The 9/11 Wars by Jason Burke

Author:Jason Burke [Burke, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Freedom & Security, 21st Century, General, United States, Political Science, Terrorism, History
ISBN: 9781846142819
Google: uTObO-cBte0C
Amazon: B005HDK4SS
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Nowhere was this more clear than in Multan, once simply a sleepy provincial town famous for its shrines but in November 2007 a city with a population swollen to nearly 1.5 million by migration from the poor rural zones around and still growing by an estimated 50,000 every year. On the outskirts, past the army garrison and the new hotels, shops and offices that were springing up along the potholed streets, past the occasional sports car and the crumbling public buildings, was the Bahauddin Zakariya University, founded in 1975 and one of scores of similar private institutions offering graduate-level further education to the children of Pakistan’s new middle classes. It was here that the result of the various elements discussed above – the new wealth, the new urbanization, the impact of the new media, the new lack of deference, the consequences of decades of Islamist activism, the failure of successive alternative ideologies, the indirect impact of the 9/11 Wars – came together in a very obvious way.

On a late autumn morning, a few months after Bhutto had returned to Pakistan, some of the 14,000 students of the university were sitting on the grass in between the college’s brick and concrete buildings, their books and files spread around them. A small queue had formed at the tiny kiosk selling small cups of sweet tea. A knot of young men inspected the motorbike one of them had recently bought. These young people were ordinary young Pakistanis, studying in a middle-ranking college, in a middling-sized town, in the geographic centre of the country. They were neither activists for secular parties nor Islamists. They were neither as Westernized as the elite youth of Lahore or Karachi, with their American college or exclusive English-medium local education, their cars and parties, nor as aggressively conservative as the Jamaat Islami members. Instead they were representative of a Pakistan that was rarely reported in the international media and had little place in conventional analysis of the country as a battleground between Westernized, democratic ‘moderates’ and fanatical ‘fundamentalists’. They comprised the middle ground, what could be termed ‘Middle Pakistan’, a diverse yet definite body of people with a diverse yet definite worldview and value system who had been as active in building a coherent and authentic identity as any other group in the country. If not immediately, in a few years’ time, they would be ‘the Pakistani street’, the people whose views and values would determine the country’s course.

Visually, the scene at the Bahauddin Zakariya University revealed many of the essential elements of this new evolving identity. So, for example, the students sitting on the grass all maintained a strict and voluntary gender segregation. The girls were uniformly veiled – several wore a full Gulf-style niqab – and many of their male counterparts were bearded. Both veils and beards had been very rare a decade or so before, one teacher, a former student at the university himself, remembered.62 The students’ conservatism extended to more than where they sat or what they wore.

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