There have been some dissonant responses to Anatol Lieven’s Pakistan: A Hard Country. Some (many) call it “the perfect antidote to stereotypical descriptions of the country as the most dangerous place in the world.” (Pakistan isn’t a failed state, you see, it is a “highly conservative, archaic and sometimes quite inert and somnolent mass.”) Others, like Praveen Swami write that “there is little sense in this book of Pakistan as a place with people, rather than a problem.” Still others charge him with “viewing the country as the sum of all its military parts.”
That, I think, is an issue with this genre of books that either represent or inform, in Sepoy’s words,”the view from the mahogany conference tables in and around Washington.” Zia Mian and Sharon Weiner, in their review of some such recent policy-oriented literature about Pakistan, write that
Much of this literature sees Pakistan as a policy problem and seeks to inform Washington’s debate on how to get Pakistan to do what the United States wants it to do. The literature also reveals the limits of American knowledge and power when it comes to Pakistan.
What I find peculiar is that Lieven’s book reminds some of British colonial chronicles. Farzana Shiekh notes that the language in Lieven’s book is “reminiscent of the memoirs of a British district administrator under the Raj.” Swami notes that “Lieven’s book self-consciously locates itself in the tradition of the colonial chroniclers whose thoughts pepper the text.” Mian and Weiner are on the same page as well:
At times, Lieven sounds like a British officer trying to parse the peculiar ways of the natives. This impression is strengthened by his repeated citation of nineteenth-century colonial commentaries on South Asian and Muslim notions of honor, loyalty, honesty, the virtues of Islamic law, the role of saints, the withering away of old feudal families, Pashtun leadership and culture, Sindhi architecture and Baloch tribal structure, to give only some examples. The dilemmas of this backward-looking gaze are most striking in his discussion of the Pakistan Taliban, where he resorts to observations on tribal rebellion offered by the last British governor of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, Olaf Caroe.
This is the context I had as I read Anatol Lieven’s review of Ahmad OMFG-The-Tallys-Are-Coming Rashid’s new book and had the following conversation with Arsalan:
Policy-centered texts are one kind of knowledge. Embedded social science is another. The smart-card yielding study of culture is yet another. And the tech-savvy empire has other ways of knowing as well.
They rain death and destruction from above, burying their prey in the rubble they reduce their targeted location to. And then they hit the rubble to ensure their kill stays dead, killing rescuers in the process. They buzz incessantly, making it difficult for people to fall asleep and sending the demand for anti-depressants and sleeping pills soaring in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Besides their function as airborne assassins, drones are also used to watch, observe, monitor. What they monitor, they relay back as grainy images. Images are also captured on checkpoints: images of retinas, faces and fingers. Biometric data on 1.5 million Afghans, that is “every six males of fighting age, ages 15 to 64” and on 2.2 million Iraqis, “the equivalent of one in four males of fighting age” was collected and stored, reported The New York Times. Within the U.S, foreigners from certain countries (almost all Muslim) were ordered to have their biometric data collected. Since then, biometrics have proliferated to airports en-masse. All of this has yielded piles of information. Still, the appetite for more data remains and the fantasies about technologically cutting edge data-gathering toys abound. The nano drones being developed “can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.” The Gorgan Stare, a U.S Air force technology, it was reported, will look at a city 24/7 so that the “adversary” knows that it is being watched but never knows what exactly is being looked at, because, as The Washington Post’s giddy headline put it, “we can see everything.”
If this is bad knowledge, is there some kind of good knowledge of the colony, acquiring which the empire will suddenly realizes that she is the disease that ails the colony? What can knowing Afghanistan or Pakistan “better” do?
Pointing to the “critical distance between knowledge and understanding,” sepoy writes:
To understand fully is to be constricted, imperially speaking. The empire must not understand for that understanding carries with it a price that is simply too dear. Therein lies the distance between knowledge and understanding at the core of all imperial ventures. … Kipling’s warning is apt – if the empire understands the position of the colony, the condition of colonialism itself, it cannot maintain any lie about either its civilising mission nor its emancipatory one.