The Powder Keg

By Michelle Goldberg, Salon. Posted November 7, 2002.

In the fall of 2001, readers desperate to get a grip on the grotesque Afghan regime that America pledged to overthrow -- and its link to the terrorists, none of them from Afghanistan, who made a charnel house of lower Manhattan -- turned to Ahmed Rashid's authoritative "Taliban." In nearly 300 exhaustively reported pages, Rashid led readers through the maelstrom of recent Afghan history, but he also made clear that the bizarre student militia led by Mullah Omar and funded by Osama bin Laden was bred not in Afghanistan but in the madrassas of Pakistan, our chief ally in the war on terror. After last year's war, Afghanistan has become less of a threat to global security. Pakistan, though, has likely become more of one.

Right now, much of al-Qaida is probably in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country riven not just by ascendant Islamist extremism, but also by fierce communal conflicts between both religious sects and ethnic groups. Six months ago, when the country was engaged in a terrifying nuclear standoff with India, American attention turned briefly to the subcontinent, but was soon diverted by the president's lurching campaign against Iraq.

Still, anyone who wants to understand more deeply the roots of the terrorism that has convulsed the world from New York to Bali to Moscow would do far better to study Pakistan than Iraq -- especially since the former offers valuable lessons about some of what we might expect following regime change in the latter. Either of two fine new books, Owen Bennett Jones' highly detailed but occasionally skewed "Pakistan: Eye of the Storm" or Mary Anne Weaver's less exhaustive but more fascinating and authoritative "Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan," would be a good place to start.

Both do for Pakistan what Rashid did for the Taliban by offering a way for general readers to get a grip on complex political currents that seem to be leading inexorably toward crisis. Perhaps most important, both make clear that the fault lines in the country -- as in the Middle East -- aren't simply between secularists and fundamentalists, or between democracy and authoritarianism, but between Shiites and Sunnis as well as among various mutually antagonistic ethnic groups. In Pakistan's case, those groups include Pathans (known in Afghanistan as Pashtuns), Punjabis, Balocis, Sindhis and Mohajirs, all of whom, thanks largely to American policies, have lots of guns.

"The accumulation of disorder in Pakistan is such that it could well be the next Yugoslavia," writes Weaver, echoing an assessment Robert Kaplan made in the Atlantic Monthly two years ago. She quotes Marine Corps Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, Bush's peace envoy to the Middle East, saying, "If [Musharraf] fails in carrying out his reforms and putting Pakistan back on track, I can foresee three worst-case scenarios: The true military hard-liners will take over; the religious hard-liners will take over, and we'll see a theocracy like Iran; or Pakistan will be faced with complete chaos and fall apart." The country, awash in CIA-supplied arms from the Afghan jihad, could be called the terrorism capital of the world. Weaver points out, "As early as 1987, of 777 terrorist incidents recorded worldwide, 90 percent took place in Pakistan."

A New Yorker writer, Weaver has been covering Pakistan for 20 years, and she has gained extraordinary access inside the country -- she has had multiple interviews with Gen. Zia ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto. While Jones, a former Pakistan correspondent for the BBC, aims at a more thorough history, replete with charts and graphs, Weaver's book is prismatic, relying on odd, incredibly telling details.

She's a hugely compelling writer -- parts of her book read like an airplane thriller, others like a surrealist farce. Jones has a wealth of experience in the country, but fewer well-placed sources. Both tell the suspenseful story of the 1999 military coup that brought Musharraf to power, a coup that occurred while Musharraf was stuck on a passenger airliner running out of fuel; soon-to-be deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif wouldn't allow it to land. But while Jones tells it from the ground, Weaver does it through Musharraf's eyes. The former is a fuller account, the latter, a more immediate one.

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