Asad Durrani - Pakistan Adrift: Navigating Troubled Waters

First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by

C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,

41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL

All rights reserved.

Asad Durrani, 2018

Foreword Anatol Lieven, 2018

Printed in India

Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

The right of Asad Durrani to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library.

EISBN: 9781787381599

www.hurstpublishers.com

I drift a little with every fast current, but have yet to find my direction.

Mirza Asad-ullah- Khan Ghalib

Nineteenth-century Indian poet

PART ONE
THE VIEW FROM A VANTAGE POINT

PART TWO
IN HINDSIGHT

PART THREE
THE OVERVIEW

It is an honour to be asked to write the foreword to this book by Pakistans foremost military intellectual. General Asad Durranis combination of memoirs and reflections is among the most important works to have emerged from the Pakistani Army since independence. Its dry wit and wealth of anecdote also makes it a pleasure to read, and its wryly perceptive take on the failings of both civilian and military government in Pakistan distinguishes it from most self-serving memoirs by former leading figures. General Durrani was in the best of positions to observe those failings. As a junior officer, he served in the wars of 1965 and 1971; as a senior officer, he was commander of both Military Intelligence and Inter-Services Intelligence. He worked in senior roles during the governments of Zia ul Haq, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and casts a cold eye on all of them.

This is a highly enlightening, necessary, but also, in many ways, depressing memoir. Writing on Pakistanby both Pakistanis and Westernershas a longstanding tendency to veer wildly between prophecies of imminent doom and belief in miraculous salvations. For liberal Pakistanis and most Westerners, this salvation was supposed to come from some mixture of democracy and obedience to the latest ideas of the World Bank. We were told repeatedly that if Pakistan underwent a regular transition from one elected government to another, then it would provide some sort of magic key that would unlock the countrys hidden capacity for political, social and economic reform. In 2013, the first such transition occurredand no miracle has taken place. Equally, the hopes of many Pakistanis that military government would transform the state have been repeatedly disappointed.

On the other hand, the portrayal by so many analysts of Pakistans imminent demise have also been repeatedly proved false. Despite all its weaknesses, Pakistan has proved extraordinarily resilient in the face of the many dire challenges that it has faced. Contrary to the great majority of expert predictions, the army and state eventually defeated the Pakistani Taliban insurgency that began in 2004 and for a while seemed to be sweeping more and more of the country. Terrorism, of course, remains a permanent dangerbut that, alas, is now true of many countries. Asad Durranis book provides some of the clues to the sources of this apparently mysterious resilience.

Among these has been the unity and discipline of the Army. General Durranis book is not propaganda for another military takeover of government. On the contrary, as well as highlighting the terrible mistakes of particular military rulers, it is a soldiers warning of how military rule both fails to solve problems and corrupts the soldiers. As Durrani writes: