Pakistan: A Hard Country (15 page)

Zia’s approach therefore left the Islamist parties deeply unsatisfied.

The Jamaat Islami in particular has also always had a certain real though complex belief in democracy, and became increasingly disil usioned with Zia’s dictatorship. On the other hand, for Zia to have formed an al iance with the Islamist parties successful y to transform Pakistani society would also have required them to have been far stronger and more deeply rooted across that society. This in turn would have required much larger, more developed and more confident middle classes in Pakistan.

As subsequent chapters wil explore, the great variety of different kinds of Islam in Pakistan makes the creation of a real national Islamist movement extremely difficult. As they wil also describe, Zia’s official Islamization whol y failed to overcome these differences, and in fact made them much worse. There were bitter disagreements even among Sunni clerics belonging to different theological schools as to which version of Islamic law should be adopted, and Shias rose in protest against what they saw as an attempt to turn Pakistan into a Sunni state. Coupled with fears created by the Shia Islamic revolution in Iran, this left another malignant legacy of Zia’s rule: enduring violence between Sunni and Shia militant groups.

So rather than the creation of a new state, Zia was left with the same strategy that al the rulers of Pakistan have sooner or later adopted: a combination of reliance on the state bureaucracy, army and police with handing out state patronage to the rural and urban elites in order to win their support. The economy recovered to a great extent from the disasters of Bhutto’s rule, but the boom of the 1980s under Zia proved as shal ow as that under Musharraf – based above al on US aid and remittances from the Pakistani workers who flooded to the Gulf states in response to the oil boom. This was in contrast to Ayub, whose administration did build up Pakistan’s real economy, though at a high social cost.

Zia did, however, leave certain legacies. Within Pakistan, he created a new and enduring party, to which was given the glorious name of the old Muslim League (though apart from Pakistani nationalism there was no continuity). Initial y just another patronage-based al iance of landowners and urban bosses created by the military for its own purposes, this party subsequently developed a real identity of its own, and has been central to Pakistani politics ever since. Like Bhutto, who developed his power base as a member of Ayub Khan’s administration before breaking with his mentor, so the man charged by Zia with leading the new Muslim League, Nawaz Sharif, later broke with the military that had created him.

Created to counter the Bhuttos’ PPP, the growth of the Muslim League has led since 1988 to the emergence of what is in effect a two-party political system at the national level (though only very rarely can either party win an absolute majority of seats) – a system which survived Musharraf’s attempt to eliminate both parties between 1999

and 2007.

But while this two-party balance – like those of India and Bangladesh – has demonstrated its resilience, neither party has demonstrated its ability to provide good government to the country, let alone radical reform. The ‘democratic’ period of the 1990s was a miserable episode from the point of view of governance, apart from the privatization and economic stabilization measures introduced by the second Muslim League administration from 1997 to 1999. Both PPP and Muslim League governments used il egal methods against political opponents, and savage (though perhaps unavoidable) ones to contain ethnic and sectarian violence.

The PPP’s economic and social populism remained at a level of pure rhetoric, with the government of 1988 – 90 distinguishing itself as the only Pakistani government not to pass a single piece of new legislation. The Muslim League’s Islamist policies also remained largely symbolic, contained no element of the social justice and progress which is the hal mark of such policies at their best (for example in Turkey), and often seemed designed mainly to boost the personal authority of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Both PPP and Muslim League governments were corrupt, owing chiefly to the perennial need to reward kinsfolk and supporters. For example, the PPP Speaker of the National Assembly from 1993 to 1997 (and prime minister after 2008), Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, created or freed no fewer than 500 jobs in various parliamentary services to give to his supporters. The PPP leadership under Benazir Bhutto (and her husband Asif Ali Zardari) went beyond patronage and limited corruption into outright kleptocracy.

Despite their high claims both main parties have been the prisoners of Pakistan’s political society and Pakistan’s political culture. As later chapters wil analyse, the first has made them dependent on patronage systems necessary to reward local power-holders. The second has meant that, whatever their ‘democratic’ pretensions, both parties in fact function as dynastic autocracies, with no internal elections and al key decisions and appointments made by the head of the dynasty and his or her closest relatives and advisers. At the time of writing, there is no sign that either of these parties is capable of transcending these deeply ingrained patterns of Pakistani life.

3

Justice

From the unwritten comes the law which is sanctioned by use, because long-lasting customs, which are approved of by agreement of those who are used to them, resemble laws.

(Code of Justinian)1

A visit to the Mohmand Tribal Agency in September 2008 (described further in Chapter 11) summed up for me the attitudes of most ordinary Pakistanis to the official judicial system, and how the Pakistani Taleban have been able to exploit this to their advantage. As Tazmir Khan, a farmer, told me, to the approval of the other local men sitting with him,

Taleban justice is better than that of the Pakistani state. If you have any problem, you can go to the Taleban and they wil solve it without you having to pay anything – not like the courts and police, who wil take your money and do nothing.2

Strikingly, his views were supported by the steward and the mul ah of the local malik landowning family whom I was visiting, and in whose dusty, sun-drenched yard we were sitting – men who were, if by no means members of the elite, then not part of the truly downtrodden masses either. The steward, Shehzad, spoke approvingly of a recent case of Taleban justice:

Last week, a woman and her husband from Shapqadar were kil ed. She was a prostitute and he was sel ing her. So the Taleban warned her twice, then arrested them, kil ed the husband, cut off her nose, gouged out her eyes and drove a car over her.

