Pakistan: A Hard Country

Eppur si mouve (And yet it moves) Galileo Galilei

Requiem (Elegy/ Funeral song)
There hv been times during the writing of this book
Pressure on pak from without and within are unprecedented
By any standards
Fundamentally changed
It is worth remembering the extraordinary resilience shown in the face of natural disasters
What is certainly true is that
In the meantime
Retarded the countrys already faltering economic progress
For if there is
Is the central theme of this book
Janus-faced
At one and the same time
Often savagely oppressive towards poor and women
Home to extremely dangerous..
In many ways
It is also not quite as unequal as
Pak contains islands of successful modernity
Not that many, but enough
To help keep the country trundling along
A few, some fine, parts of which, a number of
None of these things is characteristic of truly failed states
Some of the toughest creepers hold the rotten tree
A grim threat
This is unlikely in the foreseeable future
Enjoy a degree of instinctive, gut sympathy
That would mean
On a massive scale
Is a sign not of strength but of weakness
Apart from anything else
As long as that remains the case
Unlike in Africa and elsewhere
The only thing that could bring that about is
However great the provocation
Must not contribute to the destruction of
See it in a quite different light
A statement which is a matter not of sentiment but of mathematics
To push them in the right direction
 Vital and Irreplaceable
A large diaspora in Britain
In the eyes of their own people
Have long understood
Deeply unsatisfying though this has been for
To reach a settlement
By what seems by contrast
A purely paranoid conviction
In the great majority of cases
Equally important is to note
Freak/ rarity/ oddity
Completely improbable and impractical
Virile/ manly/ macho qualities
In some respects
The only exceptions
By no means
Wheel with in a wheel
Not surprisingly then,
Turn to their advantage
Influence and money at a certain point in a certain place
Most important foci
Is partially responsible
Inextricably
In every other way
The sense of kinship is thus reflected most dramatically in but also in
Building blocks
Says not much more about
Replenished
Which is all to the good
Beneath the forth and spray of politics
So far have changed with glacial slowness
If this were so, Feudal lords would long since have been swept away..
Pressure from below and reform from above
A great many
But emerged quite recently
Not to the extent of
Extends down to the lesser gentry
It is the way in which
Ifonly, then.. might well have; but it is also
Provide the title for this book
Has had a much smaller impact
 What we have mainly seen so far is huge numbers of..
Remain deeply attached
And of course while the, it is also one of the key factors
Have real veering on the outcome
Trapped in a marriage that ought to be antagonistic, but has in fact become essential to
the nature of each party
Has been extremely bad
To a greater or lesser extent
Shaken loose from their traditional cultural patterns and kinship allegiances
This is most obviously true
And even more important are
Have so far maintained the stability
A much smaller, but in some ways even more striking, group
Forms a remarkable contrast to the stagnation that surrounds them