Michael Schaffer, stuck in Islamabad. - Michael Schaffer

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Entry 5

Posted Friday, Nov. 16, 2001, at 11:41 AM ET

Who is this person?

What a week! Kabul has fallen, Kandahar is embattled, Taliban cadres are reported to be fleeing across the frontier. Pakistan's government sees the Afghan turn of events as an insult, with their archenemies in power and their vaunted intelligence service cut off—for now, at least—from a chance to shape politics across the border. But here in Islamabad, there's a more pressing concern: lunch. Get it while you can!

Today is the last day before Ramadan starts, and hence the last day a gawking foreigner like me can drive around during daylight hours sniffing in the myriad of smells from the food hawked even on the sterile streets of the capital: roasted corn, peanuts, sugar cane, naan bread, raisins of all shapes and sizes. One of the sweetest things about South Asia is how much of life is lived outdoors on the streets. Someone curious about Catholicism would have a hard time driving around Rome looking for the sight of someone praying. Not here. From the passenger seat of the tiny Suzuki that has jostled me from appointment to appointment, I've seen prayers and protests and meals and arguments and even—thanks to the charpoy beds that people haul out onto the sidewalk to recline on—people taking naps. In a place where so much structural distance is built into the foreigner/local relationship, the spectacle of the street is a particular relief.

These days, though, I don't need my Suzuki to tell me that things are weird. A politician friend who supported the government's alignment with the United States told me yesterday how rattled he was by the images of post-Taliban Kabul. "On TV, they're saying 'Down with Pakistan,' " he fumed. Too bad I don't know the Urdu for "Get used to it, pal." American flags get burned from one end of the Earth to the other, the blow-back from various ignoble and not-so-ignoble efforts to throw our weight around. Now Pakistan faces blow-back for its own neighborhood misadventures, and the sight of it cuts to the quick.

Pakistan's national insecurity complex is a leading topic of reporterly kvetching around the hotel restaurant table, which makes me reluctant to write about it. The only topic that seems more common, in fact, is a discussion of the various diarrheal diseases that have or could afflict the unwise eater: It's truly amazing to experience the ease with which ordinarily reserved First World types talk with one another about their bowels while living in the Third World. But since my iron, um, constitution has proved itself once again these past weeks at the assorted restaurants and dinner tables of Islamabad and Peshawar, I'm left to mull over the strange case of Pakistan's political psyche.

I think I've lost track of how many conversations I've had here that begin with braggadocio about Pakistan's proud, rugged independence and end with an assertion that all the country's troubles are the fault of … the Americans. Or the Indians. Or the Jews. Especially the Jews. (Quick! Call the head office in Jerusalem and tell them they're onto us about that whole top-secret-plan-to-subvert-Pakistan-at-all-costs thing.) It's a strange sort of dual consciousness, at once victor and victim. Of course, it's not something unknown to Americans, either: My first job in journalism was in Marion Barry's Washington. But it is sad nonetheless, a way of dealing with a situation when ethnic pride and knowledge of failure have to coexist.

I also keep having this conversation where my interlocutor comes back again and again to a concern about what "you Americans" think of various aspects of Pakistani life. "You Americans think we are all terrorists!" "You Americans think we're going to nuke someone tomorrow!" "You Americans worry about the Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, but not the Hindu fundamentalists in India!" I've come up with a stock answer that usually stops things long enough for me to steer the conversation toward something more interesting: "Why do you care?"

I mean, really, why care about what some ignorant American journalist with a 6-week-old Pakistani beard—let alone some schlep watching CNN in Kansas City—thinks about this country's religion, or culture, or affinity for terrorism. The answer, I think, is that a lot of people here haven't made up their minds about those questions, either. In 50 years of independence, Pakistan has come up with no new heroes. OK, there's a stadium that's been renamed after an officer who died in the disastrous mini-war with India a few years back, but if you look at the rupee bills, you see only one face: Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founder. And I can't think of anyone else who might make it. The only other icon that seems to resonate, ultimately, is the giant rock that finds itself in traffic circles around the country: a scale model of the mountain under which Pakistan carried out its test nuclear explosion.

Sure enough, after he explained to me what it was when we drove by one of the rocks my first week here, my cabbie Riaz said to me: What do you think of that?

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