PAKISTAN
In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan
By MARY ANNE WEAVER
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 276 pages, $24 (hardcover), $14 (paperback)
reviewed by David Vinjamuri
"But I really love Pakistan!" Mary Anne Weaver said with a mixture of exasperation and distress as the crowd milled around her at the Asia Society in New York City this spring. Weaver seemed genuinely perplexed at finding herself in the unfamiliar position of a reporter being taken out of context. She had just finished addressing a packed room about her new book, Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan. After the predictable, post-9/11 terrorism armchair experts and policy wonks had asked their questions, two Pakistanis stood up, one right after the other, and condemned her dismal view of Pakistan at some length without asking a discernable question. I, myself, after finishing the book a few days later, reached two conclusions: first, that Weaver really does love Pakistan, and, second, that her Pakistani critics had probably not read her book. Not that they would have been much happier if they had.
In the past six months, Pakistan has become the answer to a current-events bar trivia question: "Quickname a country that has strong ties to al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, proliferates them, and is a state sponsor of terrorism?" The complex truth behind Pakistan's links with the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, Kashmir, fundamentalist Islam, and U.S. and Saudi money is a tale worth telling. The message of the book is simple, and Weaver lays it out on the tenth page: "Pakistan could well become the world's newest failed statea failed state with nuclear weapons." It is a pretty good reason to take the tour Weaver is offering, and Weaver is as good a guide as one could wish for. She has known and interviewed every Pakistani leader over the last two decades, from General Zia to General Musharraf. She asked Benazir Bhutto what it felt like to meet with her father before his execution. She visited tribal leaders in Balochistan who don't consider themselves altogether Pakistani. She followed members of the Saudi elite as they despoiled the Pakistani desert to kill birds thought to have aphrodisiac properties. And she has borne witness to moments that perfectly illustrate the rawness of Pakistan, the mere shouting distance it maintains from its ancestral past:
| Akram Bugti walked slowly toward a trench in a nearby field. He had been accused of murdering a cousin in a land dispute. He had protested that he was innocent . . . so he had decided to "walk the fire," a tribal ritual that has been practiced for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. If Akram walked the fire and wasn't burned, his accuser would have to pay him compensation and could never accuse him of this crime again. There is no appeal or recourse under tribal law, and 95 percent of Balochistan still observes tribal law. |
When Bugti actually gets down into the fire pit, we can feel the waves of heat and hear the embers crackling under his feet. This descriptive power radiates throughout the book, and the intensity is multiplied when Weaver writes about issues that reverberate especially for Americans these days. She traces the evolution of al Qaeda from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, CIA support through Pakistan of the mujahideen resistance, the involvement of Arabs in the struggle, the slippage of arms and advanced weapons intended for Afghanistan into Pakistan, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and subsequent U.S. withdrawal of support for Pakistan, the Pakistani support for the Taliban, the radicalization of Osama bin Laden, the Intifada, and growth of the United States as the prime target for fundamentalist rage. Instead of doing it as a textbook might, she tells the story through interviews, narrative dotted with inside sources and personal experiences, and character studies. One disadvantage is that the narrative is episodic, and the timeline can be hard to follow without some knowledge of Pakistani history. The strength and clarity of the individual portraits outweigh this issue, however. Speaking to General (now President) Musharraf, Weaver writes:
| I mentioned to [Musharraf] that a number of Pakistanis and Western diplomats had expressed their concern to me that what they perceived to be his tilting at windmills in Kashmir made him increasingly vulnerable at home. For if he moved against the Islamic militants, who were his greatest threat, he was moving against the foot soldiers who fight in Kashmir and against the Taliban, which his intelligence service continued to train and arm. I asked General Musharraf if he wasn't playing a dangerous game of Russian roulette. He looked at me across the table and, all testimony from foreign observers about the flow of men and arms to the contraryand despite the fact that he was under increasing pressure from the United States, Russia, India and Iran to disengage from Afghanistanhe denied that Pakistan was militarily involved in Afghanistan at all. |
Musharraf's disingenuous mannerhis ability to dissemble completely as he speaks of democracy and elections, yet moves to consolidate dictatorial power, or condemns terrorism while continuing to harbor terroristsis the key to both his danger to Pakistan and the West and his survival thus far. In this single glimpse of Musharraf as he denies the obvious, Weaver gives us a perceptive study of his character and, at the same time, dramatizes the dilemma Pakistan faces as it attempts to balance the overwhelming external power of the United States with the internal death grip of fundamentalist Islam.
The most compelling of Weaver's portraits is that of Benazir Bhuttothe first woman leader in the Muslim world and Pakistan's twice-removed prime minister, who still enjoys popular support. At one point, Weaver asks Bhutto about her years as a political prisonerwhat the most difficult part had been. Bhutto replies:
| "You have tremendous mood swings in prison. Sometimes I would think to myself, My father is dead, my brother is dead, my mother has cancer, and I'm rotting away in this cell. I have suffered and made sacrificesand for what?" She looked away, and then turned back toward me, and I asked what had sustained her during those years. She answered without hesitation. "Anger," she said. |
By giving us a view of the different leaders of the country over two full decades, Weaver raises an unintentional questionthat of a journalist's relationship to her subject. Heisenberg postulated that observing a thing at the subatomic level changes it. After reading Pakistan, it is hard to imagine that a journalist with Weaver's deep relationships, power to shape U.S. public opinion, and obvious intelligence would not have some effect on the culture that she has spent a lifetime studying. How can you spend half a career moving through the elites of a society without rubbing off on each other? It is not a question Weaver answers, but one whose answer might be as interesting to hear as the description of a good firewalk.
David Vinjamuri holds a master's degree in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.