Pakistan: A Hard Country (5 page)

HOW PAKISTAN WORKS

The original title for this book was ‘How Pakistan Works’, and one of its core goals is to show that, contrary to much instinctive belief in the West, it has actual y worked according to its own imperfect but functional patterns. One of the minor curses of writing on world affairs over the past few years has been the proliferating use of the term ‘failed state’. Coined original y for genuinely failed and failing states in sub-Saharan Africa, this term has since been thrown around with wild abandon to describe a great range of states around the world, pretty much in accordance with the writer’s prejudices or the need of his or her publication for a sensational headline.

In this respect, it is instructive to place Pakistan in the context of the rest of South Asia. All of the states of this region have faced insurgencies over the past generation, which in two cases (Afghanistan and Nepal) have actual y overthrown the existing state.

Sri Lanka and Burma have both faced rebel ions which have lasted longer, covered proportional y far more territory, and caused proportional y far more casualties than has been the case with the Taleban revolt in Pakistan.

India, the great power of the region, is a stable democracy compared to its neighbours; yet India too has faced repeated rebel ions in different parts of its territory, some of them lasting for generations. One of these, the Naxalite Maoist insurgency, affects a third of India’s districts, and effectively controls huge areas of the Indian countryside – a far greater proportion of India than the proportion of Pakistan ever control ed by the Pakistani Taleban. The Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, in September 2009

described this insurgency as the biggest threat facing India, and said that to date India had been losing the struggle. A recent book by an Indian journalist describes the greater part of the countryside in several Indian states as effectively ‘ungoverned’.9

This is not to argue that India is in any danger of breaking up or col apsing. Rather, one should recognize that states in South Asia have not traditional y exercised direct control over much or even most of their territory, and have always faced continual armed resistance somewhere or other. As in medieval Europe, for most of South Asian history government was mostly indirect, and implemented not by state officials but through local barons or tribal chieftains – who often revolted against the king, emperor or sultan if they felt that he was not treating them with sufficient respect and generosity. The world of the Pakistani landowners of today would in some ways have been immediately recognizable to their fifteenth-century English equivalents.

The British introduced a modern state system which al the present countries of the region have inherited. Yet British rule too was to a great extent indirect. Two-fifths of the territory of British India was in fact ruled by autonomous princes who owed al egiance to the king-emperor (or queen-empress) but governed their own states under British tutelage. Even in the areas which came directly under the British Raj, British rule could not have long maintained itself without the constant help of the local landed aristocrats and chieftains, who in consequence often had pretty much of a free hand when it came to their treatment of their own tenants and labourers. As in parts of Pakistan and India today, these local princelings also sheltered and sponsored bandit groups (dacoits) to help in their constant feuds with their neighbours.

When compared to Canada or France, Pakistan inevitably fails.

When compared to India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, things therefore do not look so terrible. In fact, a good many key features of Pakistan are common to the subcontinent as a whole, from parties led by hereditary dynasties through the savagery of the police and the corruption of officialdom to the everyday violence and latent anarchy of parts of the countryside.

Pakistan is in fact a great deal more like India – or India like Pakistan – than either country would wish to admit. If Pakistan were an Indian state, then in terms of development, order and per capita income it would find itself somewhere in the middle, considerably below Karnataka but considerably above Bihar. Or to put it another way, if India was only the ‘cow-belt’ of Hindi-speaking north India, it probably wouldn’t be a democracy or a growing economic power either, but some form of impoverished Hindu-nationalist dictatorship, riven by local conflicts.

In order to understand how Pakistan works, it is necessary to draw heavily on the field of anthropology; for one of the things that has thoroughly befuddled not just much Western reporting and analysis of Pakistan, but the accounts of Pakistanis themselves, is that very few of the words we commonly use in describing the Pakistani state and political system mean quite what we think they mean, and often they mean something quite different.

This is true whether one speaks of democracy, the law, the judicial system, the police, elections, political parties or even human rights. In fact, one reason why the army is by far the strongest institution in Pakistan is that it is the only one in which its real internal content, behaviour, rules and culture match more or less its official, outward form. Or, to put it another way, it is the only Pakistani institution which actual y works as it is official y meant to – which means that it repeatedly does something that it is not meant to, which is seize power from its weaker and more confused sister institutions.

Parts of Pakistan have been the subject of one of the most distinguished bodies of anthropological literature in the entire discipline; yet with the partial exception of works on the Pathans, almost none of this has made its way into the Western discussion of political and security issues in Pakistan today, let alone the Western media. Critical y important works like those of Muhammad Azam Chaudhary and Stephen Lyon on Punjab are known only to fel ow anthropologists.10

Incidental y, this is why in this book I have chosen to describe as Pathans the ethnicity known to themselves (according to dialect) as Pashtuns or Pakhtuns. It was under the name of Pathans (the Hindustani name for them, adopted by the British) that this people is described and analysed in the great historical and anthropological works of Olaf Caroe, Fredrik Barth, Akbar S. Ahmed and others; and it was also by this name that this people was known for more than a century to their British military adversaries. The name Pathan recal s this great scholarly tradition as wel as the glorious military history of resistance to British conquest, both of which are crucial to understanding developments among the Pathans of the present age.

