Excerpted from The Washington Post
In December 2007, a 15-year-old Taliban suicide bomber assassinated former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi as she drove away from a campaign rally. Her murder and the ensuing political chaos sent shock waves through Washington corridors. It was a clear indication that nuclear-armed Pakistan was in free fall despite the U.S. alliance with President Pervez Musharraf.
That fall I had begun my journalism career as a reporting fellow at NPR’s headquarters in D.C. On the day of Bhutto’s assassination, as Pakistani cities exploded into chaos, I was asked to help work the phone lines to the country of my birth. A few days later, I was on a plane to Islamabad to contribute to aftermath coverage for a short stint. I may have known the language and culture as a Pakistani American, but for invaluable research on the current situation, I carried clippings from Irish journalist Declan Walsh, then writing for the Guardian as its regional correspondent.
It is strange to revisit that time now given that Pakistan, once at the center of the “war on terror,” has largely receded from international headlines and certainly from my own journalism career. In his book “The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches From a Precarious State,” Walsh returns the focus to the troubled Islamic republic and delves into his reporter’s notebook to explore Pakistan in the years after 9/11. Walsh first covered the country for the Guardian and later for the New York Times, reporting on what he describes as its “multi-ringed circus of violence.” He was there for every major story, including the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound and the endless wars along the country’s frontiers. Now the Times’ chief Africa correspondent, Walsh contributed dispatches that pulsated with urgency and empathy. In a few words, he could distill layers of history and culture into vivid brushstrokes of narrative. But as his writing became essential reading for both international and Pakistani readers, it earned the wrath of the country’s security establishment, which revoked his credentials and expelled him in 2013. It is on the eve of that expulsion that “Nine Lives” begins, as Walsh reflects on a country he spent a decade trying to untangle.