I felt compelled to write this book because of the increasingly disturbing discourse on Pakistan in the West, both within the media and within academia. There is a mixture of incomprehension and hawkishness in this discourse which is extremely dangerous given the increasing extension of the US/NATO war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. I believe that the ease with which even anti-war liberals (and sometimes Leftists) support, explicitly or implicitly, the covert war in Pakistan has to do with the fact that Pakistan has been constructed within media and academic circles in the West as a place overrun by extremists, as a place without culture (unless we are talking about raves or fashion shows being organized by the youth belonging to the elite classes) and, crucially, as a place without a history of popular struggle.
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The Cold War played an incredibly significant role in determining the trajectory of domestic politics in Pakistan—this is not news to anyone familiar with Pakistani history. However, to the extent that people in the West do make this Cold War connection, they tend to do it with regard to the Afghan War of the 1980s. I wanted to remind people that the relationship between the Pakistani ruling establishment and the US, which was born of and sustained by the Cold War, went back to the very beginning of Pakistan’s history as a newly-independent postcolonial nation-state and influenced its political trajectory in crucial ways. I felt that it was important to highlight the link between this relationship and cultural politics within Pakistan for several reasons. First, because I felt that it was important to talk about culture in the Pakistani context, since part of what makes the discourse on Pakistan in the West so problematic is that it is seen as a place without culture, and hence, a barbaric place. Secondly, culture and politics are intimately connected, and nowhere has this been more obvious than during the Cold War.
…I wanted to show how important the Cultural Cold War was in postcolonial countries—especially postcolonial Muslim countries—such as Pakistan. The US saw newly-independent Muslim countries as crucial battlegrounds in the Cold War, because it believed political Islam—especially its conservative and reactionary forms—could be deployed as a Cold War asset, a potent weapon to neutralize the popularity of international communism in the poor nations of the world.
The Pakistani ruling establishment was itself invested in neutralizing the demands for social and economic justice made by ordinary Pakistanis. The relationship between the Pakistani establishment and the US—based on these shared vested interests—manifested itself explicitly within the cultural realm in Pakistan in the form of increasing state repression of Leftist writers, poets, and artists, and the elevation of right-wing, pro-establishment ones. (Saadia Toor)
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