It is almost obligatory these days to subtitle books on Pakistan with some conjunction of ‘failed’, ‘dangerous’, ‘lawless’, ‘deadly’, ‘frightening’ or ‘tumultuous’. Pakistan is a ‘tinderbox’, forever on the brink, in the eye of the storm, or descending into chaos. It is an ‘Insh’allah nation’ where people passively wait for Allah.

In the narrow space ‘between the mosque and the military’, there is much ‘crisis’, ‘terrorism’, ‘militancy’ and ‘global jihad.’

British author and policy analyst Anatol Lieven’s refreshingly understated title “Pakistan: A Hard Country” eschews emotion for description, which is fitting because the book is a 519-page myth- busting exercise.

Lieven, currently a fellow at the New America Foundation, argues that some of the alarmist claims about Pakistan are indeed true – it is a corrupt, chaotic, violent, oppressive and unjust country. But it is also a remarkably resilient one. It is not nearly as unequal as India or Nigeria, or for that matter the United States.

Its security is beset by multiple insurgencies but they affect a smaller proportion of its territory than the ones India face. Its cities are violent, but no more so than those of comparable size in Latin or even North America.

It has an abysmally low rate of tax collection, but, at five percent of the GDP, it also has one of the world’s highest rates of charitable donations. It is no doubt corrupt, but this is due less to the absence of values than to the enduring grip of the old ones of loyalty to family and clan.

Beneath the chaotic surface, the country is held together by the underlying structures of kinship and patronage which account for its relative stability. Leaders of kinship networks derive their legitimacy from property ownership and the capacity to provide protection and patronage to followers.

This creates a degree of accountability and wealth redistribution since in order to retain the followers’ loyalty, leaders have to secure and distribute patronage – and in a country endowed with modest resources and decrepit industry, much of it is stolen from the state.

However, the same forces that ensure Pakistan’s stability also impede its progress. The primacy of clan loyalty over civic responsibility has served as a barrier to the development of modern democratic institutions.

Both civilian and authoritarian military governments have been frustrated in their attempts at reform. Little changes whether the country is ruled by a dictator or a democrat, because both have to sit atop and draw support from the same pyramid of kinship networks. The military, which functions relatively more efficiently than other institutions, has insulated itself against these forces by turning itself into the biggest kinship group of them all, securing itself the largest share of the state’s revenues.

The economy (to which Lieven unfortunately gives very little space) becomes yet another victim of this system. Indeed, “the most economically dynamic sections of the Pakistani population are those which have to a greater or lesser extent been shaken loose from their traditional cultural patterns and kinship allegiances by mass migration,” he writes. These include the Muhajirs of Karachi and the migrants from East Punjab.

Pakistan, writes Lieven, is a “highly conservative, archaic, even sometimes quite inert and somnolent mass of different societies, with two modernizing impulses fighting to wake it up” – the Westernised liberals and the Islamists. Both have been stymied by the nature of Pakistani society as much as by the liberals’ identification with the deeply-loathed United States and the Islamists inability to overcome the political quietism of the conservative, highly superstitious Islam practised by most Pakistanis.

In their confrontation with each other, both “see the battle between them as apocalyptic, ending with the triumph of good or evil”, yet their chances of success are equally grim.

Lieven carefully unravels the various strands of Islamism and gives a measured assessment of their relative influence in Pakistan. What is notable, he writes, is less the strength of Pakistan’s Islamists than their weakness. The same kinship networks, loyalty to hereditary saints, and the potpourri of sects and sub-sects are barriers which also prevent the spread of Islamism. With the partial exception of the Jamaat-e-Islami, he notes, Islamists have themselves been swallowed up by the patronage system.

Lieven is concerned with the treatment of women in Pakistan, and some of the incidents he describes are horrific indeed. But unlike other Western commentators, he is careful to note that contrary to popular myth, the worst abuses against women are sanctioned by the traditional customary law rather than the Sharia.

The case of Mukhtar Mai’s gang rape and the lesser known (at least in the West) story of the Baloch girls who were shot and buried alive for choosing to marry out of clan are instructive in this regard. Both were sanctioned by tribal customary law.

However, Lieven notes that the murder of the Baloch girls somehow elicited far less outrage from Pakistan’s liberal elite than an incident that happened around the same time involving the public flogging of a girl in Swat. The outrage around that incident proved one of the catalysts for the subsequent military operation there.

But Lieven fails to pursue the implications of this comment further. Of course the reason why the Swat incident attracted more attention is that it had entered the ‘war on terror’ narrative where a whole industry has flourished, thriving on exaggeration and fear.

