Pakistan: A new history By Ian Talbot, Amaryllis, Rs 499

Breaking a decades-old jinx, Pakistan recently saw a democratically-elected government complete a full term in office. As the country awaits the general elections in May, the mood is upbeat and suddenly it seems no longer possible that Pakistan might just “wither away”. But long before Pakistan actually experienced the miracle of seeing a government end five years in office, doomsday predictions for the country had already become unfashionable. Pakistanis themselves, such as diplomat Maleeha Lodhi, not only clamoured for the world to look “beyond the crisis state”, but the world also seemed to have grown tired with the portrayal of too much reality.

Delving into the bright side of Pakistan, Anatol Lieven, little more than a year ago, made Pakistan look refreshingly different amidst the gunfire and coup threats in his remarkable book, Pakistan: A Hard Country. Ian Talbot’s book also tries to lend a fresh perspective, although it is slightly marred by the historian’s lack of enthusiasm to play the sprightly anthropologist-journalist-travel writer that lent an edge to Lieven’s account.

Perhaps as widely travelled in Pakistan as Lieven and over a greater period of time, Talbot has no hang-ups playing his part as an eminent historian of South Asia because he wants to bring back the historical perspective that has gone missing from the strategic experts’ policy-oriented briefs on the ‘problem’ of Pakistan. Without that, he believes it is impossible to understand the country and its people “in their terms” — an understanding that is essential to stop seeing Pakistan as a problem and to begin seeing Pakistan’s problems.

As Talbot puts it, as a historian it is his business to uncover the roots of the state’s sustainability alongside the “more obvious quest to explain why it has been crisis-ridden throughout most of its existence.” But at the end of the book, there are no clear answers for the reader as to the cause for Pakistan’s “resilience”, although Talbot does a fantastic job with the other “obvious quest”. There was less diffidence in Lieven, who put down the cause for Pakistan’s resilience to its ancient kinship ties that resisted modernity as much as the Islamist wave.

Talbot does not ignore the power of the social networks, but his training as a historian makes him more cautious about making loose statements. Clan or biradiri networks are important, but Talbot wants them to be read together with other major influences that form sources of power and conflict in Pakistan. He points to recent research that shows how Pakistan’s stridently nationalist middle class, driven by the anti-US, anti-India sentiment and scriptural Islam, are challenging Pakistan’s feudal hierarchy, breaking up and re-forming social linkages. In other words, Talbot nudges his readers into a more nuanced reading of Pakistan’s past history and present developments.

True to his trade, Talbot goes for a chronological approach to Pakistan’s history, reading each period under discussion with his focus on five key areas of development — historical inheritances, civil-military relationship, external dimension, Centre-province relations and the role of Islam in public life. The major eras — General Ayub’s, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s, General Zia’s, Benazir’s-Sharif’s retarded democracy, Musharraf’s and finally Asif Zardari’s — are preceded by a discussion on various aspects of Pakistan such as geo-political context, religion, social structure, migration and so on that draws on both past and contemporary developments to provide a solid backdrop to the more incisive study into the challenges and failings of the above-mentioned leaders. None of this is “new”, especially the discovery of the historical baggage that a new-born Pakistan carried by way of its security problems, opportunism of its political class or provincialism that wrecked the initial chances of democracy. What Talbot does is tease into layers of this known history vignettes of information that sometimes add a new dimension to the perspective.

Take his discussion on the impact of internal and external migrations on Pakistan’s history. The migrants’ issue has been overwhelmingly dominated by the experiences of the mohajirs. Yet, Talbot shows how profoundly Punjabi-speaking migrants from east Punjab, whose relocation was made comfortable by the bonds of biradiri in west Punjab, affected Pakistan’s politics in the long term. Settling on the agricultural land abandoned by Sikh farmers in the Canal colony areas, Punjabi migrants later formed a constituency for Islamist and sectarian movements.

Their experiences of Partition and subsequent upheavals not only led them to adopt a staunch anti-India stance, but together with the Kashmiri refugees, they also powerfully shored up the Kashmir cause. The indubitable Hafiz Saeed comes from an East Punjab refugee family that lost 36 members during its flight from India. Again, the growing number of Pakhtuns in Karachi as a result of Pakistan’s Afghanistan engagement and military operations in the tribal areas has added to the political turmoil in the city. Migration to neighbouring Gulf countries from Pakistan has increased the influence of Wahhabism and changed the character of Pakistan’s folk Islam.

Talbot similarly offers a fresh perspective on the era of General Zia-ul-Haq that is often thought to be the most inglorious period in Pakistan’s history. Although Talbot acknowledges the “negative legacies” of his rule — the strategy of using jihadis to secure Pakistan’s regional goals being one of them — he is unwilling to lay the blame for Pakistan’s ills entirely on Zia’s door. Despite his commitment to Isalmization, Zia, unlike Bhutto’s disempowering of the Ahmadis, did not give in to calls for a similar step against the minority Zikri population. And despite the brute forces employed by Zia to enhance Pakistan’s praetorian State, Zia was never able to stifle political dissent completely or stifle civil society.

In other words, no matter how strong the military dictatorship, the possibility of future democratization was never lost in Pakistan. What has repeatedly stalled it is the patronage politics of the civilian leadership that impaired the growth and strength of Pakistan’s institutions of State. This is why the “missed opportunity” during the Bhutto era appears to hurt Talbot more than Zia’s authoritarianism that was, in any case, shorn of pretensions.

Although Talbot doesn’t ignore the failings of the Pakistan army that have complicated Pakistan’s challenges, his belief that the authoritarianism of military rule has been “benign” compared to the experience of some Latin American and African countries is surprising. Even more surprising is his belief that the ISI may have managed to keep the army top brass unaware of the existence of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.

At this point, Talbot’s “new history” of Pakistan seems suspiciously close to the Pakistan establishment’s version of the nation’s history. The discomfort increases when Talbot blames India, as a “South Asian hegemon”, for not doing enough to alleviate Pakistan’s security concerns. He even suspects that hawks in New Delhi may be waiting to lure Pakistan into the trap of becoming more involved in the nuclear arms race than in investing in structural reforms in order to do “a ‘Reagan’ on the country.” Perhaps Talbot’s sensitivity to Pakistan’s anxieties inures him to those of India. Not surprisingly, the 26/11 carnage gets passing mention.

Talbot does a masterly study of Pakistan’s past history and future challenges and the book’s compact chronological ordering and analysis are bound to make it an invaluable guide to anyone interested in Pakistan. But in his sympathy for Pakistan being forced to bear the “doleful inheritances” — of history, of human fallibility and the strategic ambitions of foreign nations — he seems to forgo some of the objectivity that is integral to the historian’s craft.