Inside Pakistan’s paranoia - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Inside Pakistan’s paranoia

An early June headline in The Washington Post: “Pakistan says tide has turned in Swat; refugees not so sure.”

Readers of Nicholas Schmidle’s compelling and informative book will agree with the refugees rather than the government.

“Stay in Pakistan long enough, and you automatically become paranoid,” Schmidle observes in “To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan.”

Paranoid for good reason. One Pakistani in the Baluchistan region tells the author, “People in other countries don’t trust Pakistanis. We don’t either.”

Stay with Schmidle’s book and you will be enlightened about a country where trust is ephemeral and violence is “a self-perpetuating and endless cycle.”

“The longer I spent in Pakistan, the more I realized ... ideologies were being hardened without any encouragement from outside,” he writes.

No need for outside weapons, either. During an interview with an Islamic bigwig, Schmidle reminds him that two years earlier he said “the reason the Taliban hadn’t defeated NATO forces in Afghanistan yet was because NATO had B-52s.” Does he offer a new assessment? “The Taliban have more than made up for that disadvantage now with suicide bombers.”

Bombs. Fear. Taliban. Why would anyone volunteer to go to Schmidle’s land of “Talibanapalooza”?

Schmidle, the son and older brother of Marine officers, had spent a summer learning Persian at Tehran University in Iran. He was awarded a fellowship to return, but in 2006, voters elected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president and “the prospects of the Iranian government giving an American a two-year visa to drift around and write about the country’s ethnic problems seemed, well, pretty dim.”

Second prize? Pakistan.

The reader is the winner. If you can hardly figure out what is going on in Pakistan, this book’s for you. In 12 chapters, Schmidle explores different regions of the 62-year-old nation and interviews officials, omniscient Taliban leaders and despondent regular folks such as a tobacco vendor making $3 on a good day: “Why are you asking me about elections when I have no food?”

Each chapter stands alone, much the way each region of Pakistan is independent. The penultimate chapter offers an in-country, dramatic report of the re-emergence and 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto. (“We have become orphans,” one woman tells Schmidle.)

So what’s wrong with and in Pakistan?

During the administration — using the term loosely — of U.S. ally President Pervez Musharraf, people had little food and electricity but lots of fear.

“Ideology wasn’t motivating people to support the Taliban as much as the lack of a rival authority,” Schmidle wrote. “Economic factors and the state’s collapsed education system — rather than some obsession with radical ideology — offered a better explanation for why parents sent their students to [Taliban-supported] madrassas [schools].”

In the epilogue, Schmidle, expelled from Pakistan once but evidently unaware he wore out his welcome, returns in August 2008 to report about a mystic mecca for a magazine. The benign assignment raises eyebrows, including his own: Newspapers and TV stations report he has been kidnapped.

At first, Schmidle’s “disappearance” is reminiscent of Mark Twain’s remark that published reports of his death were exaggerated. Except Twain’s cell phone had not been tapped, his travels not forcibly accompanied by “Kalishnikov-toting police” and later by a U.S. Embassy “facilitator,” and Twain required no bulletproof car for the ride to the airport.

Schmidle got out with his life and a story. But he left “most of my optimism” about Pakistan there. Musharraf was out, but “the military was still in control. Elections had brought a democratically elected civilian government [of Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ari Zadari], but average Pakistanis felt no more empowered than they did before. ... Pakistan stood on the verge of bankruptcy in almost every sense.”

Of that, the refugees mentioned in the Post headline are sure.

J. Ford Huffman is a contributing writer for Military Times.

To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan by Nicholas Schmidle. Henry Holt. 254 pages. $25.