Lieven rejects the alarmist claims which portray Pakistan as on the verge of Islamist takeover but warns that things would be less certain if the U.S. were to intervene directly on Pakistani soil, potentially triggering a military revolt. The insurgency at present only affects a very small stretch of Pakistani territory and, as demonstrated by the offensive in Swat, it can be crushed when the state makes a determined effort.

Lieven considers the Swat campaign a success but acknowledges that the terrorist threat in the rest of the country has increased. But these are not simply parallel developments; there is a causal relationship between them.

There was never any doubt that the Pakistani army had the capacity to crush the Taliban but the real question was always the costs and consequences of such an operation. Predictably, the use of blunt force has turned a geographically delimited insurgency into an amorphous terrorist threat against which the state can do very little.

Lieven is categorically opposed to military intervention in Pakistan and marshals some eminently reasonable policy recommendations in his brief conclusions.

For Lieven, Pakistan is resilient enough to survive the terrorist threat, but the danger which could really precipitate its collapse is climate change. A country which receives at an average only 240mm of annual rainfall and is overly dependant on the Indus will be seriously at risk as its already large population grows further and water tables drop unless it makes efforts to better preserve its water resources and prevent waste.

Unlike most Western writers who go looking for interlocutors in their own image – secular, liberal, Westernised – Lieven’s research includes a remarkable range of voices, including soldiers, Islamists, policemen, peasants, a president, and taxi drivers. He is sympathetic, but rarely credulous. He is particularly sceptical of the Pakistani elite – “even, or especially, when their statements seem to correspond to Western liberal ideology, and please Western journalists and officials”.

Lieven brings an anthropologist’s rigour, a journalist’s intuition and a travel writer’s descriptive power to a book which is perceptive, nuanced, and eminently readable. The book is illustrated with telling, sometimes amusing, anecdotes. But its greatest strength is that it shakes Westerners and Pakistanis alike from the complacent assumptions that underlie their respective political discourses.

*Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a Glasgow-based sociologist. He edits Pulsemedia.org and can be reached at idrees@pulsemedia.org. You can also follow him on Twitter: @im_pulse.

In 2005, ahead of the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Irish rock star and philanthropist Bono dedicated a concert to Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs for his services to global poverty alleviation.

Time magazine twice named Sachs one of its 100 Most Influential People. His 2005 book “The End of Poverty” was a New York Times bestseller. He has served as a special advisor to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals. In 2007 Vanity Fair was moved to declare him the “savior of Bolivia”.

From the fawning sobriquets it would be hard to tell that Sachs was the architect of the “economic shock therapy” which in Russia during the transition years (1991-1994) contributed to a 42 percent rise in male deaths, and 56 percent in unemployment. His Bolivian “reforms” brought inflation under control but unemployment, inequality and the cost of living soared.

Following a decade of unrest, Russia was only saved by an authoritarian nationalist leadership and Bolivia by economic populism. The neoliberal experiment was a failure.

If Sachs has today recanted his extreme free-market views, it is only because of a personal epiphany. At the peak of his power, he was constrained by neither public censure nor official accountability.

He is an exemplar of a new breed of influencers who operate in the interstices of official and private power and exploit the ambiguity of their multiple overlapping roles to evade both public oversight and market competition. It is this emerging power that is the subject of social-anthropologist Janine Wedel’s indispensable “Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market”.

Central to this new elite is the figure of the “flexian” who “serves at one and the same time as business consultant, think-tanker, TV pundit, and government adviser [who] glides in and around the organisations that enlist his services”. The flexian values personal relations over bureaucratic chains-of-command, puts official information to private use, and uses private information to steer official policy.

He owes no allegiance to the institution: his loyalties lie with the informal network – the “flex net” – whose close social bonds, ideological coherence, protean facility, and infiltration of official and corporate spheres serve as fulcrum for his inordinate influence.

For Wedel, the rise of this form of power has been facilitated by four key developments: the redesign of government along business lines around the 1970s with the attendant consolidation of executive power and outsourcing of many of its functions; the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of under-governed areas; the rise of advanced communication technologies, complex information systems (particularly in finance) and the ascent of “experts”; and, finally, a transformed public sphere in which politics blends with entertainment, performance valued over truth, and self-serving claims over objectivity.

The chimera of “big government” has long animated a bipartisan drive to control the number of civil servants in government with inherently governmental functions outsourced to private contractors. This has led to the rise of a massive “shadow government”.

