It might have seemed like a throwaway line at first. We have an old-school Pakistani in favor of civilian rule in a nation long plagued by military coups and foreign conflict with India, to say nothing about its contemporary problems with terrorism and an overmighty spy agency that thinks too highly of itself toss off a line, “We all live dangerous lives,” that shows up on an NPR piece and is incorporated into a book on Pakistan that includes an account of the subject’s life. In Pakistan, such a line may easily seem to be a cliche, because of course one lives a dangerous life in such a country as a matter of course. Ordinary people can find themselves caught in the crossfire between rebel groups, drug runners, terrorists, and a military-intelligence establishment and police force that all too often engage with others in the mindset of shooting first and asking questions later, if ever. No matter what avenue one tries to obtain in order to gain greater security and greater power for oneself, there are obvious risks and permanent enemies one makes along the way. If you seek to rise in politics, you will find yourself opposed by those you step on while climbing to the top of the ladder, face the loss of your position whenever there is a coup, or deal with yourself being the subject of death threats from reactionary mullahs. Alternatively, one can see one’s supposed goodwill in helping to create the Taliban vanish and find oneself put to death by those whom you helped teach and gave weapons to when you are no longer viewed as a friend but as a traitor.

To be sure, Pakistan is an extreme example of a nation whose very existence is a marvel given all of the forces conspiring to tear it apart. Constructed in the aftermath of World War II on the idea that a permanent Muslim minority within India would fare badly (itself an increasingly sensible understanding in the post-2014 world of rising Hindu nationalism in India), the nation was made without sufficient thought going into the idea of what sort of national identity the region would have. Originally, Pakistan was made up of two parts, East Pakistan, which consisted of the Muslim areas taken out of the state of Bengal, and West Pakistan, which consisted of the areas of Balochistan under British control (other parts of Balochistan remain in Iran and Afghanistan), Sindh, the divided areas of Punjab and Kashmir that were put under Muslim rule, and Pashtun-inhabited areas claimed by the Afghans as an essential part of their nation. Under such circumstances, where the national identity was weak and where there were intense divisions over the sort of Islam that was practiced (to say nothing of minority faiths like Christianity and Zoroastrianism), and where the domination of the state by certain groups of people made others feel left out as a result, further increasing tensions. When you add to the fact that India has always been ready to exploit the many internal divisions of Pakistan as well–succeeding in 1971 in bringing about the birth of a new nation, Bangladesh, out of the crowded and overlooked East Pakistan, whose increasing population had not come with increased respect or attention from the Pakistani government as a whole.

Moreover, the wounds caused by losing Bangladesh have continued to haunt Pakistan concerning its inability to deal with minority populations. It was by no means inevitable that East Pakistan would separate from West Pakistan. A loose multi-ethnic federation of provinces could have decided that there was strength in unity when dealing with the bigger nations around (like India and China), and that it was preferable to have local self-rule while being part of a larger nation capable of throwing some weight around internationally. Once Pakistan had lost half of its population and its entire ability to make India deal with a two-front war, largely out of its own oppression of the Bengali people and refusal to give them a political voice or development commensurate with its population or importance to the Pakistani state, it became frozen in anxiety over the loss of other vulnerable territories, ranging from barren Balochistan to the restive Pasthun-inhabited areas of the Northwest frontier to the remote area of Waziristan, to say nothing about the fragments of Kashmir that it had been able to take after independence. Pakistan could have avoided the problem or could have realized that a lighter hand might calm international tensions by allowing for the development of self-rule and local authority in a federal state, but this option was not chosen and may have never even been seriously considered in the first place.

We need not be so hard on Pakistan, though. The desire of people to centralize power and to put themselves and their partisans in positions of power is what makes life dangerous for people around the world. Both anarchy and tyranny, as well as the oscillation between the two, are both intensely dangerous for people. If one has power, other people want it, and that makes one’s own life dangerous But being without power in a world where people use power to oppress and dominate others is itself dangerous, because even if one lacks the power to be a threat to those in power, one simply becomes an obvious potential victim or scapegoat upon whom problems can be blamed and towards whom any sort of violence and abuse can be inflicted without recourse. Any attempt to improve one’s own security and safety, in such a world, makes other people feel unsafe and to respond in kind that make us feel unsafe. Without the ability to trust that other people will use the power they possess in beneficial ways, ambition becomes dangerous to everyone, because it is viewed through the lens of fear. And how to banish those fears, once they are provoked, is by no means an easy task.