Start the Week

16/05/2011

Andrew Marr talks to Francis Fukuyama about the development of political institutions from the early tribal societies to the growth of the modern state. Pakistan has often been referred to as a 'failed state', but Anatol Lieven argues that despite its reputation it has the makings of a modern, viable and coherent country. The author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, explores what it means to be middle class in Pakistan, and Tahmima Anam looks back to Bangladesh's fight for Independence, and the relationship between religion and politics in the country of her birth.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 16 May 2011
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, no country matters more to our security and perhaps to the world's then overcrowded nuclear-armed Taliban-touched and in some states and senses paranoid Pakistan. That was true before the Bin Laden killing and it's true now and today we're going to concentrate on that remarkable country with the Pakistani novelist Mosin Hamid famous for the reluctant fundamentalist. Another novelist Tamina Anam who's from Bangladesh and who's going to show us another side of the history of the region and Francis Fukuyama famous for the end of history but whose new book is about the origins of political order and thus why some states work in today's world, others fail and some are somewhere in between. But we're going to start with Anatol Levin of King's College London who has written a fascinating new study of Pakistan called simply a hard country and at all I have to start by asking you given your expertise on Pakistan how far you think the Pakistani authorities knew about Bin Laden being there and how intense the sort of mixture of embarrassment and anger subsequently has been. The embarrassment and anger are very intense although it's a question whether it will actually lead to anything. I mean if the argument for incompetence is going to have any credibility then the commander of Pakistani intelligence ought to resign but nobody really thinks that's very likely. As to whether they did know I would say the balance of probability is that at least some group within Pakistani intelligence did know yes that's not certain of course very few things of a certain in Pakistan that's one reason why it's so paranoid but I think on balance yes the question then becomes whether it was in the hope of using him later as a bargaining counter or much more sinister if there were actually sympathizers. I'd like to come back later on to the nature of the relationship between America and Pakistan and the dangers and all of that but just let's just start by by looking at Pakistan itself because in your book you argue that it's clearly in no way a sort of western style democratic state in many ways the state doesn't exist barely exists for a lot of people but that it's also very wrong to regard it as a failing state that there are sort of fibrous it's a fibrous toughness in Pakistan that outsiders often don't understand so just talk us through that a little bit. Yes fibrous is a good word because it's held together by these networks of clans headed by property owning feudals as they're called or urban bosses and who basically exploit the state to redistribute patronage to their kinfolk and their followers. Now on the one hand this is really one of the things that gives the system its toughness in the face of revolution and disintegration on the other hand of course because it's based on plundering the state it's absolutely terrible for development. You say at one point I think that 1% of people in Pakistan pay taxes for instance. Yes and it has the lowest rates of tax collection in South Asia less than 10% and at that point the state simply does not have the resources to do many of the things that the state needs to do even before of course the resources that it does raise are either plundered by the elites or taken by the army which is another major factor which is one of the very rare institutions in Pakistan and you're arguing which does work at a certain level anyway. At a certain level it does work I mean it but partly because it gets so much money but it does redistribute the money to its soldiers in an orderly and internally honest fashion. That's why there is this concept repeatedly this idea that the army can take over the state and run it which is completely full. And again a lot of westerns was it well you know given the nature of the Taliban in the north of the country and the Pashtan areas of the country and given all these madrasas this is clearly a country which is going to fall to islamistic extremism and again in your book you argue that is a profound misreading. Well I certainly hope so from every point of view yes but not just that I hope by analysis was right but one of the things about Pakistan is unlike Iran say it is a very very varied country including from the religious aspect. There are several different kinds of Islam in Pakistan this then also cuts across the many different ethnicities of Pakistan and as a Lahore friend said to me during my researches one of the reasons why we Pakistanis could never agree on an islamist revolution is that we can't agree on anything. Most in in your novels including moth smoke which you wrote relatively early on you describe from the inside it seemed to me a lot of the world that Anatol is looking at as a journalist and a historian the notion of incredible importance of kinship groups and knowing somebody and actually a country in which you are protected and helped by family and almost not at all by the state. I think that's right when the floods came last year to Pakistan for example the state response was was minimal but virtually everyone I knew volunteered time money went out there donated and I'm talking about from the poorest people in the market to very wealthy people and they were