Few countries elicit as much bewilderment as Pakistan — unstable and unreliable, it is simultaneously a friend and foe. Indeed, over the last decade Islamabad has arguably aided the War on Terror as much as it has hindered it. The stakes could barely be higher. A nuclear power in which terrorist groups operate with near impunity, it sits in the strategic heart of South Asia bordering Iran, Afghanistan, China, and India. Its Baluchistan port, Gwadar, is just 200 miles from the Straits of Hormuz — a vital channel for seaborne oil exports threatened with blockade by the Iranians should it be attacked.
The United States may well be looking to withdraw from Afghanistan in the coming years, but it cannot not exculpate itself from the region for the foreseeable future. This is the lesson of 9/11 that counsels against turning a Nelsonian eye to failed and ungovernable spaces where the millenarian zeal of fundamentalists can grow unchecked. All this begs a number of difficult questions. What are the perils of withdrawing from Afghanistan? What is the state of America’s relationship with Pakistan? And how will the Taliban evolve in a country free of both America and Osama bin Laden?
This is the triptych which Ahmed Rashid tries to unravel in Pakistan on the Brink: The future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Auditing these antagonisms is an ambitious task, not least because much of the received wisdom about the region and its actors is based on caricature and hearsay. To move beyond these histrionics, Rashid assembles a broad network of sources on all sides of the debate and is probing in his treatment of all the main actors.
Yes, Pakistan’s shortcomings are laid bare, but this is no apologia for Western intervention in the region either. Karzai, Bush, and Obama are all treated to the same forensic analysis. There is something refreshing about this. Too many accounts of Pakistan’s role in the War on Terror are subject to lazy and one-dimensional polemic. Rashid illuminates the iridescence of all the major relationships in play here. Thus the corruption of Karzai’s administration, Bush’s misadventures in Iraq and Obama’s misjudgement of how best to handle the legacy he inherited in South Asia are each given appropriate weight.
Perhaps most impressive is the way Pakistan on the Brink tries to understand Pakistan’s apparent Janus-like duplicity. This has been the leitmotiv of the War on Terror, a synecdoche by which Islamabad is now almost exclusively defined. Few studies have sought to explain why Pakistan brazenly persists with this approach despite it being in plain view and so obviously riling to the United States. ‘Overall, Pakistan’s policies are difficult to understand,’ Rashid concedes, though he embraces the task by unpicking a labyrinthine web of motive and posturing in broad brush strokes. Pakistan’s western border cannot be properly understood without first considering its eastern ones; the pervasive obsession with India — a foe it shares a mutual interest with Beijing in seeing undermined. This is important local knowledge.
His real strength in this regard is to shine a light on the Potemkin villages of Pakistan’s regional policies, while also explaining the official mind which distrusts America. Neither party is given a free pass. ‘Both sides are trapped in their own double-dealing,’ he writes. Fears of American intentions in the region are highlighted in this regard with relation to its aggressive drone programme in Pakistan’s tribal areas and of Washington’s ever closer union with India. ‘Pakistanis began to compare India with Israel, which could do no wrong in American eyes,’ Rashid observes. ‘And Pakistan with the Palestinians, to whom the Americans always give short shrift’. Whatever the veracity of that view, it provides vital context.
Pakistan on the Brink deftly explains the strictures that influence Pakistani actions but leaves the broader implications of this unexplained. In many senses this is the book’s greatest disappointment. The early chapters occasionally arc towards repetition and rambling, particularly when discussing Pakistan’s nuclear capability and its military budget. This is something Rashid has sometimes fallen foul of in his previous books, though he gets away with it because of their more detailed nature. By contrast, Pakistan on the Brink is a svelte offering that skims the major issues without ever stopping to explore their respective hinterlands fully. Discussions of Pakistan’s ongoing and low-intensity civil war in Baluchistan, its handling of the Raymond Davis affair — a CIA contractor jailed for shooting two men in downtown Lahore — and the continuing unaccountability of Pakistan’s intelligence services is consequently brushed over.
Much of this is probably explained by pressure from publishers to rush the book out before Presidential elections in the United States later this year. Rashid appears to acknowledge this too. On several occasions he begins to unpack important incidents only to cut himself short, qualifying his remarks with the caveat ‘as I discussed in Descent into Chaos’, which is still his defining work on contemporary Pakistan.
Therein is the problem with Pakistan on the Brink. Too many of its ideas remain underdeveloped and are better explored in Rashid’s other books. This is a powerful and pacey
primer on some of the key issues facing the region and the principal actors who operate there. But for those wanting a more sophisticated and detailed understanding of what is at stake — as
Rashid himself concedes — you’re still better off reading Descent into Chaos.
Shiraz Maher is a Senior Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, and a visiting lecturer in Middle East Politics at Washington
College.
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