Driving in Pakistan

Driving is lawlessness. It is every car, motorbike, bicycle, and motorized rickshaw for himself. Everywhere we have been so far, the roads have been chaotic - like NYC but on steroids and in the suburbs. There seem to be more motorbikes on the streets than cars, most of them carrying multiple passengers - up to 3 or 4 grown men and whole families of up to 5 people. The women tend to ride side-saddle,and I haven't seen any women driving the bikes. Few women drive cars. People don't stay in lanes, as if the lines on the road mean nothing. Drivers don't yield at intersections - they keep on driving and expect others to stop. Pedestrians are the same - they just start walking across the street. There are no speed limits - just the expectation that the volume of traffic will slow people down.

Even when traffic laws exist they are rarely enforced, or enforced fairly. There is also a general attitude that people can get out of traffic citations, or even more serious law violations, by simply paying a bribe. Discrimination seems common as well. A woman was complaining at a gathering we attended about how she was stopped once for making a U-turn at one of the many roundabouts. She complained that it was unjust because everyone does it and no one is ever stopped. The woman she was talking with concluded it was because she is a woman and said that she herself gets stopped at checkpoints all the time because the military police instinctively wave her down when they see she is a young woman.

Checkpoints are common on main roads as points where cars funnel through barriers set up by the military police, who look inside vehicles as they go by and wave them to be searched if they look suspicious. Usman says they were set up within the past couple years to deter terrorism, but he thinks they are pointless. I still don't feel comfortable passing by all the soldiers standing around the street and in bunkers with large rifles and semi-automatic weapons.

Far more uncomfortable is the feeling I get when we stop at a traffic light. Beggars go from car to car rapping on windows. Boys try to wipe the windows in hope of receiving payment. Women hold up their babies. Sure, this may happen sometimes in American cities - but not on the scale that it does in Pakistan. I came here knowing that I would witness extreme poverty, but I still feel helpless seeing it and knowing that there is nothing I can really do. It was also challenging on the way to Wagah Border on Sunday when we saw hundreds and hundreds of men of all ages cooling down in the filthy canal we had said looked like a polluted version of Willy Wonka's chocolate river the day before, not to mention the debris floating on the surface.

It seems to me that just by driving around, we have witnessed the surface of two major factors that could help Pakistan improve its stability: respect for law and order, and economic development. Many Americans may see the U.S. as promoting both in Pakistan. We are, after all, attempting to work with Pakistan to bring stability to lawless regions by bringing terrorists to justice. The U.S. government has invested billions of dollars in economic development, and many American companies have produced foreign direct investment. However, some of the people we have talked to see the U.S. as undermining respect for law and order because the U.S. has supported dictatorships that have ruled Pakistan for 30 of its 60 years of existence. They see Guantanamo Bay and drone attacks as violations of justice caused by the United States that it would not tolerate against American people but nonetheless continues to use against Pakistanis. The U.S. can be seen as undermining economic development as well because of the instability it seems to have created due to the intervention in Afghanistan. Aid for education and health care, like that given by the U.S. in the Kerry-Luger bill, may be helpful in the long run, but few people may realize the benefits because so many are preoccupied with immediate needs and other problems. A lawyer, Rafa, told us his opinion of why anti-American sentiment is so high in Pakistan is that when so few things in this country seem to work, people look for someone to blame and often blame the U.S. The problem is that whether or not the U.S. is actually deserving of blame, its policies tend to make it a very easy target. More about this later...