[R-G] Pakistan’s permanent crisis

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=27109

Commentaries - November/December 2008

Between imperial client and useful enemy

Pakistan’s permanent crisis

Justin Podur

Pakistani scholar–activist Eqbal Ahmed, who died in 1999, had a canny  
ability to predict events. In a 1974 article for the Journal of  
Contemporary Asia, he suggested that Pakistan was headed towards a  
police state structure because of the class and ideological  
composition of the military and its supremacy over civil society.1  
Other sectors, such as the bureaucracy, feudal landlords and the small  
entrepreneurial class, were weak and subordinate. Opposition parties,  
meanwhile, were ‘given more to hyperbole and public meetings than to  
organizing and resisting. A large part of the opposition is either  
ideologically reactionary or indistinguishable from the party in  
power.’ A police state would use either a kind of developmental- 
fascist ideology (as happened in Chile, Brazil and Greece) or it would  
rely on religious fundamentalism, and would find an eager sponsor in  
the United States. ‘Unfortunately,’ the article concludes, ‘the  
democratic and revolutionary groups in Pakistan to whom falls the  
responsibility of halting this trend are as yet only weakly developed.’

The main elements of Eqbal Ahmed’s analysis remain valid today. The  
military has become even stronger relative to civil society, opposing  
social forces weaker and divided, with democratic and revolutionary  
groups only weakly developed. At the epicentre of the War on Terror,  
Pakistan’s current predicament brings together the inability of the  
state to deliver development or justice to its people, an ambiguous  
imperial sponsor, all the economic woes of neoliberal capitalism, and  
the cooptation mechanisms of ‘democracy promotion’. Despite an absence  
of legitimacy, organizational inefficacy, and shrinking capacity to  
respond to challenges from the USA or India, Pakistan’s military  
dictatorship survives because it is stronger than civil society and  
political alternatives to it have been destroyed. The strength of the  
regime is based on the absence of feasible alternatives.

Ousting Musharraf: back to civilian power?

President Musharraf resigned in August 2008, but, as Tariq Ali  
commented, ‘Over the last 50 years the USA has worked mainly with the  
Pakistan army. This has been its preferred instrument. Nothing has  
changed. The question being asked now is how long it will be before  
the military is back at the helm.’2

In Pakistan the reins of government are the prize of a three-way  
contest between civilian authority, a weak civil society and the  
military, with the military by far the strongest player. Musharraf  
came to power in a coup back in 1999. When his legitimacy was  
eventually challenged by the Supreme Court last year, he sacked the  
Supreme Court judges. The judges responded and large numbers mobilized  
alongside them in the ‘lawyers’ movement’ that began when Supreme  
Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was suspended in March  
2007. That movement also found support and strength from commercial  
media that had paradoxically acquired some new freedom under  
Musharraf’s dictatorship, and continue tentatively to test that  
freedom. The next phase of the contest was fought in the arena of the  
parliamentary elections, which Benazir Bhutto, after negotiations with  
Washington and Musharraf, returned to Pakistan to contest – only to be  
assassinated in December 2007. The elections took place anyway, in  
February 2008; Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) as well as the  
Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML–N) of Nawaz Sharif, who had been  
prime minister until ousted by Musharraf’s coup in 1999, came to  
dominate the post-coup government. The Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e- 
Azam (PML–Q), Musharraf’s party, made a poor showing, as did those  
Islamist parties that had enjoyed state sponsorship under Musharraf.  
When the PPP and PML–N reached power with help from popular support  
and the prestige of the lawyer’s struggle, they did not reinstate the  
Supreme Court.

Both Nawaz Sharif and the PPP head and new President Asif Ali Zardari,  
Benazir Bhutto’s widower, have reasons to fear an independent  
judiciary. Zardari and Sharif had both been up for corruption charges  
for their behaviour under previous governments. The post-election  
brokering involved various mutual amnesties. Moreover, if the  
judiciary didn’t give in to the military government, it might not give  
in to the civilian government either.

In August 2008, Zardari and Sharif finally made their move, taking  
action to impeach President Musharraf and stating that the  
reinstatement of the judges would follow. After months in power,  
during which they neither restored the judges nor made any headway  
with the country’s growing number of political or economic problems,  
the fractious coalition of the PPP and PML–N agreed on a plan: to move  
against Musharraf, using the prestige the elected government still  
retains, and to reinstate the judges. It was a risky strategy for  
leaders who are dogged by charges of corruption and illegality dating  
from previous turns in government (or, in Zardari’s case, behind the  
scenes in government). There is still no plan for dealing with the US  
occupation of Afghanistan or the resistance against it, or with other  
forces operating from the Afghan border area of Pakistan. Nor do they  
have a plan for the economic problems. No doubt the strategy is to  
blame Musharraf for the inherited problems, to buy some time.

