Rashed Rahman
Introduction
Pakistan is a country that has been in a permanent state of crisis since it was carved out of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. From the range of factors responsible for this continuing state of affairs if one were to be identified as the most important, it would have to be the failure to establish a democratic system of governance. For more than half of Pakistan’s 61-year existence, the powerful military has dominated politics and national life, stifling the development of credible democratic institutions of state. Even in the interregnums that punctuate direct military rule, when civilian governments have been in power, the military has cast a long shadow over politics and the national agenda.
Despite this overweening military presence, the political agenda still revolves around representative government and democracy. If at one pole, Pakistan’s political history is characterized by repeated military interventions and takeovers of power, at the other these interventions have always faced resistance from the democratic forces in society. The struggle between the military’s desire to dominate and dictate the national agenda and the people’s aspiration for democratic governance is by no means resolved, despite one of the few relatively clean elections in the country’s history, held on February 18, 2008, which brought the party of its assassinated leader, Ms Benazir Bhutto, i.e. the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), to power.
Benazir’s widower Asif Ali Zardari has emerged as the most powerful politician in the wake of her death. Today he not only dominates decision making within the ruling PPP (and arguably wields overwhelming influence in the ruling coalition with smaller parties), he has also been elected President in place of General Musharraf. With such awesome power also comes great responsibility.
Mr. Zardari and his government faced formidable challenges on assumption of office how, if at all, have these challenges changed one year down the road? Of these, four in particular stood out as critical: the restoration of the judiciary emasculated by Musharraf under the Emergency imposed on November 3, 2007; the removal of Musharraf from power; the economy; and the war against jihadi extremism. Any or all of these had the potential to destabilize the new government. The future of the PPP-led coalition government therefore depended crucially on how these challenges were addressed. On the track record so far, at best Mr Zardari and his government could be said to have acquitted themselves with decidedly mixed results. Musharraf has gone, the deposed judges of the superior judiciary have been reluctantly and at the eleventh hour when the mass upsurge associated with the lawyers' long march threatened the government's grip on power, reinstated, but the other two major challenges persist.
The remaining deposed judges of the superior judiciary were only restored to office when the concatenation of the mass pressure of the long march and the military's and the US and UK's nudging forced President Asif Zardari to finally concede this popular demand. Musharraf’s departure ensued peacefully when his external and internal backers dumped him. However, he remains safe from prosecution for his sins of omission and commissions over his nine-year reign, as part no doubt of the deal that brought about his resignation.
The challenges presented by the economic meltdown facing the country and the war against jihadi extremists (which have now become inextricably linked, the insurgency by jihadi militants impacting directly on the health of the economy) remain the central issues that will in the long run decide not only the fate of the PPP government (and arguably the nascent democratic order), they also have the potential to make the difference between Pakistan wriggling out of the morass of problems it is bogged down in or fulfilling the doomsayers’ predictions about Pakistan answering to the description of a failed state that may not survive. Given the country’s geo-strategic importance, its possession of nuclear weapons, and the growing extremist threat within Pakistan and projected from Pakistan outside its borders, the stakes are rapidly growing.
Domestic: Political Ferment and Volatility
The roots of Pakistan’s democracy deficit can be traced to the very foundation of the state. In a united India struggling for independence from British colonialism, the Hindu-Muslim divide was finally bloodily resolved at Partition. Accompanying the two-way greatest migration of humanity in history was great communal massacre and bloodshed. Some one million people were killed in all. This laid the basis for the embittered and until recently virtually permanent mutual enemy status of the new states of Pakistan and India.
For nine years after Pakistan's creation, the Constituent Assembly was unable to agree on a Constitution. The biggest stumbling block was the refusal of the powerful political elite, bureaucracy and military of the province of Punjab to accept the principle of one man one vote. Since the eastern wing of the country, separated from the western one by a thousand miles of hostile Indian Territory, had a majority of the population, this powerful Punjabi oligarchy feared the acceptance of that democratic principle would mean a permanent grip on power by the Bengalis of East Pakistan. This fear was at the heart of the crisis of 1971, during which East Pakistan, with the help of Indian military intervention, broke away to re-emerge as Bangladesh.
