Pakistan: A Hard Country (36 page)

Nor is there any chance – once again, unless the state and army had already col apsed – of terrorists somehow seizing the weapons, which are the most heavily defended objects in Pakistan, and protected by picked men careful y screened to eliminate extremist sympathizers of any kind. The weapons are not on hair-trigger alert, and a majority may wel be disassembled at any given time. According to a report of 2007

by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (I SS) in London: A robust command and control system is now in place to protect Pakistan’s nuclear assets from diversion, theft and accidental misuse. For the most part, these measures have been transparent and have worked wel . Indeed, Pakistan’s openness in explaining its command and control structures goes beyond the practices adopted by most other nuclear-capable states ... Responsibility for nuclear weapons is now clearly in the hands of the National Command Authority and its constituent bodies. General Khalid Kidwai and the Strategic Plans Division he commands have gained national and international

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Incidents such as the terrorist attack on the military headquarters in Rawalpindi are not a precedent, because this was a suicide attack – whereas if you want to steal a nuclear weapon, you obviously don’t just have to get in, you have to get out again, carrying it.

The greatest danger may be not Pakistani realities but US fears.

That is to say, the risk that the US might launch a strike on Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent prematurely, thereby precipitating precisely the scenario that the US fears – since such an attack would so radicalize the army and destabilize the state as to run a real y serious risk of bringing about mutiny and state col apse.

Another danger is that the growth of India’s nuclear forces wil leave Pakistan in a position where it feels that it has no alternative but to seek new technology on the international black market. Such a move, if discovered – as it certainly would be sooner or later – would bring about the col apse of relations with the US and the imposition of Western sanctions, risking economic col apse, an increase in radicalization, and possibly revolution.

Final y, there is the ultimate nightmare scenario (other of course than a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan) of a successful attack on a US target using a weapon of mass destruction. If the aftermath of 9/11 is anything to go by, the effects of such an attack would be temporarily at least to deprive the US establishment of its col ective wits, and remove any restraint in US strategy.

Even if such an attack turned out to have no Pakistani origins, Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons would undoubtedly place Pakistan squarely in America’s gun-sights. Very likely, this is precisely what the perpetrators of such an attack would be hoping – since a US

attack on Pakistan would be the shortest road to victory for Al Qaeda and its al ies that could be imagined, other than a US invasion of Saudi Arabia.

The most dangerous moment in my visits to Pakistan since 9/11

came in August/September 2008, when on two occasions US forces entered Pakistan’s tribal areas on the ground in order to raid suspected Taleban and Al Qaeda bases. On the second occasion, Pakistani soldiers fired in the air to turn the Americans back. On 19

September 2008 the chief of the army staff, General Kayani, flew to meet the US chief of the joint staffs, Admiral Mike Mul en, on the US

aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, and in the words of a senior Pakistani general ‘gave him the toughest possible warning’ about what would happen if this were repeated.

Pakistani officers from captain to lt-general have told me that the entry of US ground forces into Pakistan in pursuit of the Taleban and Al Qaeda is by far the most dangerous scenario as far as both Pakistani – US relations and the unity of the army are concerned. As one retired general explained, drone attacks on Pakistani territory, though the ordinary officers and soldiers find them humiliating, are not a critical issue because they cannot do anything about them.

US ground forces inside Pakistan are a different matter, because the soldiers can do something about them. They can fight. And if they don’t fight, they wil feel utterly humiliated, before their wives, mothers, children. It would be a matter of honour, which as you know is a tremendous thing in our society.

These men have sworn an oath to defend Pakistani soil. So they would fight. And if the generals told them not to fight, many of them would mutiny, starting with the Frontier Corps.

At this point, not just Islamist radicals but every malcontent in the country would join the mutineers, and the disintegration of Pakistan would come a giant leap closer.

6

Politics

Men went there [to the British parliament in the eighteenth century] to make a figure, and no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it; which is perfectly normal and in no way reprehensible.

(Lewis Namier)1

The fidelity of the martial classes of the people of India to their immediate chief, whose salt they eat, has always been very remarkable, and commonly bears little relation to his moral virtues or conduct to his superiors ... He may change sides as often as he pleases, but the relations between him and his followers remain unchanged.

(Sir William Sleeman)2

Patronage and kinship form the basic elements of the Pakistani political system – if water, chemical y speaking, is H2O then Pakistani politics are P2K. Political factions are very important, but they exist chiefly to seek patronage, and have kinship links as their most important foundation. Factions which support individual politicians or al iances of politicians are not usual y made up chiefly of the kinsfolk of these leaders, but the politicians concerned almost always need the foundation of strong kinship networks to play any significant role.

By contrast, ideology, or more often sheer exasperation with the regime in power, might be compared to the energy propel ing waves through water. These waves can sometimes assume enormous size, and do great damage; but after they have passed the water remains the same. In Pakistan, waves of public anger (or, much more rarely, public enthusiasm) can topple regimes and bring new ones to power; but they do not change the basic structures of politics.

It is possible that the floods of 2010 have brought about a major transformation of this system, by so damaging local agriculture and infrastructure that the old patronage system is hopelessly short of benefits to distribute, and by driving so many rural people into the cities that traditional patterns of kinship al egiance and social deference cease to operate. If this proves to be the case, then the analysis set out in this chapter – and indeed in this book – wil be a historical portrait of Pakistan as it existed in the first six decades of its existence, rather than a guide to the future.

