In one of my conversations with General Musharraf, I had asked him what he expected from the United States. He didn't answer immediately, and then he said, bitterness edging his voice, "The United States must help clean up the mess that you created during the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.  Pakistan served your interests very prominently as a frontline state.  But when the Soviets withdrew, the U.S. government also pulled out, leaving us high and dry."
        -Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan

Through no fault of the author's, this is a terribly depressing book.  It's damned hard upon finishing it to harbor much hope for Pakistan's future, certainly none that it will develop into a stable capitalist democracy anytime soon.  As General Musharraf's comments above indicate, the U.S. does share some of the blame, but as Ms Weaver makes clear, Pakistan has many, many more problems that are of its own making.

The book is for the most part a collection of essays that Ms Weaver wrote for The New Yorker, here knitted together, somewhat loosely, to form a first hand account of the past decade or so in Pakistan.  The result is a less systematic survey of the country than one might like, but she does combine a series of fascinating profiles--of main players like Zia ul-Haq, Benazir Bhutto, Osama bin Laden, and Mr. Musharraf--with almost a travelogue, describing her own adventures in country.  Along the way she reports on such disturbing facets of modern Pakistan as the "blowback" from the Afghan jihad, the continuing tension with India over Kashmir, the rise of fundamentalist Islam, the rivalries among the various ethnic groups that comprise the nation, and the seemingly omnipresent poverty, corruption, and hopelessness.  Add nuclear weapons to this mix and the presence of al Qaeda remnants all over the country and you've got a recipe for continuing decline, disintegration, war, and eventually maybe even deadly apocalypse at the hands of their Hindu neighbors.

The book is very readable and each chapter, or nearly every chapter, can stand on its own.  The one quarrel I have with Ms Weaver is that she interjects herself into the narrative quite often and frequently criticizes U.S. policy towards Pakistan, but then doesn't really put forth any suggestions for what needs to be done differently.  That may simply be because there's no way to save Pakistan from a bloody collapse, but, if so, then one wonders if American policymakers had any better choices than those they made.  And if Ms Weaver, who obviously has great familiarity with the country, has no idea how to improve its situation, then one would wish she'd have come out and said so.  If the future of Pakistan is as desperate as she makes it sound, then perhaps we should treat it with even greater brutality and disregard for its doomed people, in order to protect ourselves to the greatest degree possible.  Foremost among the options we might want to explore is a more blatant tilt towards our fellow democratic capitalists in India and a lessening of our pressure on General Musharraf and the Pakistani military to surrender power in Pakistan.  In the end, it may be that the Pakistani military is our first line of defense and the Indian military our last line against a nation that is no longer viable, if it ever was.

(Reviewed:03-Dec-02)

Grade: (B-) Orrin C. Judd

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