by Ali, Tariq
Were this attempted directly by the United States, the Pakistan army would split, and hordes of junior officers would likely decamp to the mountains and resist. The military high command, regularly receiving reports of substantial numbers of soldiers surrendering to much smaller contingents of guerrillas, is well aware that the war in the Frontier Province is extremely unpopular among its troops. The soldiers surrender because they don’t want to fight “America’s war” or kill coreligionists. Junior officers have been taking early retirement to avoid a second tour of duty on the Afghan border. This being the case today, it is not difficult to imagine the result of a direct U.S. intervention inside Pakistan.
At the time of this writing, the Iraq war has cost $3 trillion. An allout war inside Pakistan would require a great deal more. Were the Pakistan army to accept money and weaponry to become the steamroller referred to by Lord Curzon, the “jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger” so frequently cited by the West might well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The regional solution, as I argued in the preceding chapter, is the only serious way out of this crisis.
Armitage accepted that religious extremism had little support in Pakistan, but stressed the crisis of leadership and governance, pointing out the lack of an obvious replacement for President Musharraf:
Unfortunately, the late Benazir Bhutto had a chance as a democratically elected leader, and I think it not for nothing that she found herself in Dubai for a number of years, and Mr. Nawaz Sharif also has had his difficulties. I am not being particularly nasty, I am just pointing out the fact that one of the things that we have to deal with now is that we do not have a ready candidate for soldier of the month.
This view is not much different from my own, with the following proviso. The search for a military pinup to salvage a crisis should come to a permanent halt. The latest incumbent, like his predecessors, has been an abject failure, as the imposition of an emergency revealed. On this, Stephen Cohen, another Brookings expert who specializes in Pakistan, was much sharper in a preelection exchange with me on the Financial Times website:
I’d say that more Americans now see [Musharraf] as a liability, and this begins with the US military who have encountered Pakistan-based Taliban.... At best I see Musharraf being eased out by a combination of the Pakistan army, which must find him now to be an embarrassment, and foreign supporters, including the US but certainly China and the Europeans who realise that Pakistan must have coherent and effective leadership to tackle its many problems, not least of which is the growing violence in the society.
While there is truth to this, Cohen, like most U.S. analysts, underestimates the way that continuous Washington-backed military interventions have wrecked the organic evolution of politics in Pakistan, leaving it in the hands of mediocre and mottled politicians who have, till now, shown few signs of learning from past mistakes and whose only skill is in the relentless pursuit of personal wealth. Musharraf signed his political death warrant when he joined up with one such political faction—the Chaudhrys of Gujrat—to help him retain power. It was a signal that, under his watch, nothing was going to change.
And yet, if the present cycle of Pakistani power struggles could be broken, it is not impossible that a new movement or party might emerge to fundamentally change the political system. A precedent of sorts has been established. Who would have predicted the eruption of a large lawyers’ movement or Supreme Court judges breaking with tradition and refusing a carte blanche to a cornered military government? It happened when the regime had become discredited and the opposition parties ineffective. The judiciary, despite its limitations, filled the vacuum. The timing was right for the chief justice to accept legal challenges to an unpopular and corrupt regime. His actions reignited popular involvement in the political process, creating the basis for an opposition victory in the general elections of 2008.
It is indisputable that the joint victors of the February 2008 general elections—Bhutto’s husband, Asif Zardari, and the Sharif brothers— are tried-and-tested failures. An atmosphere of stifling pusillanimity and conformity prevails inside their political parties where compromises and deals are the prerogative of the leader alone. They were elected primarily because, as is increasingly the case in the West as well, when policy differences in a globalized world are minute, electors tend to vote against the incumbent. Musharraf had outlasted his welcome. His cronies were unpopular. Large-scale manipulation having been vetoed by the new army chief of staff, the elections were cautiously rigged to deny any single party an overall majority in accordance with the U.S.-brokered deal with Benazir.
Benazir had agreed to become Musharraf’s junior partner and work with him and also, if necessary, his favored Chaudhrys of Gujrat. This is why Anne Patterson, the latest U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, summoned the widower Zardari after his election victory and reminded him, no doubt in more diplomatic language, that he had inherited not only the Peoples Party from his wife but also her legacy. Musharraf’s spin doctors piled the pressure on Zardari by informing the media that corruption cases against him in Europe and Pakistan had not been withdrawn. Only his wife had been given legal immunity. This was somewhat mean-spirited since they worked as a team and immunity for one should have applied to the other, but nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems. Finally, the charges in Pakistan were dropped.