The proportion of contractors in the U.S. federal labour force, for example, increased from three-fifths in 1990 to three-fourths in 2008. The cost of contractor services soared from 125 billion dollars in 2001 to 320 billion dollars in 2008. Between 1996 and 2006, the services budget of the Pentagon (which accounts for 75 percent of all federal procurements) increased by 78 percent. Contracts currently account for 70 percent of the intelligence budget, a quarter of whose core forces are private.

While efficiency was the rationale in redesigning government along business lines, the blurring public-private divide has pushed government functions outside the purview of public accountability while relieving private actors from the demands of market competition.

The consequences for democracy are deleterious, according to Wedel. It creates an ideal habitat for “institutional nomads” such as the flexians to advance private agendas by instrumentalising official power. Wedel highlights this in two fascinating case studies.

In the early 1990s, through Sachs’s mediation, the Harvard Institute for International Development received a USAID grant to help manage the Russian transition from a centralised command economy to a market economy.

Andrei Shleifer of the Harvard Project was able to use his personal relationship with then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to secure Washington’s official backing, and links with Russian presidential advisers Yigor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais allowed the network to monopolise the transition. The result: both sides were able to serve as gatekeepers for each other and use their transnational links to sideline domestic competitors.

The close links and ambiguous roles allowed members of the Harvard-Chubais network to evade both U.S. oversight and Russian government cheques. This unaccountable group was able to borrow and disburse billions of dollars from international financial agencies without the approval of the Russian taxpayer. The consequences for the Russian people and state were devastating.

The free-for-all environment predictably descended into criminality, eventually leading to charges of fraud, racketeering, and money laundering. Though the U.S. Justice Department was able in the end to make Harvard, Shleifer and Jonathan Hay of the network pay fines, they escaped with their reputations intact. Shleifer now serves as an anti-corruption consultant, and Lawrence Summers is today President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser.

The true archetypes of the flex net, however, are the neoconservatives, a small band of ideological kindred brought together by common goals, shared interpersonal histories, and an Israel-centric worldview, Wedel argues. Their superior coordination and ideological coherence allowed them to conceive and instigate the 2003 Iraq invasion despite strong reservations of the military and intelligence bureaucracies.

Their capacity to undermine, circumvent, or intimidate the professional intelligence community, which stretches back to their efforts to disrupt détente between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, has enabled them to insert dubious or even fabricated information into the policy-making process, often under the imprimatur of ad hoc, quasi-governmental bodies. The ambiguity of their roles has in turn allowed them to evade scrutiny while preserving their reputations.

Though their star has dimmed somewhat, their militarist imprint on foreign policy shows little sign of fading.

While Wedel’s framework for studying this potent new power is immensely useful, her nomenclature isn’t always so. What she calls a “coincidence of interest” is indistinguishable from a conflict of interest; and “Evolving door” from a “revolving door”. “Truthiness” is a stand-in for “propaganda”, except it has none of the negative resonance.

(Ironically, it was awareness of the negative connotations of the term that had prompted its most celebrated practitioner Edward Bernays to rebrand it as “public relations” after WWII.) Her argument is also undermined by treating “corruption” as a legal rather than a moral category.

Nonetheless, Wedel makes a compelling case, supported by a wealth of evidence. Her call for a new paradigm of cheques and balances resilient enough to match the flexibility of political actors is timely and important. Citizens with an interest in political reform and accountability would do well to weave her arguments into their demands.

*Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a Glasgow-based sociologist and the co-founder of Pulsemedia.org.

To the west of Peshawar on the Jamrud Road that leads to the historic Khyber Pass sits the Karkhano Market, a series of shopping plazas whose usual offering of contraband is now supplemented by standard issue U.S. military equipment, including combat fatigues, night vision goggles, body armour and army knives.

Beyond the market is a checkpoint, which separates the city from the semi-autonomous tribal region of Khyber. In the past, if one lingered near the barrier long enough, one was usually approached by someone from the far side selling hashish, alcohol, guns, or even rocket-propelled grenade launchers. These days such salesman could also be selling U.S. semi-automatics, sniper rifles and hand guns. Those who buy do it less for their quality—the AK-47 still remains the weapon of choice here—than as mementos of a dying Empire.

The realisation may be dawning slowly on some U.S. allies, but here everyone is convinced that Western forces have lost the war. However, at a time when in Afghanistan the efficacy of force as a counterinsurgency tool is being increasingly questioned, there is a newfound affinity for it in Pakistan.

A survey conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in July 2009, which excluded the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and parts of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP)—the regions directly affected by war—found 69 percent of respondents supporting the military operation in Swat.