The USA in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s intractable insurgency

Now that the plan has succeeded, the coalition has already begun to  
unravel as US military pressure continues on the Afghan border, and  
the Supreme Court judges remain out of office. As the USA tries to  
decide whether Pakistan would be of greater benefit as an ally or an  
enemy, Pakistan’s rulers have a delicate balance to strike if they  
want to stay in power. Musharraf’s claim to competence was based on  
the fact that he managed the country and kept a relationship with the  
USA through an impossible situation. Pakistan’s military strategy  
since its independence in 1947 has always been based primarily on the  
Indian threat and Kashmir. Pakistan’s alliances with the United States  
and China were motivated by this consideration.

Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally  
Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are ethnically Pashtun, which is also  
the ethnicity of the largest number of Afghans. The border is porous  
and not really recognized by the people who live there. The state’s  
relationship to NWFP has also been complex. The FATA area does not  
have provincial status and administration occurs through patron–client  
and negotiated relationships with local leaders. Throughout its  
history, Pakistan faced resentment from each subnational minority, all  
of whom resented domination by the Punjabi majority, whose elite is  
overrepresented in the military. One of the reasons that the military  
operations in the NWFP have been so unsuccessful is that Pashtuns in  
the military do not see the logic of firing on their fellow Pashtuns,  
Pakistanis, Muslims, for the sake of a US war.

When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, these areas of Pakistan  
became the bases for a US-, Saudi- and Pakistani-sponsored war against  
the Soviets. This moment saw three important changes in Pakistan.  
First, control passed to Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s worst military  
dictator, who ‘Islamized’ the military and attempted to ‘Islamize’ the  
other institutions of the country.3 Second, the USSR presence in  
Afghanistan changed the US attitude towards Pakistan, including its  
nuclear programme, which the USA began to support covertly. Third, the  
most ‘hands-on’ role in organizing this war was taken on by Pakistan’s  
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). After the USSR left in 1988,  
Pakistan maintained a very strong influence in Afghanistan, and was  
profoundly influenced in turn – by the small arms, narcotics economy,  
and militarism that are inevitably associated with covert operations,  
and by the Islamist ideology that was used to mobilize fighters from  
all over the world to come through Pakistan to join battle with the  
USSR. When veterans of these movements, angry with America’s bases in  
Saudi Arabia, the destruction of Iraq and support for Israel, turned  
their guns on the USA and attacked New York in 2001, Pakistan was in a  
bind. Clients that it had once supported along with the USA were now  
in the gunsights of its ally. By providing the USA with help in the  
invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan was able to save its clients and its  
own personnel from destruction, as much of the Taliban and al-Qaeda  
crossed the border to Pakistan or went to ground and Afghanistan was  
taken over by US-friendly warlords. Musharraf paid a price for this,  
however, in assassination attempts and accusations of treason for  
supporting the USA against fellow Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

That tension has escalated continuously since 2001. Today, the USA and  
NATO demand that Pakistan take action against insurgents operating in  
NWFP and FATA. When Pakistan does so, its forces take casualties and  
it loses legitimacy in the region. When it provides passive or active  
support for the insurgents, as it has in the past, it is exposed to US  
threats (and its soldiers, sometimes, to US bombs). As the motives of  
the USA/NATO themselves seem increasingly confused or contradictory –  
is their aim to establish a long-term presence in the region? To watch  
and threaten Pakistan? To fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban? – parts of  
the countryside of Afghanistan and the NWFP and FATA have come under  
the control of the Taliban. While Pakistan’s authorities promise to  
use their military to extend the ‘writ of the state’ in those areas,  
insurgency in both countries is growing in opposition to the extension  
of the writ of the wrong kind of state. The global and local balance  
of forces makes it virtually impossible for a state like Pakistan to  
deal with this kind of insurgency.

Counterinsurgency and the absence of the state

As mentioned above, the FATA have no representative provincial  
administration: the central government rules through deals with local  
leaders. This hangover from the British Raj is a symptom of a colonial  
state, the operation of which has generated resistance in FATA,  
Baluchistan and Sindh over decades. The Taliban have flourished not  
just because of the NATO occupation of Afghanistan but also because of  
the absence of the state in the NWFP and FATA. People rely on the  
insurgency’s sharia courts for justice, as even brutal justice fills a  
vacuum.

In other parts of Pakistan, the vacuum is filled in different ways. In  
Karachi, for example, there are reports of mob violence and lynching.  
The idea that the Taliban could take all of Pakistan is exaggerated.  
Despite its strength in NWFP and FATA, there are very different  
structures, elites, and power bases in Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan.  
If NATO leaves and Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, the maximal  
scenario for Pakistan is probably a de facto Taliban-controlled NWFP  
and FATA. Deterioration of the state could also be blamed for the  
region’s opium problem. Since 2001, there have been periodic waves of  
stories about opium and its role in fuelling the insurgency in the  
West. But the idea of an ‘opium-fuelled insurgency’ can be deceptive.  
Today, the Afghan economy is dependent on poppy, which, according to  
the UN sociologist David Macdonald, supplies 60 per cent of  
Afghanistan’s GDP and employs 10 per cent of its people.4 Everyone in  
the economy, from farmers to local warlords, from foreign intelligence  
agents to government officials, from the Taliban to probably NATO  
soldiers as well, are taking a piece. It is not just the insurgency  
that’s opium-fuelled, but the entire economy.