The remaining Pakistan comprising the western wing also had deep structural flaws in the federal arrangements of the state. Despite lip service in the 1973 Constitution to the principle of provincial autonomy, the three smaller provinces of Sindh, Balochistan and North West Frontier Province (NWFP) continue to have serious complaints about the dominance of the province of Punjab in the structure of state institutions. Underpinning this Punjabi dominance is the weight of population of Punjab in the ‘new’ Pakistan (56 percent according to the last census of 1998), and the predominant recruitment of the military, bureaucracy and police from Punjab. When these institutions operate through their largely Punjabi cadre in the smaller provinces, cries of ‘internal colonialism’ engender separatist sentiments in these three provinces. Balochistan is in the throes once again of what is the fifth military operation and resistance to it since independence. The relative weight of sub-nationalist sentiment in Sindh and NWFP may have declined over the years (Sindh because of the political weight of the largely rural-based PPP and urban based Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), NWFP because of the three decades-old wars in neighbouring Afghanistan), but resentments at perceived deprivation of political, economic and cultural rights simmer just below the surface in all three smaller provinces. The federal structure of the state too bears all the hallmarks of an authoritarian dispensation tilted in favour of the ruling oligarchy drawn overwhelmingly from Punjab. The question of provincial autonomy therefore, also forms part of the problems of a transition towards a genuinely democratic dispensation. Failure to resolve this long-standing conundrum could conceivably still threaten the viability of the Pakistani state.
Brief periods of civilian democratic governance have been punctuated by long periods of the military’s direct rule. Even under civilian dispensations, the military has more often than not called the shots. The last military regime, that of General Pervez Musharraf, left a country divided, fractured, economically bereft and threatened by the emergence of jihadi extremist groups aligned with the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda, who are now challenging the state of Pakistan to transform it along Taliban lines.
Although the military has since late 2007 stepped up its military campaign against such elements in the NWFP’s tribal and ‘settled’ areas, there remains a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Pakistan’s security posture. Since 2004, when the military blundered for the first time in Pakistan’s history into the tribal regions known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan that has historically been lightly under government control, inhabited as it is by fiercely independent tribes, this contradiction involves the desire of the military establishment and its intelligence arms to ‘export’ Islamist militancy in pursuit of so-called strategic depth in Afghanistan through a pliant regime in Kabul while preventing, by force if necessary, any challenge by the Pakistani Taliban to the Pakistani state. FATA served during the Afghan wars as the main staging post and conduit for infiltration of the Mujahideen into Afghanistan. Since 9/11 and the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Kabul, FATA provides safe havens and base areas for the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. The newly emerged (2007) Pakistani Taliban, now united under the banner of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), owe allegiance to the Afghan Taliban leader Mulla Omar, widely believed to be operating from the environs of Balochistan's provincial capital Quetta. This nexus, and arguably the links with Al-Qaeda, have proved more resilient than the efforts of the military establishment and intelligence agencies to wean the TTP away from Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban's emergence owes itself directly to the metamorphosis of local tribal facilitators of the Afghan Mujahideen/Taliban into local warlords in their own right. Their hosting of the Taliban is fuelled by the enormous funds and weapons they have been gifted by the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda in their midst.
Although Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf agreed to join the US-led war on terror after 9/11, providing bases and logistical support to the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, his calculation appears to have been that he could continue to extract financial and military support from the US in return for cracking down on Al-Qaeda (95 percent of the militants sent to Guantanamo Bay were Al-Qaeda), while preserving the Afghan Taliban as strategic assets for the Pakistani military establishment, in anticipation of the day when the US would tire of the Afghan war. As and when the US reached that point, Musharraf calculated, the Pakistani military establishment could return to 'business as usual' in Afghanistan through the largely intact Afghan Taliban. Thus the dream of strategic depth provided by a friendly regime in Kabul that would deny India leverage on Pakistan's western flank, is alive and well. The unintended consequence of this 'preserve the Afghan Taliban as strategic assets' policy has been the blowback in the shape of the Pakistani Taliban, who do not appear, suspicions to the contrary notwithstanding, to be completely within the control of their erstwhile mentors, the Pakistani military establishment.
The political class in Pakistan is still dominated by large landowning elements who are, despite their participation in the electoral process, far from consistent democrats. Their participation in the electoral process is basically aimed at preserving their traditional power of patronage over a largely poor, illiterate and disempowered rural populace. Progressive democratic legislation in Parliament has therefore to run the gauntlet of these ‘feudal’ landowners. All efforts at land reform or a redistribution of land on the grounds of both efficiency and social justice have fallen foul of the ability of this class to manipulate the system to their advantage and avoid parting with any significant quantity of land, thereby ensuring their continued dominance of political, economic and social life in the countryside.
The industrial and business sector in Pakistan owes its emergence and continued prosperity to state largesse. Such a ‘hothouse’ entrepreneurial class lacks the political vision to support democracy as the optimal political shell for the growth and expansion of their class. There is no evidence of any significant part of this class ever resisting military intervention or dominance of the political agenda. They are clearly wedded to authoritarian dispensations, so long as their profits are maximized.
