The Nine Lives of Pakistan

people by 2050 in its World Population Prospects 2019 report.
Asia Bibi’s quote about keeping her faith is from an interview with Mishal Husain broadcast on the BBC in February 2020. Husain Haqqani sketched his ideas for Pakistan’s future in his book Magnificent Delusions.
Details of the attack on Jinnah’s residence in Ziarat, Balochistan, on 15 June 2013, are from Pakistani press reports and a video posted online by the Balochistan Liberation Army, which claimed the assault. The government renovated the house and reopened it a year later on 14 August, Pakistan’s Independence Day.

Estimates of the number of Pakistanis killed and injured in violence since 2007 are from the annual reports of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which draws on newspaper articles, official publications and field sources. The United Nations predicted that Pakistan will have 408 million peo

dia’s rightward lurch and the state of its relations with Pakistan. Articles that influenced me included a reflection on partition by William Dalrymple in the New Yorker on 29 June 2015, and an article on India’s seventieth anniversary by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Times on 11 August 2017. The sketch of the Trumpian property developer Mangal Prabhat Lodha, including his use of the slogan MAKE MUMBAI GREAT AGAIN, is drawn from a profile

Sheela Reddy’s book Mr and Mrs Jinnah was invaluable on the history of South Court; an article she wrote for livemint.com in August 2017 brought the story up to date. Jinnah’s wish to retire at South Court was recorded in the memoirs of Sri Prikasa, India’s first High Commissioner to Pakistan. India Today estimated South Court’s value at $400 million in April 2017. Jinnah’s remark about Hindus and cows is taken from Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s book, Freedom at Midnight.

Shaikh’s acquittal, retrial and subsequent conviction are from Pakistani press reports.
The reference to CIA officers employing ‘Moscow Rules’ in Pakistan is from Mark Mazzetti’s book, The Way of the Knife. Details of the military’s accusations against Manzoor Pashteen of the Pashtun Protection Movement (formally known as the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement) are from

I Director General Ahmed Shuja Pasha following the Mumbai attacks in 2008. Khaled Ahmed noted Mir’s use of the phrase ‘liberal-fascist’ in an article published in the Express Tribune on 5 February 2011

2 April 2006, as did Isambard Wilkinson in an article for the Daily Telegraph of 21 March 2006, and subsequently in his book Travels in a Dervish Cloak.
President George W. Bush’s observation that Karzai and Musharraf nearly came t

of that year, is from a report by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, published on 8 March 2006.
Mohammed Hanif’s short book on human rights violations, The Baloch Who Is Not Missing & Others Who Are was also useful, as was testimony provided by Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch to a hearing of the United States Hou

ed the idea of Quetta’s multiple identities from a paper by Haris Gazdar, Sobia Ahmad Kaker and Irfan Khan of the Collective for Social Science Research, published in February 2010. The city (known as ‘Q’) provides the surreal setting for the opening part of Salman Rushdie’s 1983 novel Shame, in my opinion his finest work.
The Pakistani news magazines Herald

There is a lamentable dearth of good general texts on Balochistan – a reflection, perhaps, of the province’s marginalisation in the story of Pakistan. But the province has provided ample material for human rights researchers, journalists and specialist writers on the Pakistani military’s complex entanglements with jihadist militancy.
For Nawab Bugti’s early life, I relied on an old copy of The Tigers of Baluchistan by Sylvia A. Matheson. I took details of the early trouble at Sui from an article in Newsline magazine by Massoud Ansari in September 2006. The poem about Brahm quoted by the Nawab is from The Light of Asia by