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2 COMMENT Rocking to the sound of guns (and
roses) By Mark LeVine
Driving into Pakistan's North West
Frontier Province, there is a sign on the road
that welcomes you to "the land of hospitality".
This is not what you'd expect to find on your way
to Peshawar, gateway to the region of the country
controlled by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, where
Osama bin Laden is likely hiding. But it's an
indication of how diverse and filled with
contradictions Pakistan is today; why so many
people with whom I spoke fear that without a
significant but unlikely change for the better,
the Pakistani state
and
society will fracture beyond repair in the coming
years.
Each meter of Peshawar brings new
contradictions. The "smugglers' bazaar" features
both an age-old arms market and one offering the
latest Chinese electronics. It's an extremely
conservative city in which cheap drugs and
pornography are readily available. Some of
Pakistan's most militant madrassas (Islamic
seminaries) are minutes away from two of its best
universities. Road signs point to the "Imaginarium
Institute for American Studies", but the US
Consulate's American Club changed its name for
security reasons. There are innumerable
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with names
like the Center for Excellence in Women's Studies,
yet female literacy stands a bit above 2% in the
surrounding region.
The gates leading into
the tribal areas warn, "No foreigners allowed,"
yet Peshawar is awash in foreign money and people.
The US Central Intelligence Agency, US Agency for
International Development, European NGOs, the
Taliban - you name it, all have staked a claim to
a city that has been at the crossroads of empire
since Alexander the Great crossed the nearby
Khyber Pass. And then there is Sajid &
Zeeshan, one of Pakistan's hottest new rock bands,
whose improbably beautiful new album of songs
driven by acoustic guitar was recorded almost
entirely in the home studio of the band's keyboard
player using vintage synthesizers and guitars
bought for a song at the smugglers' bazaar.
The contradictions of life in Peshawar are
almost as glaring in the more cosmopolitan cities
of Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. Violence, both
petty and political, permeates society. Hotels and
airports are bombed with increasing frequency.
Each day brings news of soldiers, rebels, and too
often civilians killed in clashes in Balochistan
or North West Frontier Province.
US Vice
President Dick Cheney stopped in Islamabad the day
I arrived to warn Pakistani President General
Pervez Musharraf to "do more" in the fight against
the Taliban; yet nothing short of a massive
investment into fighting Pakistan's debilitating
corruption and improving the country's
underdeveloped infrastructure will win the
allegiance of an increasingly alienated populace.
Tragically, this is a path the governments of
neither Musharraf nor US President George W Bush
seem inclined to pursue.
Indeed, the
greatest threat to Pakistan's stability, if not
existence, is the vast disparity in wealth that
divides the privileged upper class from the mass
of the people. The country is ranked 134 out of
177 countries in the most recent Human Development
Index, although you wouldn't know it in the
neighborhoods, malls and coffee bars of the
country's elite. News reports in the West suggest
that religion, or at least militant Islam, is the
main threat to democracy and modernization, but it
is better understood as a tragic response to the
deliberate attempts by the country's elite and its
Western backers to stymie both.
And the
children of the elite seem disinclined to break
this cycle, as I saw at a party thrown by the son
of a senior government official. The festivities
featured a stage, light and sound system on which
local bands played their best Guns N' Roses
impersonations, a catered buffet, and half a dozen
heavily armed, poorly paid and angry-looking
guards there to protect the teenage revelers as
they engaged in all sorts of religiously - not to
mention legally - prohibited activities late into
the night.
Ironically, among the few
optimistic developments in Pakistan has been the
emergence or, better, re-emergence of a more
"moderate" - in fact, in the current context,
"radical" - Islam than the Saudi-sponsored
Salafism of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This
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