A recycling of the country and its modernization is perfectly possible, but it requires large-scale structural reforms. To isolate Pakistan’s problems to religious extremism and dual power in Waziristan or the possession of nuclear weapons is to miss the point, to become marooned in a landscape behind enemy lines. These issues, as I have made clear in preceding chapters, are not unimportant, but the problems relating to them are a direct result of doing Washington’s bidding in previous decades. The imbalance is glaring. In 2001, when U.S. interest in the country resumed, debt and defense amounted to two-thirds of public spending—257 billion rupees ($4.2 billion) and 149.6 billion rupees ($2.5 billion) respectively, compared to total tax revenues of 414.2 billion rupees ($6.9 billion). In a country with one of the worst public education systems in Asia—70 percent of women and 41 percent of men are officially classified as illiterate—and with health care virtually nonexistent for over half the population, a mere 105.1 billion rupees ($1.75 billion) was left for overall development.
Throughout the nineties, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had scolded civilian governments for failing to keep their restructuring promises. Musharraf’s regime, by contrast, won admiring praise from 1999 onward for sticking to IMF guidelines “despite the hardships imposed on the public by austerity measures.” Impoverishment and desperation in the burgeoning city slums and the countryside—still home to 67.5 percent of the population—were exacerbated further. Some 56 million Pakistanis, nearly 30 percent of the population, now live below the poverty line; the number has increased by 15 million since Musharraf seized power. Of Pakistan’s four provinces, the Punjab, with around 60 percent of the population, has continued to dominate economically and politically, with Punjabis filling the upper echelons of the army and bureaucracy and channeling what development there is to local projects. Sind, with 23 percent of the population, and Baluchistan, with 5 percent, remain starved of funds, water, and power supplies, while the North-West Frontier’s fortunes have increasingly been tied to the Afghan war and heroin economy.
A cash-flow crisis in May 2008 was temporarily resolved by a Saudi commitment to provide oil on long-term credit.
TO PERMANENTLY continue as a satrapy is certainly not going to help Pakistan. Instead, a number of changes, if implemented, could set the country on the road to rapid economic development experienced elsewhere in Asia, while at the same time building and sustaining democratic structures at the level of the state.
First, serious land reform is required to disperse economic and political power to the countryside, reduce rural poverty, and provide aid and subsidies to farmers and peasant cooperatives. Farmers in the United States and Eu
rope have been heavily subsidized, often to the detriment of agriculture in the third world. A subsidy program to small farmers in Pakistan could be of great benefit, but elite attachment to the current market-priorities global system militates against any such plan. Ownership of land is highly concentrated. Only 20 percent of all landholders own more than thirty-five acres, and less than 10 percent own more than one hundred acres. Eighty-six percent of households in Sind, 78 percent in Baluchistan, 74 percent in the Punjab, and 65 percent in the North-West Frontier Province own no land at all. Fifty-five percent of the country’s total population of 170 million is landless. This inequity lies at the heart of rural poverty.
The problem is structural. The economy rests on a narrow production base, heavily dependent on the unreliable cotton crop and the low-value-added textile industry; irrigation supplies are deficient, and soil erosion and salinity are widespread. More damaging still are the crippling social relations in the countryside. Low productivity in agriculture can only be reversed through the implementation of serious land reforms, but the alliance between khaki state and local landlords makes this virtually impossible. As an Economist Intelligence Unit report on Pakistan noted:
Change is hindered not least because the status quo suits the wealthy landowners who dominate the sector, as well as federal and provincial parliaments. Large landowners own 40 per cent of the arable land and control most of the irrigation system. Yet assessments by independent agencies, including the World Bank, show them to be less productive than smallholders. They are also poor taxpayers, heavy borrowers and bad debtors.*
The weak economy has been further skewed for decades now by Pakistan’s vast military apparatus. For “security reasons,” its detailed budget is never itemized in official statements: a single line records the overall sum. In Pakistan, the power of any elected body to probe into military affairs has always been strictly curtailed. The citizenry remains unaware of how the annual $2.5 billion is distributed between the army (550,000 strong, with over two thousand tanks and two armored divisions); the air force (ten fighter squadrons of forty combat planes each, as well as French- and U.S.-made missile systems); and the navy (ten submarines, eight frigates)—let alone what is spent on nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
In these circumstances the most recent slogan of the Ministry of Culture, “Grow and Globalize,” takes on a satirical, if not surrealist, hue. Unfortunately it is meant seriously. The idea behind it is the sale of large tracts of land to global agribusiness, as has been done in Brazil, while along the way transforming the peasants into employees on short-term contracts. A civil servant from the Finance Ministry in Islamabad was recently reported in the press as saying, “The era of land reform has gone and now the government wants to create new job opportunities through liberalization, privatization, and deregulation of the economy. There is no plan even to discuss land reforms in the upcoming planning document.” In the face of this brutal new approach, the old-fashioned feudal landlords have been given a renewed lease on life. In Sind, for instance, they continue to administer justice, dominate politics, rule their fiefdoms with an iron hand, and also, in their own fashion, provide for the common weal by not letting their peasants starve. Some, such as Mumtaz Bhutto (Benazir’s uncle), openly contend that those who work their land are better off under a precapitalist system of this sort than under what is offered by globalization. Of course, they will not even consider a third alternative of land redistribution to the poor.