However, it is stil too early to draw this conclusion. The patterns and traditions concerned are very old and very deeply rooted in local society. They have adapted to immense upheavals over the past 200

years, and are likely to be able to do so in the face of future upheavals, unless ecological change is so great as eventual y to threaten the very basis of human existence in the region.

So one can most probably continue to speak of certain long-lasting and enduring features of the Pakistani political system. Among these is the fact that the alternation in power of civilian and military regimes has also been carried along by a sort of deep political wave pattern common to both. In the case of military regimes, the wave that has buoyed them up has lasted longer, because they have had more autonomy from political society and not been so dependent on parliament; but in the end they too have plunged into the trough between the waves and been overwhelmed.

The pattern has worked like this. Every new Pakistani government comes to power making two sets of promises, one general, one specific. The general promises are to the population, and are of higher living standards, more jobs, better education and health services, and so on. The specific promises are to smal er parties and to individual politicians, who are offered individual favours to themselves, their families or their districts in return for their political support.

The problem is that the poverty and weakness of the state make this process rather like trying to get a very skimpy blanket to cover a very fat man, and a man, moreover, who wil never keep stil but keeps twisting and turning in bed. In other words, there just isn’t enough patronage to go round. This is even a circular process, because a large part of the favours that governments hand out are meaningless but expensive ministerial posts (more than sixty in the civilian governments of the 1990s and after 2008), tax breaks, corrupt contracts, state loans (which are rarely repaid), and amnesties for tax evasion and embezzlement – al of which helps keep the state poor.

As a result, governments simply cannot keep most of their promises, either to the masses or to the political elites. As time goes on, more and more of the political elites find themselves disappointed, and unable in turn to pass on favours to their fol owers and voters – which means the likelihood of not being reelected. What is more, even giving a serious favour to a political family is not enough. In parts of the countryside, local politics is structured round competition between particular landowning families, branches of the same family, or family-based factions. That means that the state favour not only has to be large, but has to be visibly larger than that given to the local rivals. No contract or ambassadorship wil compensate for seeing your enemies become ministers, with al that means in terms of ability to help local friends and al ies.

Meanwhile, at the level of parliament, Pakistan’s deep ethnic, regional and religious divisions mean that no party ever succeeds in gaining an absolute majority, even if it is army-backed; and even if it could, it wouldn’t mean much, because for most politicians party loyalty means little compared to personal advantage and clan loyalty. So governments find that their parliamentary majorities are built on shifting sand.

Sooner or later, the ‘outs’ have come together and found that they outnumber the ‘ins’; and also find that the state’s failure to improve the lot of the population means growing discontent on the streets, or at least a public mood of disil usionment which inclines more and more people to support whoever is in opposition. As Abida Husain, a great Punjabi landowner-politician, said to me candidly: ‘You know, a normal Pakistani with a normal human heart can’t be real y pro-government no matter what the government is, because governments always look indifferent to the hardships of the people.’3 This permanent mood of simmering mass irritation with government is catalysed by specific events or developments – economic crises, especial y gross instances of corruption or autocracy, foreign policy humiliations or al of them together.

As politics has become disorderly and government unmanageable, the army and senior bureaucracy have engineered the downfal of a civilian government and replaced it either with a new civilian government or with their own rule; or, after the military themselves have been in power for a few years, they have managed a transition from their own rule back to civilian rule; and the whole cycle of patronage has begun again. Developments since the 1990s, and both main parties’ fear of renewed military rule, may have modified this pattern to some extent, but I very much doubt that they have fundamental y changed it.

It would be quite wrong to see these features of Pakistan as reflecting simply the absence of ‘modern’ values of democracy and the law. Rather, they also stem from the continued presence of traditions of overriding loyalty to family, clan and religion (often in a local form, which is contrary to the precepts of orthodox Islam as wel as the Pakistani legal code) and to the rules of behavior that these loyalties enjoin. Similarly, ‘corruption’ in Pakistan, as in so much of the world, is not the kind of viral infection instinctively portrayed by much of Western analysis.

In so far as it is entwined with patronage and family al egiance, corruption is an integral part of the system as a whole. In fact, to reform Pakistan radical y along the lines of how Western states supposedly work would require most of the population to send itself to gaol.

Corruption cannot therefore be ‘cured’. Rather, as in South Korea and other societies, it may over time be possible to change it organical y into less destructive forms of patronage. To quote a local proverb, ‘Dishonesty can be like flour in salt or salt in flour. It’s a question of the proportion.’

As far as most of the political parties are concerned, these do not exist in the form taken as the norm in the West. With the exception of the MQM and the religious parties, al of Pakistan’s ‘democratic’

political parties are congeries of landlords, clan chieftains and urban bosses seeking state patronage for themselves and their fol owers and vowing al egiance to particular national individuals and dynasties.

Most of these individuals inherited their positions from their fathers or (more rarely) other relatives. Where new individuals gain political power, they invariably found political dynasties of their own, and seek to pass on their power, influence and fol owers to their sons (or occasional y daughters).