helping the villages that came from friends family etc there is a very powerful social safety net in the form of these patronage networks that exist in Pakistan. In your novels also I was perhaps rude by saying that there's an element of of Pakistani paranoia about the world but certainly Pakistan feels surrounded by enemies and there's a lot of discussion about India among some of your in some of your characters in the Indian nuclear bomb and the Pakistani nuclear bomb but also you discuss the war with Bangladesh and the incredible importance of that to the Pakistani self-image. Well I think the 1971 war in East Pakistan which became Bangladesh was what it was a you know a terrible genocide and a horrific massacre of people nothing like that has happened in Pakistan since it's an unusual event in Pakistani history but it does it does represent a kind of turning on itself of which Pakistan and Pakistan is are capable and it comes from a kind of paranoia. I wouldn't disagree with the idea of paranoia. I think there is a deeply entrenched doublethink in Pakistan. Tamima in your book The Good Muslim another novel but seen from the Bangladeshi side of the divide. One of the things that occurred to me is is the sheer madness in 1946, 1947, 1948 of thinking that you could create one country of two such disparate places merely because they both happened to be Muslim dominated. Exactly it seems inevitable that East and West Pakistan would break up eventually and perhaps it needn't have happened in such a bloody horrific way but you know the idea of having these countries that are separated it would be like you know having France and Greece decide that they're one country and forgetting about all the countries in the middle but the thing is that in a way Pakistan wasn't able to integrate a concept of diversity and pluralism from the very beginning and perhaps that's why as you were saying it's you know there are many different kinds of people in Pakistan but is there an idea of the nation that brings that all together? Tamima in your book one of the characters the brother of the narrator is turned more and more towards a pretty extreme form of Islam or Islamism because of his experiences in the war and I wondered whether we thought there is a sort of there is a wider point here that the experience of being surrounded and struggling for some sense of identity does or can very easily drive people towards Islamism as an alternative to traditional nationalism. Yes exactly I mean it's possible that the trauma of the war or a trauma in other forms can drive people or a sense of a sense of feeling surrounded by hostile others. I suppose in the case of Bangladesh that hasn't happened on a national scale because we have a concept of our Bengali ethnicity and language and that sort of identity has remained primary and that's what's kept Bangladesh possibly from turning the way of Pakistan. Francis Fukuyama I was reading your new book on the origins of political order which is part one of an even bigger work at the same time as Anatol Leven's history of Pakistan and I kept thinking yes yes yes because you describe the origins of political order as being very much about lineage based, clan based, family based authority which only in certain circumstances then develops into a full blown state and I wondered we call Pakistan we call lots of countries around the world including some in Europe we call them states and countries as if that answered everything but actually just below the level of the national flag there is a much older form of authority across a lot of the world isn't there. Well that's absolutely right the most natural form of human sociability is either based on kinship or based on the direct exchange of favors between friends and that's the form that people will revert to in the absence of incentives to do otherwise if you look at the countries that really did create impersonal modern states China was one of the first and it was on the basis of a real war against kinship in a certain way because they had to create an institution that one of the instruments they used was actually a civil service examination by which you'd recruit people into the state bureaucracy because they're talented and had certain skills in education and not because they're the cousin or the brother-in-law of the present ruler the Mamalooks and the Ottomans had the most extreme system for doing this they'd actually capture slaves in a different part of the world bring them back and raise them in the household apart from their families to create a sort of neutral elite which could crush those tribal and kinship groups which in Pakistan are still so strong which in Pakistan are still strong in Afghanistan it's still basically a tribal level society and so these are countries that have had as a result of their contact with the outside world state level institutions imposed on top of a society that's still primarily organized on the basis of friends and family in these kinds of personal connections and it'll leave in reading your kind of Pakistan I came away thinking hey I now understand why what we in the west call corruption is absolutely essential to day-to-day life just surviving and getting by and ensuring you're getting a job getting food getting protection getting security because nobody else is going to do it for you but I also felt well there's very little chance of Pakistan developing into a sort of south Asian version of I don't know Turkey never mind Italy never mind France that the development to a European style state is simply not going to happen well one should never say never urbanization may change things over time it has in other places it's doing so very slowly in Pakistan because well partly because the economy is not really developing in a modern way so very often even in the towns people are still dependent on their families for employment and so forth but