The Most Dangerous Place

May 10, 2010
In this breathless play-by-play, Pakistani journalist Gul surveys the violent free-for-all along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The kaleidoscope of armed religious and ethnic factions he follows includes Taliban groups that attack each other almost as readily as they do their enemies; Pakistani army and police forces, who fight pitched battles with the Taliban and also cut deals with them; tribal militias that sometimes support the Taliban and sometimes the government; competing Arab and Uzbek strains of al-Qaeda; and miscellaneous smugglers and bandits. Hovering above it all are CIA drones periodically lobbing Hellfire missiles into the fray. The author traces the turmoil to the Soviet and American invasions of Afghanistan, the Pakistani government’s erstwhile support for Afghan jihadists, and Pakistan’s authoritarian rule, but the fundamental problem is the absence of a functioning state, aside from the Taliban chieftains who try to stamp out crime, girls’ schools, barber shops, and iodized salt. Gul’s disorganized but readable account doesn’t alter the conventional picture of the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, but he offers a useful scorecard for the struggle to bring order to the region—and shows how difficult and perhaps even unrealizable it is.