Daniel S Markey
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shared history, keeping a close eye on how Pakistanis have come to understand
the United States (Chapter 3), and paying careful attention to how American
officials have handled recent episodes in the relationship (Chapters 4 and 5).
Finally, Washington needs to craft a vision of the future that places Pakistan
into a much larger regional context (Chapter 6).
No single magic-bullet strategy is delivered from this process, but a set of
broad guidelines, born from hard experience and leavened by a realistic hope for
the future, emerges from the gloom (Chapter 7). By remaining focused on the
long term even as it grapples with crises and by selectively implementing parts of
defensive insulation as well as cooperative strategies, America can successfully
“get on with it” in Pakistan. In practice, this boils down to preparing for the
worst, aiming for the best, and avoiding the most dangerous mistakes of the
past.
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The Four Faces of Pakistan
Understanding Pakistan on its own terms is no mere academic pursuit. Too
often over the past decade, America has stumbled in its dealings with Pakistan
because U.S. policymakers made incorrect assumptions about how Pakistan
works.
In Washington, views of Pakistan seem to swing like a pendulum between the
extremes of ungrounded exuberance and overstated fear. Both have influenced
U.S. policies for the worse. For instance, in 2008 and 2009, many in Washing-
ton dreamt that Islamabad’s newly elected civilian leaders could implement a
liberal agenda and finally rein in Pakistan’s military after President (and former
General) Pervez Musharraf left the scene. They failed to perceive how deeply
entrenched was the army’s power, and how limited was the liberal impulse
and capacity of Pakistan’s ruling politicians and their constituents. At other
times, similarly faulty American assumptions led Washington’s policymakers
to perceive – and portray – Pakistan as if it stood just at the edge of violent
Islamist revolution.
To think seriously about a U.S. strategy for Pakistan, we need to know how
close (or far) it is to the abyss of failure, nuclear nightmare, or revolution;
how to assess its potential for reform and growth; and how to anticipate the
interests and ambitions of its people. Answering such questions first requires
us to paint a realistic portrait of Pakistan’s state and society.
The trouble with painting such a portrait is that Pakistan shows different
faces to different audiences. To the uninitiated, any one of these faces could
present itself as the defining image of Pakistan’s reality. In fact, each one
provides an important layer of truth, but a layer that must be combined with
the others to achieve a full picture.1
1 Stephen P. Cohen portrays the complexity of Pakistan’s politics and strategic posture in his authoritative work The Idea of Pakistan (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).
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30
No Exit from Pakistan
From one perspective, Pakistan is an elite-dominated basket case of a coun-
try, mired in a repressive tradition that makes sure a tiny number of “haves”
possess a great deal of power and wealth while the rest have not. From a second
perspective, Pakistan is a garrison state. The military has grown to control not
only its own budgets and authorities but also to dictate national politics and
a big slice of the economy as well. From a third point of view, Pakistan is a
terrorist incubator. The nation suffers from the cancerous growth of violent
and extreme ideologies, now embedded too deeply and dispersed too widely
to be removed by the political equivalent of minor surgery. And from a final
vantage point, Pakistan is a youthful idealist, teeming with the energy and
reform-minded ambition of its rapidly growing population.
basket case
Pakistan’s caste system is not as overt as India’s, but as in many traditional soci-
eties, it is difficult to escape the consequences of one’s family name. Throughout
much of the countryside, Pakistan’s “feudals” hold millions of Pakistani peas-
ants in their thrall as they have for centuries. The nation’s half-hearted attempts
at land reform flopped. By denying education and other basic opportunities to
the people who work their fields, landlords maintain a grip on political and
economic power. By and large, however, Pakistanis simply accept and play out
their roles – whether peasant or landlord – because they know that to do oth-
erwise would be deeply disruptive.2 In much of the country, change – whether
reform or revolution – remains a foreign concept.
Even in Pakistan’s teeming cities, vast majorities also feel powerful ties to
communities that pre-date Pakistan’s existence as a state. Some bonds are to
family and tribe, others to language or the practice of a particular strain of
Islam. Pakistan is no melting pot; its ethnic groups may live side by side, but at
home they speak different languages and hold fast to their particular customs.