it may change but one thing I do think is that if urbanization does really change the society it will do so in an Islamist way very likely we just have to pray that it's in a Turkish style Islamist way and not something a lot rougher hmm would you agree with that most in terms of I mean there are various models and you can look at Turkey you can look at Egypt who knows what's going to happen in Egypt but there are plenty of examples of heavily Muslim dominated countries which have developed a more successful form of parliamentary democracy or represented democracy well I think Pakistan is is unusual because it has security has been essential to the state and the way the state has configured itself since independence originally allying itself to the United States against the Soviet Union in the Cold War as a way to leverage America's power against the rival India and that has continued in different versions ever since and when you develop a sort of mercenary-like security-based political economy one thing which flows from that is the marketing so to speak of the political economy is about delivering insecurity and in Pakistan now there is a deep and pernicious sense of insecurity that has been created and that many constituents who want to see continue I think I think the potential changes if that insecurity begins to receive you could see a state building moving very different non-Islamist lines but at the moment policies towards Pakistan seem to enhance insecurity as opposed to reduce it well that takes us straight on to the question of the the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban and what is often called the the Janus faced nature of the security services and indeed the army in Pakistan and at all you write about this at some some length to just explain to us a little bit about how in your view the the Taliban are seen in Lahore and in the other big cities of Pakistan well I'm sorry to say that the Afghan Taliban are seen overwhelmingly as a basically legitimate resistance force and much in the light that the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviets were seen in Pakistan when I was there in the 1980s now that's not to say that most people would like to see the Taliban ruling over them inside Pakistan but there is this view up in up in the north it's a different world and it's appropriate up there well yes um that these are Afghans they have to the right to fight against a foreign occupation of their country of course it's different in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and especially the tribal areas along the Afghan frontier because those people are basically the same people as in Afghanistan they're members of the same tribe so how do the Pakistanis regard Pakistani Taliban well that's different because of course the Pakistani Taliban are in revolution against Pakistan they want to overthrow the Pakistani state um they're killing as we just saw last week absolutely in in terrible numbers Pakistanis yes we we need to remember they're killing far far more Pakistanis in fact since 9/11 you yes sorry you were about to make a certain point say 10 times more Pakistanis than died in America on 9/11 have been killed as a result of terrorism and insurgency in Pakistan but the population is very confused partly because of sort of the paranoia of the culture but partly because of military propaganda so there is this widespread belief that the Pakistani Taliban are actually being backed by India um which on the one hand inclines people to oppose them but then feeds into this whole paranoid security state business that Mohsen has mentioned and so what most when you describe the the elites from the inside in Pakistan talk to us a little bit about the double nature of this because um in your novels these are these are people who are in some sense in love with the west and love with America to a lesser extent perhaps with Britain um whose world is is is an international world but at the same time remain profoundly Pakistani and patriotic too yeah that's right but I think I think what you see in in sort of the liberal uh what you might call the liberal elite in Pakistan and probably all three of the main political positions in Pakistan is a kind of double think in the case of the liberal elite what that tends to be is you know everybody should be equal in a western democratic sense but I refuse to pay my taxes and if I should go to court for let's say criminally killing someone I'd certainly don't expect the court to administer law blind to my social status and then you have the Islamist position which is to say that Islam makes us all equal but at the same time to reject the notion that everyone has an equal say in saying what Islam is and you know these kinds of of and there's this there's the military type position which is to say that America owes us aid and America is also a kind of enemy and these basic tensions that you see you know cropping up again and again in Pakistani discourse make it very difficult actually to a sweet enemy as a title another book put it well in a way it's it's it's um it's a it's a bad marriage a sort of bad codependency relationship where America's ruined the Pakistani economy in Pakistan by imposing this war on terror and therefore owes reparations but you know it becomes a um and I think American involvement in Pakistan has been quite pernicious but uh but but this this unreconciled conflict you know are are we allies are we not makes it very difficult I want to come on in a minute to talk about the vast impact of population growth and climate which certainly affects Bangladesh and Pakistan in parallel ways seems to be very important in this conversation but I'd like to come back to Francis Fukuyama first because we've talked a bit about Islam and in your um account of the growth of political order you argue very strongly that in its early phases Islam was one of