The class of mullahs too has its own agenda, i.e. ensuring there is no deviation from what has incrementally become the leit motif of the Pakistani state: an Islamic state that is theoretically founded on the principles enunciated in the Qoran and Sunnah. Starting from General Ziaul Haq's period in power (1977-88), the decade of the 1980s saw a mushroom growth of madrassas (religious schools or seminaries) funded largely by Saudi largesse. When Pakistan came into being in 1947, there were only 189 madrassas, divided between various competing fiqh (schools of Islamic thought). By 2002, their number had risen to 10,000-13,000 unregistered madrassas having 1.7-1.9 million students. In 2008, one estimate puts the number of madrassas at over 40,000. This mushrooming of religious seminaries in Pakistan had two effects: it produced generations of jihadi extremists from amongst the millions of Afghan refugees on Pakistani soil (from whom the Taliban eventually emerged), while also creating indoctrinated jihadi extremists from amongst Pakistani youth who were students at these seminaries. Today's suicide bombers owe their origins, and arguably their continued flow of fresh recruits, to these seminaries. This is because in addition to traditional Islamic teaching, the madrassa curriculums tend to inculcate in their charges a rejection of anything to do with the West, and a narrow interpretation linked to their particular fiqh, which tends to strengthen (violent) religious sectarianism.
Given this concatenation of forces within the political class, despite lip service to democracy as the hegemonic discourse in Pakistan’s polity, it is unlikely that mere elections will be able to nudge Pakistan towards a state structured on genuinely democratic principles. For that, perhaps a new emulation of the American Revolution may be inescapable to free society of the benighted influence of the forces of the status quo.
The military has learnt in recent years (certainly this was on display during the Musharraf years) that the old methods of rule by the gun are no longer efficacious. Under Musharraf, the military embarked on ‘management’ of the political process (and the new mushrooming print and electronic media, an explosion conceded after the bitter experience of Pakistan’s state-run television being unable to win the country’s case in competition with Indian and international media during the Kargil War of 1999). Even after that experiment in political and media 'management' ended in ignominy because of Musharraf’s blunder of attempting to emasculate the judiciary, the elected government that is currently in power, despite attempts to bolster Parliament as the supreme source of power and legitimacy, has its work cut out for it in the face of the dead weight of anti-democratic inertia that informs large parts of the polity and even the media.
The emergence of a vibrant private media (print and electronic) is one of the pluses of developments in Pakistani society in recent years. However, the dearth of experienced and knowledgeable media practitioners (a lack contributed to in no measure by the failing state-run education system) has meant the raw professional edges; inadequate knowledge and unfamiliarity with the ethics of best media practice the world over have been all too evidently on display. Arguably, the infant media will grow into a responsible entity over time. Pressure from readers and viewers could contribute to such a healthy development. Already, there are signs of weariness and even despair at some of the irresponsible excesses of the media. Nevertheless, the accountability of the newly emerging media must be left to its customers and hopefully self-regulation on ethical lines by the media itself. This is doubly important in Pakistan, which has an unfortunate history of state intervention to curb media freedoms. Without an unfettered (but responsible) media, the democracy project will be hobbled.
Pakistan, therefore, needs all the help it can get from internal democratic forces and external friends interested in the modernisation of Pakistan’s state and society along democratic lines.
International Influence: Meeting the Challenge of Extremism
Pakistan is a country of enormous strategic and geo-political importance. The second largest Muslim country in the world, it has always confronted two insecure borders on its west, with Afghanistan (which does not recognize the Durand line) and in the east along Kashmir with India. India is seen by Pakistan’s military as the preeminent threat, although this is not necessarily the case for the civilian population, which generally seek normal relations, and greater mutual trade and investment with India. Pakistan’s army has also sought to influence governments and events in Afghanistan since the 1980s. It has tried to create trade routes to Central Asia but these ambitions have been stymied because the pathways to Central Asia that run through Afghanistan are locked in war. Pakistan also features a growing dependence on the Middle East for jobs, remittances and loans for the state.
A section of the liberal intelligentsia in Pakistan believes that Pakistani society has demonstrated over time its scarcity of intellectual resource to bring about incremental change along a democratic path. They therefore pin their hopes on international influence, made weightier by Pakistan’s economic and strategic dependence on powerful friends such as the US, to nudge the Pakistani state and society along an incremental path of democratic reform.
The problem with such hopes is that nowhere in history has a state or society been transformed along democratic lines through foreign influence alone, no matter how benign. Recent failures in Afghanistan and Iraq only serve to emphasise this lesson of history. Without the political will and vision of a significant section of the citizenry and political class to carry out deep-reaching reforms, no credible democratic order that responds to the needs of its people is likely to see the light of day in Pakistan in the foreseeable future. What passes for democracy currently, after the February 18, 2008, general elections, is nothing more than the reproduction of the traditional dominance of the backward looking political forces through the conduit of elections and parliament.