Pakistan’s people are distributed among five principal ethno-linguistic
groups: Punjabis, Sindhis, Baloch, Pashtuns, and Mohajirs.3 Punjabis, who
have long maintained a dominant position in Pakistan’s politics, military, and
economy, comprise just under half of the total population and are clustered
in the north and east, Pakistan’s agricultural and industrial heartland. Sindhis
(in the southeastern plains), Pashtuns (in the west along the Afghan border),
and the Baloch (in the southwestern desert) together make up about 35 per-
cent of the population but have historically had less access to the levers of
Pakistani power. “Mohajirs,” derived from the Arabic word for immigrants,
are the descendants of those who moved from India to Pakistan at the time
2 This is one of the essential findings in Stephen M. Lyon’s doctoral thesis, Power and Patronage in Pakistan, University of Kent, Canterbury, 1993, p. 228.
3 For a detailed look at Pakistan’s ethnic groups, see Chapter 6 of Cohen, Idea of Pakistan, pp. 201–230.
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The Four Faces of Pakistan
31
of Partition. Although Mohajirs played a prominent role in Pakistan’s early
establishment, they have since been displaced.4 Throughout Pakistan’s history,
ethnic tensions – and, at the extremes, Pashtun and Baloch separatist move-
ments – have posed significant challenges to Pakistani unity.
Once, on a trip to Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s least-developed Baluchis-
tan province, I was surprised to learn that even
Pakistanis who had moved to
the city with their families many decades earlier were still called the deroga-
tory “settlers” by the ethnic Baloch and Pashtuns. In spite of the fact that
Pakistan has seen its share of population movements over the centuries –
whether from invasion, colonial rule, or partition – history runs deep. Identities
are inculcated into each of Pakistan’s rapidly expanding generations, reinforc-
ing patterns of behavior and, to a greater extent than one might expect in this
era of individualism and globalization, thought as well.
Reforming a traditional society like Pakistan’s has proven beyond the means
of even some of the country’s most powerful men. Pakistanis readily recall that
Chief of Army Staff Pervez Musharraf, upon seizing power in a 1999 coup
against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government, declared his intention to
clean out the dirty, corrupt politicians and start fresh. “Never before so few
have plundered so many,” he said at his first news conference. “Account-
ability is the demand of everyone . . . And we want to do it quickly.”5 For
several years, Musharraf enjoyed the broad support of Pakistanis exhausted by
a decade of revolving door democracy that witnessed two of Benazir Bhutto’s
Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) governments alternating with two led by Nawaz
Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N). By the public’s reckoning, both
parties had broken new records for corruption, mismanagement, and political
gamesmanship.
Musharraf failed to capitalize on the opportunity for change. One simple
measure of Musharraf’s failure to transform, or even to reform, Pakistan’s
politics is the fact that when he was hounded out of office in 2008, the very
same Bhutto and Sharif showed him to the door. By then, Musharraf and his
own ramshackle political party (the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam),
or PML-Q) were the ones accused of corruption and dereliction of duty. The
problem was that the PML-Q, populated by the nation’s traditional political
elite, never had any serious plan to deviate from the status quo. Musharraf
cannot be absolved from blame for the many failures of his regime, but it is
clear that one of the worst failures of all was to expect different results from
the same, tired old politicians.
4 As Steve Inskeep points out, the self-conscious creation of “Mohajirs” as a politically active ethnic identity was the seminal work of Altaf Husain, leader of the MQM, which initially stood for “Mohaijir Qaumi Movement,” Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), pp. 174–175.
5 “Musharraf Forms Accountability Bureau,” Associated Press, November 2, 1999, http://www
.indianexpress.com/Storyold/130023/.
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32
No Exit from Pakistan
After Musharraf’s collapse, the new civilian government benefited from the
legitimacy of popular elections and the public euphoria of seeing the military
sent back to the barracks. The benefits of civilian rule should not be underesti-
mated. Most of the liberalizing reforms of the Musharraf era, from the media
to political activity, were protected or even expanded during the five-year term
of the democratically elected government led at the center by the PPP under
Benazir Bhutto’s widower, President Asif Ali Zardari. Beyond that, the par-
liament voted for a series of constitutional amendments and struck political
accords that granted greater autonomy to Pakistan’s provincial governments
and returned power to the prime minister from the president. Pakistan’s civil-
ians passed an important milestone in democratic political development simply
by serving out a full five-year term and conducting a second set of national
elections in May 2013.6
Yet with respect to tangible accomplishments – economic growth, law
and order, or administrative services – the vast majority of Pakistanis still
found their elected leadership wanting. As one prominent Pakistani think tank
observed, “Apart from some historic achievements during its five year term,
the 13th National Assembly remained unsuccessful in providing workable rec-
ommendations on resolving Pakistan’s key issues including terrorism, law and
order situations in Balochistan, Karachi and FATA, and growing sectarianism.
