'Reimagining Pakistan' book review: Outpourings of a jaded campaigner

Husain Haqqani's latest book says nothing that other scholars have not said before, nor does he offer a new course for his troubled country

Although Pakistan has produced several colourful political personalities, there is perhaps no one to match Husain Haqqani and his chequered career.  As a student, he was affiliated with the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami and later briefly worked as a journalist with its mouthpiece. He was, in turn, adviser and spokesman for both Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. Impressed with his sharp mind and fluent articulation, the latter appointed him ambassador to Sri Lanka before he was 40 years old.

In 1999, he was “exiled” by General Musharraf, became a full-time academic in the US before bouncing back as Pakistan’s ambassador to the US in 2008. He resigned in 2011 when he was embroiled in an unsavoury episode: he is said to have jointly authored a “memo” given to the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff that said the Pakistan army was planning a coup in his country to ward off criticisms that it had been complicit in Osama bin Laden’s killing, and sought US help to ward off the takeover.

Husain Haqqani

Many Pakistanis see Haqqani as pro-US and even the source of Trump’s recent aggressive posture against his country. In his latest incarnation, he is also being viewed as pro-India: he urged the US Congress in 2015 not to sell F-16 fighter jets and AH-1Z Viper helicopters to Pakistan since they would only be used against India. The spokesman who had robustly justified his country’s jihad in Kashmir 25 years ago has certainly come a long way.

A book on Pakistan by one so peripatetic is to be welcomed, particularly when it is titled Reimagining Pakistan, while reminding us that the country is “dysfunctional” and has nuclear weapons. Sadly, the book does justice to neither its title nor its distinguished writer; most of what he has to say has been said earlier, and more effectively.

The very idea of Pakistan was flawed: was it to be a “homeland” for India’s Muslims or were the Muslim-majority areas that made up the new country with its own Hindu minorities meant to guarantee the safety and welfare of Muslim minorities in “Hindu” India? 

These questions were never answered by the votaries of Pakistan, who were frequently warned by several Muslim and Western commentators about the non-viability of their project. In 1943, a scholar close to Jinnah, Syed Abdul Latif, prophetically warned that, following Partition, Muslims in India would become weaker as a tiny minority, while those in Pakistan would be lured towards religious fanaticism.

In the event, Pakistan’s leaders set up a unitary state that ignored the ethnic and cultural diversities of its regions that made up the new nation and attempted to glue it together with Islam. What it actually achieved was an “identity” that was increasingly radicalised and defined itself in terms of visceral hostility towards India.

Today, the malaise has run deep. Pakistan is affiliated with extremist Islam as state ideology, is home to several rigid and violent jihadi organisations, and its power centre — the army — uses jihadi Islam as the preferred ideology and instrument to retain power and strike at India. The bulk of the state’s resources are used to buttress this order at the expense of education, health, nutrition and economic development.

Amid the breakdown of state order, Pakistanis take solace in blame-games and conspiracy theories: everything wrong is some-one else’s fault — the usual suspects being “the Brahman, Jewish and white racial mindset”. The whole nation is suffused in false history and fake news: the genocide in East Pakistan was hidden from Pakistanis; on the day the Pakistani armed forces were signing the surrender in Dhaka, the Dawn in Karachi blared: “Victory on All Fronts!” Today, negative writing is controlled through intimidation of journalists, both Pakistani and foreign.

As Haqqani reminds us, the focus on Islam and India has extracted a heavy price from Pakistan: its provinces resent the hegemony of Punjab and are asserting regional aspirations. But, the greatest neglect has been that of the economy — Pakistan spends seven times more on the army than on primary education. Not surprisingly, it fares poorly on most yardsticks of national achievement — GDP growth, human development, education, public health, industrialisation, exports, et cetera. Pakistan has regularly been “saved” by large infusions of US assistance which most of its citizens see as their entitlement on account of the “sacrifices” the country has made to subserve US interests.

All of this is familiar territory, already discussed in considerable detail by Khalid Ahmed, Ahmed Rashid, Ayesha Jalal and Farzana Sheikh. The book is anchored too deeply in the past and says little about the future. Led by the title, we expect from Haqqani some fresh ideas on how Pakistan could be re-imagined, though the author does warn us that Pakistan “has gone too far down the ideological rabbit hole to be able to embrace pragmatic policies”.

Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a dysfunctional nuclear state by Husain Haqqani

We are still disappointed with what Haqqani has to offer. Only in the last two pages does the author suggest a “new course” which is that “military officers might need to do the greatest rethinking” in regard to — hold your breath — curbing jihadi militants and “allowing secular advocates of ethnic nationalisms and supporters of normal relations with Afghanistan and India into the national mainstream”. Do we really need to wade through 300 pages to receive these self-evident, even banal, truisms?

But the problem of Pakistan remains. Most Pakistanis rejoice in the fact that their state has remained “resilient” in the face of dire predictions of state failure. What is the worth of this “survival” if the country, pursued with such relentless emotion, is now seen as “terrorist incubator”, “land of the intolerant” and an “international migraine”?

In 1956, Hans Morgenthau had said: “Pakistan is not a nation and hardly a state.” Not much has changed since then.

The reviewer is a former diplomat

Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

Husain Haqqani

HarperCollins Publishers India 

Pages: 336

Price: Rs 699