the great modernizing uh factors uh hitting back at at the traditional tribal and kinship group areas and allowing a different kind of identity spread across a great suite of the world well that's right if you look at the history of Arabia there were tribes in Arabia for centuries prior to the prophet Muhammad and his message in a sense was an anti tribal one he said that there's an Uma a community of believers that is not based on kinship or tribe uh and that is what unites us it's the faith that unites us and that's what permitted collective action so that the Arab suddenly burst out of Arabia they conquered the Persian Empire they conquered most of the Mediterranean world they got all the way up into central France on the basis of something a principle that was higher than kinship the other I think really important Islamic contribution is actually in the area of law today in the west we see demands for Sharia as something very reactionary and medieval but if you think about it the rule of law is really about legal constraints that are higher than the will of the current executive whoever happens to be running the country and in the history of the middle east Sharia and the Uma I'm sorry the the the Ulamah the scholars that interpreted the law did in fact act as a certain break against a arbitrary executive authority and so when we hear calls for a return to Sharia law in different parts of the world we should be thinking a different level of the particular importance where there is no effective state law that in many respects people are simply looking for justice and law that is going to be delivered quickly if not kindly no that's right I think that this is very important that some of the nostalgia is is not for Taliban type punishments which we associate with Sharia but actually for a law governed society in which rulers actually have to obey the law the word justice is incorporated into the Turkish Islamist party's name the Moroccan one and justice in this circumstance is not redistribution it's really equality under the law which was an ideal that I think has been lost with the undermining of traditional legal forms in the in the Middle East. Tamima in your novel you make the point that there was a sort of revival or a powerful wave of Islamism after the war. It's a very interesting case Bangladesh because it was famously described as Kissinger as a basket case it was going to go nowhere it has a very very strong sense of national pride and national identity and the flag flying everywhere on victory day and so on but it seems to me to be a country which in some ways like Pakistan is struggling about struggling with the true nature of its identity is it fundamentally an Islamic area or is it fundamentally a Bengali nation and you can almost see the battles going on on the streets of Dakar between sort of Western influences and English language schools on the one hand and a lot of Saudi financed I have to say islamism on the other. Exactly I mean Bangladeshies have been struggling with this I question of what role does religion play in their public and political life ever since 1947 when they sort of voted for being part of Pakistan and then wanted to reassert their cultural identity but the thing about Bangladesh is that we've never actually voted in significant numbers for an Islamic party and recently you know Islam was was integrated into the name of the nation so there was a move to call it the Islamic Republic of Bangladesh but that's been reversed and now we are the People's Republic of Bangladesh so I think it's very much a question of trying to find social and political forms that integrate that this very strong cultural identity with the fact that most people are very practicing very devout Muslims but who don't veil some do it's very interesting you see on the streets comes and goes a bit but you would also argue that women's movements and civil organizations are very strong very powerful in Bangladesh exactly the women's movement has been instrumental in ensuring that the constitution remains secular and also micro credit Muhammad Yunus's institution Grameen Bank has you know 90% of Grameen borrowers are women so putting money in the hands of women has completely changed women's ability to to have a kind of empowered state within the village and then within the country in general. You know one thing I find quite remarkable when you compare Bangladesh and Pakistan is Bangladesh does really well on all of the human development indicators when you look at female literacy and health scores and so forth compared to Pakistan and as you said you know micro credit has become a major you know it's billions and billions of dollars it's a substantial part of the economy and this all happens in a country where the politics is a mess you know where you have these two well the founder of the Grameen Bank is being persecuted at the moment by the Bangladeshi government. Absolutely it's a very shameful chapter in our history at the moment because he was seen as a political threat he has a major constituency and if he you know they think if he tries to take power then he has a very good chance of of ousting the two kind of you know established political parties. I'd like to turn to what I said earlier on maybe the biggest issue underlying a lot of this which is population growth and climate change and at all even in in your Pakistan a hard country you argue that that is the greatest threat to Pakistan's security and therefore the security of a large part of the world it's not the Taliban in the north it's not necessarily even American reactions or a fight with India it's about water and people and a lack of land. In the long run I mean in the short to medium term yes I mean it's the Pakistani-Taliban the relationship with America and so forth. Give us some numbers on the Pakistani population and what's happened to add agricultural land. Well