Regardless of the severity of these issues, the Assembly’s response never moved
beyond expressing sorrow.” Moreover, “the performance of democracy, also
known as governance, remained dismal in 5 years. . . . There have been palpa-
ble failures in the domain of economy, control of corruption, maintenance of
peace and order in the society and provision of speedy justice to the citizens in
which National Assembly remained unable to play an effective oversight role.
There have been charges of corruption on cabinet members while the state of
economy is worse than in 2008.”7
Indeed, according to national surveys conducted in late 2012 and early 2013,
58 percent of Pakistanis felt the overall quality of democratic governance had
deteriorated over the period from 2008 to 2013.8 Nearly all (94 percent) of
Pakistanis surveyed between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believed the
country was heading in the wrong direction. Of that same age group, 77 percent
viewed the army favorably, while the civilian government got favourable
6 For a brief assessment of the accomplishments of the PPP government, see Shamila N. Chaudhary,
“How Did They Do? Grading the PPP,” afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/03/28/how did
they do grading the ppp.
7 Citizens Report, Five Years of the 13th National Assembly of Pakistan, Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency, Islamabad, Pakistan, March 2013, http://www
.pildat.org/publications/publication/Democracy&LegStr/5Yearsof13thNationalAssemblyof Pakistan-CitizensReport.pdf.
8 Thirty-one percent of Pakistanis felt the quality of governance had improved, while 15 percent felt the quality was unchanged. See Public Verdict on Democracy 2008–2013, Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency, Islamabad, Pakistan, February 2013, http://www
.pildat.org/Publications/publication/SDR/PublicVerdictonDemocracy_2008to2013.pdf.
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The Four Faces of Pakistan
33
reviews from only 14 percent. Most disconcerting of all, only 29 percent of
those young Pakistanis saw democracy as the best form of government for
Pakistan, whereas 38 percent preferred some sort of Islamic law, or Shariah,
and 32 percent thought military rule would be best.9
Growth without Development
It is important to appreciate that despite decades of unfulfilled promises by
Pakistan’s leaders – both military and civilian – most Pakistanis are still better
off, at least by basic economic measures, than their grandparents. Average
wages increase
d fivefold for Pakistanis from 1947 to 2003. In 1947, the country
could not feed its 30 million people, while in 2002 the country produced more
than enough wheat, rice, sugar, and milk to meet the demands of its burgeoning
population of 145 million. Over its history, Pakistan has dramatically expanded
its network of roads, factories, power plants, dams, and canals. Moreover,
in absolute terms, Pakistanis also have greater access to health services and
education than their parents or grandparents did before them.10
Yet Pakistan might have done a lot better for itself if its government had
invested greater resources in the health and education of its people. Pakistan
is a model of what one prominent economist has called “growth without
development.”11 Pakistan’s history of economic growth has been respectable,
but it “systematically underperforms on most social and political indicators–
education, health, sanitation, fertility, gender equality, corruption, political
instability and violence, and democracy – for its level of income.”12 In other
words, the country has routinely done less with more.
A country’s infant mortality rate – the number of children in 1,000 who
die before reaching one year of age – is a good way to measure living stan-
dards across countries. As countries develop, the rate tends to go down. In
some of the world’s richest countries, like Japan, the number is very low (just
over 2 per 1,000 in 2012). In Pakistan, over 60 out of 1,000 children die
before the age of one, putting it right between Rwanda and Uganda in global
rankings.13
9 Alex Rodriguez, “Survey: Young Pakistanis Harbor Doubts about Future, Democracy,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2013, http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-survey-young-pakistanis-democracy-20130403,0,2015291.story.
10 All of these points are made in detail by Ishrat Husain, “The Economy of Pakistan: Past, Present and Future,” in Robert Hathaway, Wilson Lee, and Ishrat Husain, eds., Islamization and the Pakistani Economy (Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2004), pp. 11–35.
11 William Easterly, “The Political Economy of Growth without Development: A Case Study of Pakistan,” paper for the Analytical Narratives of Growth Project, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (June 2001), http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/File/