Beyond Bin Laden by Jon Meacham

Future(s)
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    Contrary to the dire predictions of some American analysts, Pakistan’s internal cleavages do not mean that the country faces the prospect of imminent collapse. But Pakistanis are in the midst of a violent national debate over their core principles. The outcome of that debate will determine whether Pakistan gradually falls into a deeper morass of internal instability, takes on a far more revolutionary and disruptive foreign agenda, or manages to find its way back into the mainstream of the international community.
    If present trends—demographic, economic, political, and security—hold, Pakistan is likely to lurch toward ever-greater instability. As the years go by, its military and police may lack the capacity to maintain order, not simply along the tribal borders with Afghanistan, but within Pakistan’s burgeoning cities. If today Pakistan is understood as confronting pockets of insurgency, then in the future the state may very well be reduced to holding only pockets of control. A moth-eaten Pakistan need not succumb to any one group, but its already weak governing institutions and military and political leaders would simply retreat behind the walls and gates of their own heavily fortified compounds, leaving their less fortunate countrymen to fend for themselves.
    In certain respects, this future has already arrived. Most Pakistanis survive not with any assistance from the state, but through family, tribal, and community networks. But absent a reversal of negative trends, this pattern would simply be exacerbated over time, with informal local leaders asserting control over more and more functions traditionally associated with the state. And perhaps the most fundamental change would come if the military, Pakistan’s predominant state institution, were forced to accept its inability to impose order over historically stable regions. This prospect is hardly inconceivable. Pakistan’s army has been stretched thin by its counterinsurgency efforts in the hinterlands of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. If significant unrest were to spread to Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab, the army could be pushed beyond its military and political limits and forced into retreat.
    Rather than a future of gradual decay, it is possible that Pakistan could face a revolutionary movement, one that transforms latent public discontent into a fundamental change in national leadership and direction. However, it is hard to envision such a radical outcome in the near term. Not only is the Pakistani army still too strong and disciplined, but no other individual or group has the sort of national stature needed to sweep across Pakistan’s many internal divisions and promote a new vision for the state and society. In this manner, Pakistan’s fractiousness and diversity may obstruct revolution.
    Yet the recent experience of the lawyers’ movement that led to the ouster of President Musharraf suggests that Pakistani civil society has a capacity to organize in ways that were previously underappreciated. That movement was steered by informal social and professional networks and new forms of communication that initially left traditional political parties in the passenger’s seat. Pakistanis also witnessed their military’s lack of will—or capacity—to crack down violently on protests from within the nation’s Punjabi heartland.
    If Pakistan does see a revolutionary future, it is possible that some aspects of the lawyers’ movement will reassemble, perhaps more violently and under a very different ideological banner. Because Pakistan has already experienced democratic movements as well as the frustrations of civilian rule, it is less prone to an exuberant Tahrir Square–style uprising. As one liberal Pakistani recently lamented to me, "We’ve had our equivalent democratic movement, and what has it achieved? Far too little. The next revolution can only be led by the