according to the estimate of the World Bank unless the birth rate can be brought down much more steeply than it has been in recent decades Pakistan will have a population of around 335 million people by the middle of the century and this is in a naturally arid area from roughly speaking about 190 million today a vast increase a huge increase but mathematically certain unless the birth rate can be brought down that by the way very much reflects the lack of female education because if there's one you know really strong correlation it's that the education of women brings down the birth rate and Pakistan has absolutely terrible statistics from that point of view and not just it has to be said because of the weakness of the state but because of the indifference of much of and meanwhile a growing serious shortage of water. Yes I mean already serious in parts of the country and once again I mean if things go on as they are disastrous potentially in 40 years or so now I mean that's not inevitable there's a huge amount that can be done Pakistan also has some of the most wasteful uses of water in South Asia let alone in the world but I mean for that not just the state but society needs to be able to change in certain ways and well it hasn't done so so far and to me that's again a great parallel obviously with with with Pakistan or with Bangladesh. Dakai's routinely said to be the first of the world's mega cities which might have to be evacuated because of flooding and water problems. Yes and people migrate to Dhaka in the millions every year because they're essentially climate refugees from within the country. So what is what would we say about the dangers for political order Francis Fukuyama in a situation where you have tribal and kinship groupings not particularly powerful states and a sudden new pressure like like that's been caused by the the population in explosion and the drying out of previously fertile areas. Well I think a lot of conflicts in developing countries have actually been caused by these kinds of conflicts over resources. A lot of them are attributed to things like religion and ethnicity but when it gets right down to it these become actually useful mobilizing tools for people that are fighting over things like land and water and access to you know minerals and the like. So I would assume that in in a country like Pakistan you're going to see you know this feeding a continued you know growth of religious politics because again religion you know it's it's hard to know in the modern world whether when people say they're religious they're actually genuinely religious or whether this isn't actually a form of identity that is useful to politicians as a means of getting support mobilizing people in favor of you know. And perhaps as we've said a refuge from other forms of identity state identity which don't seem to be effective anymore. Well I think this is the big failure in in in many developing countries is there is no viable national identity that can be based you know and this is something Europeans forget because they went through many painful centuries before the democratic era in which largely authoritarian governments imposed a single language drove out people of a different religion or identity to create these homogeneous culturally homogeneous units and country like Pakistan never had that history and therefore doesn't have a nation doesn't have that sense of identity. I always begin to wonder whether the whole notion of the United Nations with all its flags and lines and colors as a description of the world is a hopelessly simplistic and naive one. Well it is and it was created by countries that had gone through this nation building process in an earlier age and could impose their norms on you know what sovereignty for example you know it was a concept that that emerged in Europe over many centuries of warfare and then all of a sudden you say to a very weak state that has very little national identity that's driven by tribal and ethnic conflicts they say okay you're sovereign now you can exercise. Here's a line drawn around you here's a flag that's right you just like us and you just like but the reality is is incredible state weakness that the state cannot enforce laws anywhere within its territory and then they get represented in the United Nations as if they're all equal. This is a better description of the world and we're used to most we've been talking in quite abstract terms about this but in your novels for instance the this is these are arguments that are kind of fought through in very concrete terms in terms of how people dress where they work do they drink whiskey or not do they smoke dope or not the language that they use it's a continuing daily debate internal debate about identity. I think so I mean in Pakistan there is an ongoing debate about identity and partly because Pakistan is both as we've described it a very fragile place but also because there is enormous opportunity in Pakistan and people are always trying to grasp it so to give you an example of this in Pakistan it's one of the largest dairy producers cotton producers wheat producers in the world with an incredibly inefficient agricultural system my friends you know work in Lahore and in offices shops factories that have electricity 12 hours a day but are still oftentimes competitive as exporters and you know you see this incredibly resilient society which for thousands of years has been invaded by invaders passing through to India and has learnt somehow to cope and so in a way Pakistan and also this as we said a multi ethnic society it is it is not like Bangladesh in the sense that there there is no majority in Pakistan and so you have this nation of minorities with very great opportunity enormous difficulties and so individuals have very different responses to it and you know to give you an example of this in Pakistan there was a time when you both