Alongside agricultural reform, a functioning social infrastructure urgently needs to be created for the mass of the population. This requires a transformation on three levels: education, health, and cheap housing. Of these the first two should now be a strategic priority for any government. Figures released by the UN in 2007–8 place Pakistan 136th out of 177 on the Human Development Index, below Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, and Myanmar. Illiteracy has actually increased and will continue to do so unless measures are taken. The official primary-school enrollment rate of 53 percent is the lowest in South Asia and is almost certainly an overestimate. The Ministry of Education, I was told in Islamabad, pays salaries to nonexistent teachers, charges overhead for deserted school buildings, and has various other scams that inflate the published figures. Even so, the official spending on education is 2.4 percent of GDP, considerably lower than that of Nepal. Despite the parlous state of primary education, more than 50 percent of the allocated nonrecurrent education budget goes unspent each year because of the poor capacity of the system. Many smaller towns have empty, dilapidated school buildings with few teachers. Given this, it is hardly a surprise that desperate, poor families are prepared to entrust their children to madrassas of the Isalamists, where they will be fed, clothed, and educated better than in what passes for a state system. The private educational network is both expensive and class-bound, sometimes rejecting children from poor backgrounds even when they have managed to borrow the money or obtained philanthropic aid. This massive shortcoming in Pakistani society is the responsibility of every government since 1947. The Bhuttos, father and daughter, were no better than Zia and Musharraf in this regard. A high-quality state system with English as a compulsory language (on the Malaysian model) would be an extremely popular measure in every province and would entirely transform the country.
Educational opportunities may be limited in Pakistan, but the poor have almost no health care. Recent figures show that there are just eight physicians and one dentist per ten thousand people and fewer than five hundred psychiatrists for a country with large numbers of traumatized and disturbed people. Malnutrition, acute respiratory illnesses, tuberculosis, preventable diseases of various types, are widespread. One in every eleven citizens suffers from diabetes. Given the lack of facilities, and with nearly three-quarters of Pakistan’s specialist doctors working in the United States, government hospitals are a disgrace. Most medical practitioners work in their own clinics or private hospitals for the rich. No official statistics are provided, but Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad together have up to a hundred or so well equipped of the latter. Conditions in state hospitals in the big cities are grim, and the lack of affordable medicine a permanent curse on the poor. The tragedy is continuous. The coalition government formed after the February 2008 elections announced its twenty top “ministries.” These did not include “health and human development.”
As for housing, the state provides none except for those currently in government service or the armed forces. The privatization of land in the military cantonments has meant, however, that new military colonies are being created in remote areas outside the cities.
The legal system too is skewed in favor of the wealthy. Recent events with the chief justices notwithstanding, most judges in Pakistan have been vacillating, cowardly, negligent, prejudiced, and above all corrupt. The Zia dictatorship frightened them into submission. His civilian heirs appointed political cronies with the result that, especially during the nineties, justice in Pakistan has never been blind; what was usually weighed in its scales was banknotes, with a few honorable exceptions. It was no secret in the country that in legal cases involving property or corporate claims, senior lawyers, when asked to name a fee, would simply ask the client how many judges he was prepared to buy.
The spate of recent Supreme Court activism that led to Pakistan’s only judicial crisis does offer hope on this front, but it is worth remembering that the rot begins at the primary level. Judicial and legal reforms, including a complete separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive, would be a first step toward reviving a dysfunctional state. Proper salaries to reduce the need for “illegal” money would also be helpful. The restoration of the chief justice and his colleagues sacked by Musharraf is an important political issue. But even if the divisions on this question, both within the PPP and between it and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League, were resolved and the judges reinstated, the structural problems would not go away.
It soon became clear that Zardari was more sympathetic
to Musharraf than he was to judicial activists.
The “march” from Karachi to Islamabad was in reality a drive to the capital in cars and buses. It was large, but the government insisted there should neither be a sit-in or a permanent siege of parliament. The leaders capitulated and disbanded the assembly. The result has been to demoralize the movement. Where Musharraf failed, the widower has succeeded.
One of the proud boasts of the Musharraf regime was that it had provided the country with a free media for the first time in its history. This was only a partial exaggeration. Pakistan’s first two military dictators had crushed the media in blatant fashion. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was not a great friend of press freedom, nor was Nawaz Sharif. While Benazir Bhutto did not interfere with the print media, both she and her husband offered nonstop advice to the programmers of PTV, the state television network, which was impossible to ignore. By way of contrast, Musharraf, during his early days as president, when he was brimming with self-confidence, ended the state monopoly of television. The airwaves were liberated. As a result a range of new stations mushroomed, often providing higher-quality news reportage and analysis than their counterparts in India or Britain. A cocky and arrogant General Musharraf did not imagine that he could ever be threatened by press freedom. He also knew that Pakistanis watched Indian cable channels and news bulletins much more than they did their own state TV. He recognized that reforming the antiquated broadcasting structure would benefit local businesses and create a healthy competition with channels abroad, and indeed this is what happened.
