All the Things You Didn’t Know About Pakistan

Here’s a quick primer on the world’s most misunderstood and demonized country — and one to which the United States is inextricably tied.

Since 2005, the people of Pakistan, no strangers to upheaval, have been suffering near-constant food and water shortages, rampant power-outages and bodily harm as formerly peaceful cities are besieged by extremist violence. All the while, American leadership continues to direct criticism and threats at the troubled nation, allocating most of its monetary aid for Pakistan to its army, and openly endorsing India as blameless in the endless brinkmanship between the two equally culpable South Asian nations.

A decade ago, few Americans could say with certainty where Pakistan was geographically, let alone where it fit within geopolitics and global commerce. Despite the country’s well-worn place in the headlines recently, Americans still seem unclear as to how Pakistan came to be among the world’s most prolific exporters of nihilistic political Islam, let alone able to think of it as anything but a terrorist training camp. For Bush et al., this was a good thing.

Following 9/11, neoconservatives in the Bush White House worked overtime to at once demonize and obscure the enemy, which, many felt, was Islam itself. Popular perception began to conflate Afghans and Pakistanis as a monolith of geographies and populations. Seven years and two disastrous wars later, candidate Barack Obama made Pakistan a pillar of his platform, vowing to take that nation in hand if it could not heal itself and stamp out terrorism within its borders.

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