Pakistan: A Hard Country (37 page)
Thus the Pakistan People’s Party is built around the Bhutto dynasty, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) around the Sharif dynasty, and the Awami National Party around the Wali Khan dynasty. The smal er building blocks of these parties are also local political families. These often break away to form new al iances with other families, or to create a new smal party based on one leader and his family, like the PPP
(Sherpao), founded by a dissident local PPP politician from the Frontier, or – on a much larger scale – the Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam), created by the Musharraf administration but put together and led by the two Chaudhury brothers from Gujrat.
As wil be seen, ideology does play a certain part in political loyalties, but outside the Jamaat Islami it is not dominant. Furthermore, a long-term loyalty to one party, sometimes taken by observers to reflect ideological al egiance, may in fact be reflective of something more like a medieval al egiance: an obstinate personal loyalty to a particular leading family. In many ways, the kind of politician who is personal y admired today (for more than simply his or her ability to gain patronage for supporters) is stil very close to the Pathan chief described by Mountstuart Elphinstone more than 170 years ago: Proud, high-spirited and obstinate; frugal, but not sordid in expense, steady in his attachment to his party, and strict in conforming to the notions of honour which prevail among his countrymen ...4
Long-term loyalty to one party can also reflect the fact that the individual and family concerned have no alternative, because they have burnt their boats as far as al the other potential loyalties are concerned. Thus in my travels round Pakistan, I have quite often been told in private (sometimes by the politicians themselves): ‘Of course, So-and-So Khan would like to join the ruling party; but he can’t, because the Sharifs [or the Bhuttos] wil never forgive him for what he did to them when he was in government’; or, sometimes, because a rival local faction, or set of cousins, is so firmly entrenched in one party that their local rivals have no choice but to stick to the other, come what may.
In the Pakistan of 2010, there are only two areas where this is not the case: the Federal y Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which were never ful y part of the state patronage system, and much of which have been removed from state control by the Pakistani Taleban; and to some extent the MQM-control ed areas of Karachi, where the removal of the Mohajirs from their ancestral roots in India, and the disruption of their kinship networks, as wel as their old urban culture, has produced a more ‘modern’ form of ethnic party politics.
THE MILITARY AND POLITICS
The nature of the Pakistani political system has made possible three military seizures of power, and the long periods of military rule that have fol owed. Even more common have been military attempts to manipulate politics from behind the scenes, to influence and put pressure on journalists, to bring down civilian governments that have fal en out with the military, and to shape the results of elections.
Retired officers, or serving officers speaking off the record, are usual y quite unapologetic about the military’s role in politics. As Admiral (retired) Arshad Gilani told me in November 1990: Democracy has failed – it is not suited to our temperament. It took Western countries hundreds of years to develop and we have only had forty. The military is the only force in the country which has some discipline, which can guarantee stability and economic growth. If there has been army rule for most of Pakistan’s history it is not the military’s fault. Benazir complains that the military did not give her a chance – wel , grow up. This is a serious game. Let’s accept that no force that has power wants to give it up. If the PPP wants to keep power, then it has to prove itself to be better at government than the army.5
Because real political power is spread among so many local actors, and depends so heavily on patronage, this also places limits on the ability of the military to control things for long – because, as I’ve said, there just isn’t enough patronage to go round. On the other hand, both civilian governments and the ISI have other means of influence, as sketched for me by Murtaza Jatoi, son of the caretaker chief minister of Sindh, in 1990:
If this were a political government running a political campaign, then PPP candidates would have no water for their land, al the state loans to them would be cal ed in, there would be raids on Asif Zardari’s home and those of his relatives to pick up known dacoits taking shelter there, and every vehicle with a PPP flag or sticker would be pul ed over to see if its licence is in order or its tyres in proper shape. That’s how governments in power run elections here.6
The key military institution for the manipulation of politics is of course Inter-Services Intel igence (ISI). In private, the army is unabashed about the need to keep an eye on politics as part of internal security in general. As a retired senior general pointed out to me with considerable justification, since its foundation the Pakistani state has been faced with parties in the NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan which have been committed to breaking up the country, and have also had close links at different times with India, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. ‘No country in our circumstances could do without a strong domestic intel igence service,’ he told me. He pointed out that while the ISI has helped Pakistani military regimes against their domestic opponents, the Intel igence Bureau (IB) has been used by different civilian regimes, first in one direction, then in another, ‘to the point where they have become almost paralysed as a force to defend Pakistan’ (not of course a judgement with which the IB would agree).
In July 2009 one of the ISI’s senior officers gave me an account of its political role and its limits, an account which needs to be taken with several pinches of salt, but which is nonetheless interesting: I just have to laugh when I hear these conspiracy theories about how the ISI controls everything in Pakistan. If that were true, don’t you think that General Zia would stil be in power? Or that Nawaz Sharif and his party would have stayed our loyal servants instead of becoming our enemies?
As to political manipulation, I must tel you that every single civilian government has used us and the IB to target their political rivals and to rig elections, so their complaints about this are also a bit of a joke ...
We have never control ed elections either on behalf of civilian governments or the military – Pakistan is much too big and we aren’t nearly strong or numerous enough for that, and we also don’t have the money. Remember how much money is involved in winning one Pakistani assembly seat, and then multiply it by hundreds. What we have sometimes done is pushed a bit – usual y if things were moving in that direction anyway. There are various ways in which we can help get the result we want in some individual constituency. But across the whole country, no.
