All the Things You Didn't Know About Pakistan

Since 2005, the people of Pakistan, no strangers to upheaval, have been suffering near-constant food and water shortages, rampant power-outages and bodily harm as formerly peaceful cities are besieged by extremist violence. All the while, American leadership continues to direct criticism and threats at the troubled nation, allocating most of its monetary aid for Pakistan to its army, and openly endorsing India as blameless in the endless brinkmanship between the two equally culpable South Asian nations.

A decade ago, few Americans could say with certainty where Pakistan was geographically, let alone where it fit within geopolitics and global commerce. Despite the country's well-worn place in the headlines recently, Americans still seem unclear as to how Pakistan came to be among the world's most prolific exporters of nihilistic political Islam, let alone able to think of it as anything but a terrorist training camp. For Bush et al., this was a good thing.

Following 9/11, neoconservatives in the Bush White House worked overtime to at once demonize and obscure the enemy, which, many felt, was Islam itself. Popular perception began to conflate Afghans and Pakistanis as a monolith of geographies and populations. Seven years and two disastrous wars later, candidate Barack Obama made Pakistan a pillar of his platform, vowing to take that nation in hand if it could not heal itself and stamp out terrorism within its borders.

Now that he's president, the only way, apparently, for Obama to deal with a politically tenuous, nuclear-armed Pakistan is drone warfare, the logical extreme of fighting a completely dehumanized and faceless enemy. After all, if Pakistan is populated by woman-haters and terrorists and headed by a not-entirely-cooperative government, it's a lot easier to sidestep the nagging ethical questions about the use of drones.

Short of traveling to Pakistan for a corrective to the one-sided representation available to most news consumers, here's a quick primer on Pakistan, a nation to which the United States is inextricably -- and by its own design -- tied.

The Cultural

The Pakistani bourgeoisie feels terribly misrepresented by Western observers, especially when it comes to women. In contrast to those among the urban working poor and agrarian communities, wealthier Pakistanis in cities tend to be more educated, fairly cosmopolitan, and more likely to take women's rights as a given. As is the case the world over, money buys access not just to goods and services, but to a worldview.

Middle-class women attend university, hold jobs, enjoy mobility and increasing autonomy, and are spared the more demanding strictures of modesty placed on rural women in particular. Clad in the kaleidoscopic and protean shalwar-kameez, women in Pakistan's cities in no way resemble the shrouded figures of Afghan women under Taliban rule, Iranian hijab-wearers or Saudi women in black. And professionally, Pakistani women now appear in virtually every male-dominated sector, including in leadership positions, and are powerful advocates of their own advancement.

There is obviously a certain tokenism in fixating on Pakistan's fortunate and independent women when so much of the female population still labors under repressive patriarchy, but it's also dubious to take the view that women in Pakistan are a uniformly oppressed class of victims, without the agency or desire to effect change. Poverty undermines a feminist agenda as effectively as misogyny, and still women work to change Pakistan every day.

One cultural misconception about Pakistanis is that they frown upon music and performing arts in general. It didn't help matters when in 2006, a Taliban-sympathizing religious leader in the North-West Frontier Province declared music, like narcotics, unlawful, and a slew of CD-store bombings in the area ensued. Such a ban was anathema to Pakistanis, for whom music always has been the inviolable accompaniment to every aspect of life. From regional folk tunes to Qawwali (and its most celebrated practitioner, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) to Hindi tunes out of Bollywood, from centuries-old classical ghazals to smarmy pop songs to Metallica-inspired metal, music is one of the few things almost all Pakistanis have in common. Perhaps that's why political Islam targets music for its own ends; the reverberations of proscribing it are endless, and help create the impression that the Taliban possess a greater social influence than they actually do.