If proof of this assertion is sought, one need only examine the track record and performance of the current Parliament (or even past such assemblies) to realise that ‘business as usual’, i.e. seeking perks, privileges, pork barrel patronage and a singular lack of serious debate or consideration characterises our elected assemblies. The October 2008 in-camera briefing to a joint session of both Houses of Parliament regarding the internal security situation provided evidence of the lack of depth in the legislators’ consideration of arguably the greatest threat to the state in our short and chequered history.
This weakness and democratic deficit within Pakistan’s political class leaves the door open (as in the past) to the military’s penchant for influencing the national agenda, or worse. The real threat to the continued progress of Pakistan along a democratic path remains the powerful military, despite the hopes (and illusions) engendered by the new military commander, General Kayani’s ostensible distancing the army from politics since assuming charge. Developing countries such as Pakistan, in which there is a history of military coups, cannot be sanguine about an ostensible retreat from politics by the military in favour of attending to the professional tasks of the defence forces. Pakistan’s own history and the example of other similar cases in the developing world suggest that such retreats tend to be tactical rather than strategic. The military retains the wherewithal and perhaps even the secret desire to once again enter the political fray as the nation’s self-anointed saviour once its (temporarily) battered image (by association with Musharraf of late) is restored.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s geo-political importance dictates that the country must not be allowed to sink into the morass of economic meltdown and threats to its security from jihadi extremism (fostered by the military establishment for foreign policy goals in Pakistan’s neighbourhood), not the least because of concerns about its nuclear weaponry falling into the wrong hands. As it is, suspicions and even alarm linger in the global community about the self-confessed proliferator Dr. A. Q. Khan (recently freed from house arrest by the courts) and his network once again becoming clandestinely active. The apprehension that Pakistan's nuclear weapons may fall into the hands of jihadi extremists is contingent on the outcome of the struggle against terrorism. Was Pakistan at any point to be seriously on the verge of falling to the jihadis, scary scenarios are being painted about the need to intervene, militarily if necessary, to prevent such an outcome?
International backers and friends of Pakistan should play their role in encouraging the evolution of democratic institutions of state, answerable to elected representatives who arguably also need help to comprehend the advantages of pulling their weight in the transition to a genuinely democratic order, not merely the trappings of one.
The US and NATO forces in Afghanistan have until recently had mixed feelings about past attempts by the Pakistani authorities to seek peace deals and a negotiated political settlement with the Pakistani Taliban. Currently however, given the growing sense of the failure of the military mission in Afghanistan, the US and NATO is veering round to the acceptability of political negotiations with 'moderate' elements amongst the Afghan Taliban. Conceivably, no political solution to Afghanistan’s strife could be viable without offering, at a minimum, power sharing arrangements to the Afghan Taliban. The latter’s strategy then would be to insert themselves into a niche in the Kabul power structure, wait out the foreign troops presence in Afghanistan, and then roll over the weak Karzai government. The worry is what this would mean for the movement of the indigenous Taliban in Pakistan, who are by now clearly out of the control of their erstwhile handlers, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) of the military. Pakistanis therefore, with the exception of the military, cannot view with sanguinity the moves by the US and NATO to seek such an exit strategy from the Afghan quagmire. This would hand the Afghan Taliban and their backers in the Pakistani military victory on a platter. It remains a moot question whether a new Washington administration or its European partners in NATO would be able to muster the requisite political will to continue the Afghanistan mission for as long as it takes to build up the Afghan military and security forces to a point where they could stand up to the Taliban. Any face-saving compromise with the Afghan Taliban intended to hasten the departure of American or NATO forces from Afghanistan would almost inevitably engender a fresh civil war in that benighted country after the foreign troops presence is no more, with worrying implications for the ‘blowback’ into Pakistan from an eventually triumphant Afghan Taliban regime in Kabul, not the least worrying factor being the ideology that informs the TTP of subverting and transforming the Pakistani state along Taliban lines. There would, it is obvious, be little room for liberal democracy in such an environment, as the years in power in Kabul of Mulla Omar and company clearly demonstrated.
Key Findings
- Pakistan presents a multifaceted set of challenges at the national and international level, including those presented by the economic meltdown facing the country and the war against jihadi extremists. These challenges have now become inextricably linked, as the insurgency by jihadi militants is impacting directly on the health of the economy.
- The emergence of a vibrant private media (print and electronic), alongside a nascent civil society, is one of the notable positive developments in Pakistani society in recent years. Nevertheless, the media sector confronts considerable challenges relating to the establishment of a more mature class of media professionals. The growing economic crisis will place greater pressure on Pakistan’s media sector. Moreover, illiberal voices, including extremists in the Swat region, are creating more challenges for the advance of liberal and normal politics.
- The Pakistani Taliban, now united under the banner of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), owes allegiance to the Afghan Taliban leader Mulla Omar. This nexus, and arguably the links with Al-Qaeda, have proved more resilient than the efforts of the military establishment and intelligence agencies to wean the TTP away from Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban.
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