To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years In Pakistan

By Nicholas Schmidle

perishforever“The cops came for me on a cold, rainy night.” Such nocturnal visitations rarely bode well, let alone for an American journalist in Pakistan reporting on the country’s rumbustious politics, a job tailor-made to pique someone’s ire, that someone ever-and-always being the wrong someone. But Nicholas Schmidle doesn’t know any better, for he is young, and much of the beauty of his reportage comes from the fresh, gimlet eye he brings to the flabbergasting array of forces contending for ascendancy. How are you going to get the Pakistan story unless you talk to radical Islamists—he seeks out jihadists in the same city, for goodness sake, as did Daniel Pearl—tribal insurgents, ethnic nationalists, old school caste-and-lineage politicos, the military, the rogue intelligence agencies, the man on the street? Just so, and Schmidle will pay for it with his safety; if he doesn’t beat that drum, the narrative can’t help buzz with tension. But the tension does not obscure Schmidle’s illuminations: each chapter reads like a daytrip, which may happen to last for months, in search of political awareness. One moment he is exploring the provincial-autonomy issues that plague Baluchistan, next he is up in the valley of Swat, where Taliban control is hardly the late-breaking news Americans are being fed. He doesn’t neglect an elemental sense of place and incident—the look of a village, a Sufi in a dancing trance, the play of a green kite against a periwinkle sky—yet he is more hungry for understanding why Pashtuns have a bad reputation, why Pakistan has more assassinations than a porcupine has quills, or what lays behind the rise of the insurrectionary madrassas (one boost is the state utterly failing to provide most everything). Always in evidence is Schmidle’s willingness to listen and then report, with polish but without varnish—thus the late-night knock on the door.

(from the Barnes & Noble Review)