had people calling for the beheading of those who ran music shops CD shops in places like so out and a openly bisexual transvestite television talk show host as your number one tv talk show host so so what you wind up seeing in Pakistan really is incredible diversity and you know the I think that can be a good thing actually the problem is when you layer this insecurity a security based state over an inherently vibrant and diverse society you wind up with with enormous self wounding and the independence of Bangladesh is an example of that of highway society which was very very diverse because it was so insecure so security obsessed wound up literally cutting itself in half I mean I certainly felt when I was in Dakar in Bangladesh to me this was of course huge poverty and all sorts of problems but also one of the most colorful friendly in some respects enjoyable places I'd been yes people are incredibly lighthearted and when you go to Bangladesh there really is a sense of things moving ahead people you know starting small businesses people trying to cope with all these kind of environmental calamities and the political structure being quite weak I mean I wonder in Pakistan is it possible to have leaders who are separate from the system of patronage who try to talk about diversity who try to talk about an idea of Pakistan that is separate from these established tropes that have been so damaging and at all well yes unfortunately they're they're all called general something or the other and they have an established trope of their own but yes I mean the the generals are separate from from this world of kinship and and patronage they do run a genuinely meritocratic but they're the only people who do well in Karachi which is but in many ways Karachi is an Indian city of course not a Pakistani one there you do have a kind of secular politics the problem is that it's an ethnic nationalist politics which is becoming more and more mired in savage violence with other ethnicities for control of the city so politically the signs are not good but as Mohsen said the funny thing is that when you live in Pakistan because of this diversity because also of this friendliness that you mentioned for Bangladesh as well because of the richness of the the many different cultures there oddly enough it doesn't feel as bad as you know the the news the media even our conversation sometimes makes out Mohsen I think this comes from the the the constant security lens through which we view Pakistan because if you look at Pakistan from different perspectives so for example in Pakistan today there is less income inequality than there is an India there's less absolute hunger than there is an India you know you see there there is although of course 3,000 people killed in the last few years on average from terrorism there is a homicide late that's a tiny fraction of of South Africa or Mexico or these sorts of places except for driving yes the driving is the driving is is often fatal but so so you you do have a very different society once you take the security lenses off it's a troubled society but but it's by no means you know the worse off of societies otherwise they could do it quite well and something very important there is as you mentioned charity and charity very often does come from Islam this is a face of religion in Pakistan that we don't notice enough. Francis Fukuyama it seems that from what we've been talking about of course in Washington there is a great debate about what should they now do about Pakistan what should they now think about Pakistan but one of the lessons of this is a that everybody is going to have to be engaged in Pakistan we haven't even mentioned the nuclear weapons that are there but also that it's going to be very very difficult name possible to impose some notion of order from the outside on Pakistan or indeed on many other places in the world. Well I think American foreign policy has learned that it's very hard to impose order even in the smallest country not to mention a you know a gigantic nation of almost 200 million people so I think that's off the table I think the real question for American foreign policy right now is whether continuing the war in Afghanistan is worth the you know the the creation of this horrible relationship you know between the United States and Pakistan that is really driven by the needs of of fighting the Afghan war because in the end I think as Anatol argues in his book that's actually the much more dangerous scary place and it's it sounds to me like your answer to that is no it's not worth carrying on the Afghan war given the cause. Well I think given the prospects of actually you know militarily achieving what the United States wants to do at the moment you know it's not very realistic Anatol? Yes well that's that is indeed what I have been arguing I would say that this shouldn't involve some kind of panic-stricken scuttle we do have a duty to try to put some kind of settlement in place in Afghanistan before getting out but certainly I think that the idea that we can dictate the future nature of Afghanistan while excluding influence from Pakistan and other neighbors and not negotiating with the top leadership of the Taliban it is more and more simply a fantasy. It's a painful thing to face up to there in a country like Britain which has lost so many soldiers out there never mind America and the soldiers they've lost out there to motion. I think I think now may be a good time to face up to it though because subsequent to 9/11 I think there were two components to the reaction that brought the West into Afghanistan. One was a desire to prevent further terrorist attacks on the West but a second and very important one I think was a desire for you could call it either justice or revenge you know a sort of wounded pride and and evidence of that is that so much of you know 100,000 troop presence there doesn't actually