The mul ah, Zewar, retorted that,

I agree that she should have been kil ed, because she had committed crimes, and after al hundreds of people are being kil ed in this fighting every day. But not the way they did it, by cutting her nose and eyes. That is against the Koran and the Shariah.

However, he added that he too supported the Taleban because they bring quick and fair justice, even if it is often rough: The Taleban’s work in our area has been good. If you have a problem you can go to them and they wil decide your case justly in three days. If you go to the police station, they wil take al your money and decide the case in twenty years. In Pakistan, only the rich get justice. So people are coming here from Charsadda and even further to get justice from the Taleban.3

From this, it can be gathered that the harshness of Taleban justice, so often denounced in the West and by Pakistani liberals, does not necessarily repel local people, whose local traditions of justice are themselves often very harsh indeed, especial y as far as women are concerned. As the mul ah pointed out, the punishment of the prostitute and her husband was closer to the pashtunwali (the traditional ethnic code of the Pathans) than to the Shariah. Even clearer was the entire local population’s absolute loathing for the state judicial system; and this was an attitude which I found among ordinary people across Pakistan.

However, it would be wrong to see the Pakistani population simply as innocent victims of a vicious judicial system run from above for the benefit of the elites. Rather, justice in Pakistan is an extension of politics by other means, and everyone with the slightest power to do so tries to corrupt and twist the judicial system to their advantage in every way possible.

Thus cases brought before the state judicial system are key weapons in the hands of individuals and groups fighting for national and local power; and in both the state and the traditional systems of justice, outcomes are determined largely by political considerations.

That means kinship, wealth, influence and armed force, but also sometimes and to some extent the ability to win over public opinion in general. The means to do this have changed over time, with the modern media now playing an important role in some cases.

In the various traditional systems of justice, the powerful always had colossal advantages, albeit occasional y qualified by considerations of religious morality expressed through the influence of the Shariah. In the Pakistani state judicial system derived from the British, to this builtin bias against the poor and weak is added the appal ing slowness and complexity of the system, and the ruinous costs extracted by a largely predatory judiciary and police.

Al of this is wel known to every Pakistani, and fear and even hatred of the state judicial system is general among the mass of the population – even among those who are exploiting the system assiduously to attack their enemies. As an Urdu couplet (with paral els in many languages round the world) has it, The day a lawyer was born Satan said with joy, ‘Al ah has made me today the father of a boy.’4

Yet at the same time, whether stemming from the teachings of Islam or from innate and universal human cravings, there exists among Pakistanis a deeply felt desire for a better form of justice. This has led to admiration in the educated classes for courageous human rights lawyers such as Asma Jehangir, and to the (alas, exaggerated) hopes attached to the Lawyers’ Movement which began in 2007 against President Musharraf and has continued in a lower key against President Zardari.

For many ordinary Pakistanis, however, this hunger for justice focuses on the Islamic code of Shariah; and as subsequent chapters wil describe, at least up to the spring of 2009, the Taleban’s claim to spread Islamic justice was central to the growth of their popularity in the Pathan areas, and to the unwil ingness of most Pakistanis elsewhere to support military action against them.

In the words of Imran Aslam, president of Geo TV: Ask ordinary people here about democracy, and they can’t real y explain it; but ask them about justice, and they understand it wel , because unlike democracy issues of justice are part of their daily lives. Also, a sense of justice comes from Islam – athird of the names of God have something to do with justice, fairness, harmony or balance. Issues of electoral democracy have no necessary relation to this, because in Pakistan electoral democracy has little to do with the wil of ordinary voters.5

It would be quite wrong, however, to see the Pakistani masses faced with the state justice system as simply the passive, sheep-like victims of predatory lawyers, judges, policemen and political elites.

This is true, but it is also true that the vast majority of Pakistanis (and Indians) with even the most limited power to do so have contributed to the wreckage of the state judicial system by their constant efforts to twist it to their own individual or group purposes. One reason for this is the continual struggles for power which permeate Pakistani society – struggles in which politics and property are often inextricably mixed. In turn, these struggles generate and are generated by the lack of mutual trust that permeates Pakistani society, between but also within kinship groups.

An additional and disastrous factor is also present. However much, in England in the past, men may have bribed or intimidated judge, jury and witnesses, while at the same time swearing hypocritical y into their beer that the law was an ass, they stil had a feeling that, however corrupted, the law was English law, with its roots in England and stretching back to the very beginnings of English history.

No Pakistani can feel that his state law is Pakistani law in this sense, for the obvious reason that it isn’t. It is British law, as transmitted by British rule to the empire of India, adapted to the purposes of ruling India, and somewhat modified by Pakistani governments and parliaments since independence. Al over the former colonial world, modern legal systems have been undermined by the fact that they were imposed from outside, have never been ful y accepted by the mass of the population, and often clash with that population’s traditional codes.

This is also true to some extent in much of neighbouring India. In Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world, however, the state judicial system faces a dual chal enge to its legitimacy: from traditional, informal and unwritten local practices (and the moral orders and loyalties they reflect) cal ed in Urdu rivaz, and from another great formal, written legal code, that of the Shariah.

The state code and the Shariah are both by nature ‘great traditions’