When it comes to other parts of Pakistani society, the lack of detailed sociological research means that analysts are groping in the dark, and drawing conclusions largely based on anecdotal evidence or their own prejudices. It is striking – and depressing – that more than eight years after 9/11, by far the best US expert on the vital y important subject of Islamist politics in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP)11 is a young graduate student, Joshua White – one key reason being that he has actual y lived in the NWFP. 12 This lack of basic knowledge applies for example to the critical area of urbanization and its effects – or lack of them – on religious, cultural and political patterns.

According to standard theories concerning urbanization in the Muslim world, the colossal movement of Pakistanis to the cities over the past generations should have led to fundamental cultural changes, reducing the power of the old political clans and traditional forms of Islam, and strengthening modern and radical forms of Islam and modern mass parties. But is this real y happening? My own impressions would tend to suggest that things are much more complicated, for reasons that wil be discussed in this book. But they are only impressions. Systematic studies of these questions have not been carried out for almost a generation.

As a result of this lack of basic information, too often in Western analysis, when local forms differ from the supposed Western ‘norm’

they are not examined, but are treated as temporary aberrations, diseases to be cured or tumours to be cut out of the otherwise healthy patient’s system. In fact, these ‘diseases’ are the system, and can only be ‘cured’ by a revolutionary change in the system.

The only forces in Pakistan that are offering such a change are the radical Islamists, and their cure would almost certainly finish the patient off altogether. Failing this, if Pakistan is to fol ow Western models of progress, it wil have to do so slowly, incremental y and above al organical y, in accordance with its own nature and not Western precepts.

THE NEGOTIATED STATE

In the course of Pakistan’s sixty-year history, there have been several different attempts radical y to change Pakistan, by one civilian and three military regimes. Generals Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf, military rulers in 1958 – 69 and 1999 – 2008 respectively, both took as their model Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk’, the great secular modernizing nationalist and founder of the Turkish republic. General Zia-ul-Haq, military ruler from 1977 to 1988, took a very different course, trying to unite and develop Pakistan through enforced adherence to a stricter and more puritanical form of Islam mixed with Pakistani nationalism.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistani People’s Party and civilian ruler of Pakistan in the 1970s, for his part tried to ral y the Pakistani masses behind him with a programme of anti-elitist economic populism, also mixed with Pakistani nationalism.

And they all failed. Every single one of them found their regimes ingested by the elites they had hoped to displace, and engaged in the same patronage politics as the regimes that they had overthrown.

None was able to found a new mass party staffed by professional politicians and ideological y committed activists rather than local ‘feudals’ and urban bosses and their fol owers. Indeed, with the exception of Bhutto none tried seriously to do so, and after a short while Bhutto’s PPP too had ceased to be the radical party of its early years and had become dependent on the same old local clans and local patronage.

The military governments which took power promising to sweep away the political elites and their corruption also found themselves governing through them, partly because no military regime has been strong enough to govern for long without parliament – and parliament is drawn from the same old political elites, and reflects the society which the military regimes wish in principle to change. Western demands that such regimes simultaneously reform the country and restore ‘democracy’ are therefore in some ways an exercise in comprehensively missing the point.

To have changed al this, and created a radical national movement for change like that of Ataturk, would have required two things: firstly a strong Pakistani nationalism akin to modern Turkish nationalism – something that ethnical y divided Pakistan does not have and cannot create; and, secondly, a capacity for ruthlessness to equal that of Ataturk and his fol owers in suppressing ethnic, tribal and religious opposition. For the pleasant Western story of Turkey’s ascent to its fragile democracy of today ignores both the length of time this took and the hecatomb of corpses on which the modern Turkish state was original y built.

With the exception of the dreadful atrocities perpetrated in East Bengal in 1971 – committed against people whom the Punjabi and Pathan soldiery regarded as alien, inferior and Hindu-influenced – the Pakistani state has not been able to commit abuses on a real y massive scale against its own people, either because, in the case of Punjab and the NWFP, its soldiers were not wil ing to kil their own people, or, in Sindh and even Balochistan, because it always in the end had to make compromises with the local elites.

One of the most striking things about Pakistan’s military dictatorships is in fact how mild they have been by the historical standards of such dictatorships, when it comes to suppressing dissent and criticism among the elites. Only one prime minister (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) and a tiny handful of politicians have ever been executed in Pakistan – far fewer than have been kil ed in feuds with each other.

Few senior politicians have been tortured.

Of course, the poor are a different matter, but, as noted, they get beaten up by the police whoever is in power. Perhaps the single most important social distinction in Pakistan is that between what Graham Greene cal ed the ‘torturable classes’ and the ‘untorturable’ ones. 13

This view has support from a surprising source. As General Musharraf writes in his memoirs, ‘Whatever the law, civil or military, the poor are always the victims of oppression.’14

Nor indeed has the Pakistani state ever faced rebel ion in West Pakistan on a scale that would have provoked massacre in response – though that could be changed by the Taleban insurgency in the Pathan areas which began in 2004 and gathered strength in 2008 and 2009. India has faced much more serious rebel ions, and has engaged in much largerscale repression in response.

But in India, as in Pakistan, the state is not responsible for most human rights abuses. This is something that human rights groups in particular find hard to grasp, since they stem from a modern Western experience in which oppression came chiefly from over-mighty states.