The Nine Lives of Pakistan: (Dispatches from a Precarious State).

• Author: Dorschner, Jon P.

Title: The Nine Lives of Pakistan: (Dispatches from a Precarious State)

Author: Jon P. Dorschner

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: (Dispatches from a Precarious State)

By Declan Walsh

W.W. Norton & Company, 2020

357 pages

Review by Jon P. Dorschner

Declan Walsh, a professional journalist, set up shop in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, in 2004, as the country correspondent for The Guardian. In 2012 he moved to the New York Times, and was expelled from Pakistan by the government in 2013. In his introduction Walsh describes the expulsion in detail. During the process, the intelligence officers from Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) never provided a reason for this drastic move. Afterwards, his repeated entreaties to the Pakistan government left the question unanswered. In the book's final pages, he meets up with an unnamed ISI officer in an unnamed European city. This man with a conscience, who could no longer carry out the dictates of his agency and has resigned, provides Walsh with some closure, but, like so much regarding Pakistan, the real story remains unclear.

Although Walsh and I did not serve in Pakistan in the same time period, his Pakistan experiences overlapped with my own in many ways. I was assigned to the US Embassy in Islamabad from 1985-1987 and 1995-1997. Like him, I travelled the length and breadth of the country interacting intensely with the Pakistani people, and "teasing out its nuances and arguing with those who chose to view its problems in stark black-and-white." For me, the book kindled old and intense memories, and provided an update on what has transpired since my departure. Walsh's descriptions were so vivid and accurate, that I was transported instantly to many of my old haunts.

Walsh used a creative format to weave his own story with that of Pakistan. He repeats the oft-heard truism that Pakistan is a country living on borrowed time, "a country of sighs and regrets, the only one I had been in where some of its own citizens quietly regretted it had ever come into being." Just as a cat is perceived to have "nine lives," escaping from one situation after another, Pakistan continues to plug along, avoiding its oft-predicted demise. As a result the Pakistani mindset is characterized by a prevailing fatalism, encapsulated by the phrase Insha' Allah (if Allah wills it), which Pakistanis routinely apply to any and all situations. Both Walsh and I heard this phrase everywhere we went.

Unlike others writing about Pakistan...