This is certainly a very considerable understatement of the ISI’s ability to influence politics, but it is accurate on some points – firstly, the fact that the civilians themselves have used the intel igence services for unconstitutional ends. As Iqbal Akhund, adviser to Benazir Bhutto, admitted, ‘From early in Pakistan’s history, rulers lacking support from a strong political party relied instead on the intel igence agencies to consolidate their rule.’7 A key role in building up the ISI’s political wing was played by Z. A. Bhutto. Ten years later, under Zia, this section of the ISI played a key part in putting together the new Muslim League and the IJI political al iance that ran against Z. A.
Bhutto’s daughter Benazir.
My ISI contact was also truthful when he said that the ISI has to work with the grain of the existing political system, and not against it; and that, during elections, its heavy power is usual y brought to bear to produce results in particular parliamentary constituencies, rather than across the board – which means that they can have a big effect in a close-run race, but cannot stop a real y big political swing, whether to the PPP in 1988 and 2008, or the Muslim League in 1997. As the leading Muslim League politician Chaudhury Shujaat Hussain told me in 2008: ‘The army and the ISI wil only go with you as long as enough of the people are with you. They are like a horse that carries you only as long as you have strength in your own legs.’8
One important group whom the ISI can influence very heavily, however, is the senior bureaucracy, because a negative security report from the ISI wil blast their careers. This means that while, ever since Z.
A. Bhutto’s time, civil servants have been subjugated by the politicians, there is no possibility of a serious movement to resist military influence or a military takeover emerging in the bureaucracy.
A picture of some ISI political tactics emerged in 2009 with revelations from a former ISI officer, Brigadier Imtiaz, about his organization’s role in bringing down the PPP government of Benazir Bhutto in 1990 (‘Operation Midnight Jackal’). This involved, among other things, bribing PPP deputies to defect from the party, and a whispering campaign to the effect that she was about to be sacked by the president for corruption, and therefore that her MPs and ministers should switch sides in order to keep their positions.
HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS
General y portrayed by both Western and Pakistani analysts as whol y negative, the Pakistani political system is in fact two-sided. On the one hand, it is very bad for the overal economic development of the country, for reasons summed up for me in 1988 by former Finance Minister Mehboob-ul-Haq, and equal y true twenty years later: Growth in Pakistan has never translated into budgetary security because of the way our political system works. We could be col ecting twice as much in revenue – even India col ects 50 per cent more than we do – and spending the money on infrastructure and education. But agriculture in Pakistan pays virtual y no tax because the landed gentry controls politics and therefore has a grip on every government. Businessmen are given state loans and then al owed to default on them in return for favours to politicians and parties. Politicians protect corrupt officials so that they can both share the proceeds.
And every time a new political government comes in they have to distribute huge amounts of state money and jobs as rewards to politicians who have supported them, and in short-term populist measures to try to convince the people that their election promises meant something, which leaves nothing for long-term development. As far as development is concerned, our system has al the worst features of oligarchy and democracy put together.
That is why only technocratic, non-political governments in Pakistan have ever been able to increase revenues. But they cannot stay in power long because they have no political support ... For the same reasons, we have not been able to deregulate the economy as much as I wanted, despite seven years of trying, because the politicians and officials both like the system Bhutto put in place. It suits them both very wel , because it gave them lots of lucrative state-appointed jobs in industry and banking to take for themselves or distribute to their relatives and supporters.9
It is important to note that the speaker had been finance minister under the ‘military dictatorship’ of General Zia-ul-Haq (no relation); but, as he candidly admitted, this regime had been almost whol y unable to change these basic features of the Pakistani system. Lack of revenue, and the diversion of what revenue there is to political patronage, are especial y disastrous for Pakistan’s ability to develop its national infrastructure – something which in the area of water conservation could in future literal y threaten the country’s very survival.
On the other hand, the Pakistani system creates immense barriers to revolutionary change, including that offered by the Taleban and their al ies; and these barriers are formed not just by the raw power and influence of ‘feudals’ and urban bosses, but also by the fact that, for a whole set of reasons, the system requires them to use at least some of that influence and patronage for the good of poorer sections of the population.
As Stephen Lyon and others have emphasized, patronage in Pakistan should not therefore be seen as the preserve of the elites, and as simply a top-down relationship. A mixture of the importance of kinship loyalty and the need for politicians to win votes, and – on occasions – to mobilize armed supporters, means that quite wide sections of society have the ability to exploit and even distribute patronage to some extent. Quite poor people can thus form part of ‘human resource networks’ and mobilize some degree of help or protection from their superiors. Even the very poorest in the vil ages often benefit from the deg tradition, whereby local landowners and big men distribute free food to the entire vil age to celebrate some happy event, to boost their local prestige through public generosity, and by the same token to try to cast local rivals into the shade.
People gain access to patronage by using their position within a kinship network to mobilize support for a politician who then repays them in various ways when in office, or by using kinship links to some policeman or official to obtain favours for relatives or al ies. In certain circumstances, this can benefit whole vil ages through the provision of electricity, roads or water. Of course, everyone complains bitterly about this in public when others do it successful y, while fol owing precisely the same strategies themselves. In the words of Professor Iqraar, vice-chancel or of Faisalabad University: The problem with Pakistan’s political and government system is not so much feudalism as what I would have to cal South Asian political culture in general. Everyone here seeks personal and family power by al means and then misuses it. The feudals just have more of it, that’s al .