A different survey undertaken by the U.S. polling firm Gallup around the same time, which covered all of Pakistan, found only 41 percent supporting the operation. The Gallup poll also found a higher number—43 percent—favouring political resolution through dialogue.

The two polls also offer a useful perspective on how Pakistanis perceive the terrorist threat. If the country is unanimous on the need to confront militancy, it is equally undivided in its aversion for the U.S. Yet, both threats are not seen as equal: the Gallup survey found 59 percent of Pakistanis considering the U.S. as the bigger threat when compared to 11 percent for the Taliban; and, according to the IRI poll, fewer saw the Taliban (13 percent) as the biggest challenge compared to the spiralling inflation which is wrecking the economy (40 percent).

In 2001, when the United States launched its ‘war on terror’, many among Pakistan’s political elite and intelligentsia supported it, miscalculating the public mood, which was overwhelmingly hostile. This led to the protest vote which brought to power the religious alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in two of the frontier provinces. The MMA had been alone in openly opposing U.S. intervention.

However, as Afghanistan fell, things went quiet and passions subsided. Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator, was able to present his decision to participate in the “war on terror” as a difficult but unavoidable choice. Internationally, his isolation ended, and as a reward the various sanctions imposed on Pakistan after the nuclear tests of 1998 were lifted.

The economy grew, so did Musharraf’s popularity. When under intense U.S. pressure in 2004 he sent the Pakistani military into the restive FATA region, people barely noticed. He managed to retain his support despite reports of atrocities, which, according to Human Rights Watch, included indiscriminate use of force, home demolitions, extrajudicial killings, torture and disappearances. Indeed, if he was blamed at all, it was for not going far enough.

Things changed when on Musharraf’s orders, soldiers stormed a mosque in Islamabad held by Taliban sympathizers in August 2007, which resulted in the deaths of many seminarians. The Taliban retaliated by taking the war to the mainland and terrorist attacks hit several major cities.

Musharraf was blamed, and with an emerging challenge from the civil society in the form of a lawyers’ movement and an insurgent media, his popularity went into terminal decline. Meanwhile, in the Malakand region, Swat and Dir emerged as new flashpoints. The threat from Taliban militants could no longer be ignored, but opinions differed as to how best to confront it. The majority supported a negotiated settlement.

The turning point came in May, when, after a peace deal between the government and militants had broken down, the military embarked on a major offensive in Malakand. Though the truce had temporarily brought calm to the region, both sides had failed to live up to their commitments.

Yet, in the aftermath the Taliban alone were blamed, and in the media a consensus developed against any further negotiations with the militants. The operation was hailed as a success despite the loss of countless lives and the displacement of up to three million people.

However, in the frontier itself, analysts remained less sanguine. Rahimullah Yusufzai, deemed the most knowledgeable commentator on frontier politics, considered it an “avoidable” war. Another leading analyst, Rustam Shah Mohmand, wondered if it was not a war against the Pakhtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the NWFP, since no similar actions were considered in other lawless regions.

Roedad Khan, a former federal secretary, described it as an “unnecessary war” which was “easy to prevent … difficult to justify and harder to win”. In the political mainstream all major parties felt obliged to support the war for fear of being labelled unpatriotic. The opposition came mainly from religious parties, and from cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice).

Opinions were reinforced in favour of a military solution when militants launched a wave of terrorist attacks in anticipation of the Pakistani army’s new operation in FATA.

While the effects of the terrorist atrocities were there for all to see, the consequences of months of aerial bombing and artillery shelling that preceded the operation were less known.

A third of the total population of South Waziristan—site of the government’s newly launched anti-Taliban offensive—has been displaced, and it has received little relief. When an Associated Press crew met the refugees, they expressed their anger at the government by chanting “Long live the Taliban”.

Instead of winning hearts and minds, the Pakistani government is delivering them to the enemy.

Despite the best efforts of sections of the elite to take ownership of the war, the view persists that Pakistan is fighting an American war. That the military operation in South Waziristan follows an inducement of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars from the U.S. government, and is supported by U.S. drone surveillance, does little to disabuse sceptics of their notions.

Following the bombing of the International Islamic University in Islamabad last week, an Al Jazeera correspondent—a Scot—was accosted by an angry student who, mistaking him for an American, held him responsible for the attack.

Pakistanis are acutely aware that before 2002 there was no terrorist threat, and they remain equally convinced that the threat will vanish once U.S. forces withdraw from the region. But before that happens, some fear, Pakistan will have compromised its long-term stability.

*Muhammad Idrees Ahmad (m.idrees@gmail.com) is the co-founder of Pulsemedia.org.