostly attributing it to Jinnah’s taciturn manner, which he exercised across all domains of his life.

If you live in Pakistan, the relentless onslaught of turbulent events and ensuing incessant high drama leaves one with a permanent case of deja vu

Although he correctly assumes that Jinnah cuts an elusive figure in Pakistan, remembered yet unknown, he then proceeds to fill in the gaps with incomplete or embellished facts. Case in point: he postulates based on the following line from Jinnah’s speech that he wanted a secular, not a theocratic homeland. “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”

I found this claim glaringly assumptive. This quote is in fact in direct accordance with The Charter of Madina, widely considered the first civil constitution to set the basis of a multi-religious Islamic state in Medina, drawn up on behalf of the Prophet Muhammad. A vital clause of the document granted non-Muslim members autonomy and freedom of religion.

It goes without saying that this religious liberty granted by Islam has often been undermined by political and sectarian motives in Pakistan.

Turbulent events

Since its inception, many volatile issues have been exacerbated by ethnic and sectarian conflict, frequently turning Pakistan into a tinderbox. While Pakistan’s image abroad is sustained by a generic hardline approach, Walsh found it hard to square it with the permissiveness he saw in other parts of society, where the rich did as they pleased and organised “lavish, boozy parties inside high walls (and, later, a lot of cocaine consumption)”. Upon close scrutiny, Walsh struggles with the jarring double standards between the rigid, de jure policies of the state and the de facto societal practices.

If you live in Pakistan, the relentless onslaught of turbulent events and ensuing incessant high drama leaves one with a permanent case of deja vu. In this vein, Walsh had the gruelling task of culling anecdotes from these events that took place in 2010 within one month.

Biblical floods wreaked havoc all over the country, wiping out 2,000 lives. A passenger plane from Karachi to Islamabad crashed, killing all 152 people on board. CIA operatives began investigating the Abbottabad compound that would be revealed as Osama bin Laden’s hideout. It is a testament to Walsh’s sapient journalistic eye that he is able to eloquently carve a gripping narrative from the deluge of information.

The book dedicates ample space to Pakistan’s frayed diplomatic ties with the US and India. Prognostic, erudite political observations sustain the narrative. While the first half of the book is characterised by a volley of highly-charged events that leave one feeling overwhelmed, the latter half is measured and staid, ending on a sanguine note. The concluding chapter solves the mystery of Walsh’s abrupt ousting, after he meets the intelligence agent who was assigned the task of tracking him.

Walsh has a knack for inch-perfect delineations with a trenchant turn of phrase. In a particularly vivid section, he caricaturises cities with flair. Lahore is “corpulent and languid”, Islamabad cuts a clipped figure, “holding court in a gilded drawing room, proffering Scotch and political whispers”, while Peshawar wears a turban or a burka, scuttling along an ancient bazaar. He struggles to come up with a single pithy depiction of Karachi, the Janus of Pakistan: “It has too many faces: the shiny-shod businessman, rushing to the gym; the hardscrabble labourer who sends his wages to a distant village; the slinky young socialite, kicking off her heels as she bends over a line of cocaine.”

The Nine Lives of Pakistan does a thorough job of mapping the racial and ethnic taxonomy of the nation, from the honourable Balochs and hospitable Pashtuns to the class-conscious Punjabis and “resilient” Karachiites. Clear-sighted and exhaustive, these dispatches paint a scrupulously layered portrait of a country that defies easy explanations.