do much to prevent terrorism in the West and I think with Osama bin Laden gone I don't think he's going to make much difference to Islamist movements or to the killing that's taking place in Pakistan which is enormous but maybe it will make a difference to the emotional space the emotional debate that we see in America and in the UK and open up a chance of look at Afghanistan fresh and say you know is this does this make sense is this current policy makes sense gliding over how it would actually happen a withdrawal from Afghanistan what would be the effect on Pakistan's morale if that happened well I think it would be very good in many ways first of all the Afghan war is not purely an external war because it is partly a war among pistons and other groups of Afghans and more pistons live in Pakistan than in Afghanistan so you have a very strange situation where it's a war external to Pakistan but the ethnic group most effective lives largely in Pakistan that state of semi-civil war will begin to go away I think the danger of course is that it strengthens those who believe that you know sponsoring militant groups which has been disastrous for Pakistan is sensible policy and so it'll have to be counterbalanced I think with with the other essential component which is which is getting India and Pakistan towards a peace agenda exactly and Kashmir is crucial to that I mean so many more resources should be diverted into finding a solution for Kashmir not just to resolve you know America's relationship with Pakistan but also speaking to the global Muslim anger about Kashmir which I think is quite serious and is felt in Bangladesh as well well absolutely I don't think Bangladesh has a kind of history of anti-americanism but certainly Kashmir and Palestine are the two issues that Islamic leaders can rally many many people around in Bangladesh as well and some at least of the same forces occur in Bangladesh as doing Pakistan in terms of outside money outside influence from Islamist groups very often from Saudi Arabia and certainly from the Gulf exactly you were talking about the Saudi funded madrasas and educational institutions which are cropping up a lot and we see a lot more borkas on the streets and their shops that you know sell Saudi borkas which are becoming very fashionable and popular so there is that kind of borkas that they're called Saudi borkas oh oh I see right yes so you can you can look like a Saudi woman that sounds great exactly yeah I say no more um France is for gamma looking at Pakistan as the biggest problem perhaps on America's plate in terms of foreign policy at the moment what do you draw to this discussion what do you what do you feel you'd like to go back and say to President Obama whoever it might be in Washington discussing this I think that in general we need a lot more local knowledge about the way societies really work in American discussions of Pakistan you know so often the issue has been democracy or not democracy we fail to see past that to the actual social structure so I think that the reality is just has been discussed around this table it's a highly feudal society kinship is really the you know one of the primary social glues that holds this place together if you don't understand that you don't really understand how the society works and therefore imposing our categories you know as lenses through which to see what's going on is has really not so we are terribly well so we come back to the the old question about having a deeper knowledge and understanding of Pakistan which is what you are seeking to achieve Anatol in your book we've talked in some respects in this conversations if Pakistan is a sort of scary place but it should be said you spend an awful lot of time there and would you encourage people to go there and see for themselves and to learn from Pakistan well I wouldn't advise tourism to the Pakistani tribal areas or even sort of long periods spent staying in guest houses in Peshawar but I think to much of the country you can still travel freely and reasonably safely I think we all agree that the driving is more of a threat actually a threat to life than the terrorism so yes I mean certainly researchers and particularly researchers linked to government simply must go there they have a duty to do so because so much of what is now being projected onto Pakistan by now is exactly I mean simply through our prisms and is gravely and accurate most of the final word I think I think that that's absolutely right people should come to see Pakistan but the other thing which is often ignored is Pakistanis should be allowed out to see the rest of the world when I was growing up people would go to my father studied in the states and in the UK and that was a normal model many of my friends were living in the United States in 2001 almost none of them are now really yes the vast majority of my friends who live abroad live in places like Dubai and so when you talk about the Saudi Borkah you know replacing Levi's is the most important foreign fashion in places like Pakistan and Bangladesh what you've also seen is the is the disconnect the intentional rupturing of movement has left Pakistan isolated from non Middle Eastern foreign contact the the absolute worst tourism poster when they can't think of anything else to say is such and such land of contrasts I think we've at least shown that Pakistan would live up to that thank you to all my guests today most in Hamid's debut novel Moth Smoke has just been reissued Tamima Anams the Good Muslim Anatol Leven's book on Pakistan hard country and Francis Fukuyama's the origins of political order are all of them published this month and well worth reading Francis is speaking at the South Bank Center in London tonight as well next week Afghanistan treason and heroism with Sherrod Cooper Coles Angie Hobbs and David Price Jones but for now thank you and goodbye

Producer: Katy Hickman.