The narcotics trade provides resources for the insurgency to challenge  
the state. Meanwhile, the state, and specifically the military, is  
present in areas that are normally the preserve of the private sector.  
As Ayesha Siddiqa documents in her book Military Inc., the military  
owns cornflakes, banks, real estate, cement, insurance, and many other  
industries.5 This is far from the public ownership of socialist  
economics, as there is no national development project behind it.  
Indeed, transnational capital is encouraged to take its share as well,  
especially in resource-rich Baluchistan, where companies such as  
Canada’s Barrick Gold are signing contracts for exploration and  
mining. Military spending has also drawn resources away from  
development and investment in the national economy.

Government failures, ecological dangers

Although Pakistan’s military business, or ‘Milbus’, structure is  
sometimes blamed for poor economic performance, the country has deeper  
structural economic and ecological problems exacerbated by the rise in  
energy prices and climate change. Pakistan’s breadbasket is the  
Punjab, also the keystone site of the ‘Green Revolution’, in which  
modern chemical agriculture was adopted at the urging of Western  
planners and financiers. The Green Revolution is often presented as a  
tremendous advance, but some students of South Asian agriculture, like  
Vandana Shiva, Devinder Sharma and P. Sainath, have shown a less  
bright side to it – exhausted soil, people without work and no way to  
feed themselves, rural-to-urban migration, increased vulnerability to  
global commodity prices, and dependence on expensive inputs.

In 2008 Pakistan missed its cotton production target and had to import  
cotton to run its textile industry, significantly reducing its  
earnings of foreign exchange Without much energy of its own (except  
for gas in Baluchistan), Pakistan needs this foreign exchange in order  
to buy ever-more-expensive energy. It is also importing food – milk,  
meat, vegetables, wheat, dry fruits, tea, spices, edible oil, sugar  
and pulses. Combined with global problems in the food system (see Raj  
Patel, ‘The Hungry of the Earth’ RP 151) and the supply of food to  
NATO in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s food security is in peril. The way in  
which the energy price shocks of the 1970s hurt the development of  
Third World countries that didn’t have their own oil resources is  
repeating itself today, combined this time with the perils of climate  
change. The Punjab’s water comes mainly from glacier-fed rivers,  
which, according to most scenarios, will dry up when the glaciers  
melt. These economic and ecological problems are a potent source of  
regional catastrophe, to which must be added the threat of nuclear  
destruction, derived from the rivalry with India.

The weakness of the Left

Such converging crises ought to provide an opening for left politics.  
But secular left forces in Pakistan are isolated and precarious, and  
have to contend with forces of cooption that have become far stronger  
since the 1970s, especially NGOs. Critics of neoliberalism,  
privatization and militarism are present, but cannot find a foothold  
in the clientelistic structures of the main political parties. Some  
leftists work through the NGO sector, but the NGO structure has its  
own serious limitations, based as it is on foreign funding, often  
providing clientelistic services itself.

Some NGOs, like Roots for Equity, which works in villages in Sindh and  
NWFP, are aware of these limitations and use the structure anyway, as  
a basis for organizing and educating peasants about agrarian policy  
and problems. ‘The only alternative would be to form a political  
party’, argued Azra Talat Syed of Roots for Equity, ‘and there are  
dozens of tiny left political parties with no following. When  
movements are strong enough, parties will emerge.’

Other grassroots groups such as the Rawalpindi-based People’s Rights  
Movement (PRM) agitate and demonstrate on political issues, including  
support for the lawyers’ movement and opposition to military  
operations in the NWFP and FATA. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar suggested that  
capacity was a problem for radical politics: ‘the objective conditions  
for progressive politics are tremendous: all parties are not trusted  
and have fallen off the pedestal. We are growing but not fast enough.  
There is potential but we don’t have the people to do the work.’  
Partly, PRM argued, the NGO sector was diverting people who would  
otherwise join movements. Partly, there has been a break in historical  
continuity, with missing generations of leftists and hence no one to  
work with younger people interested in radical politics due to decades  
of dictatorship. Socialism is often associated with atheism and, at  
worst, with the USSR and its invasion of Afghanistan.

Secular opposition groups do not take an anti-religious stand, but  
instead focus on economic and political issues without attacking the  
connection between religion and politics directly. To date, there has  
not been a movement that articulated opposition to the regime in  
religious terms. In Pakistan and India (as well as in Israel and the  
USA), religious symbols in politics are associated with the Right,  
although there are hints of attempts to challenge and contest right- 
wing politics and religion in Pakistan.

Despite its inability to offer development or democracy to most of its  
citizens, Pakistan’s regime survives with help from the USA and  
through the absence of challengers in civil society strong enough to  
replace it. In relative terms, the military is still the supreme  
institution in the country. In the coming years the regime could  
easily find itself facing a hostile United States, and it might not  
survive such a contest. Many of the possible future scenarios are  
disastrous, but not all of them. Forces in play include those who  
mobilized to reinstate the judges, media that have had a taste of  
freedom, fledgling anti-imperialist movements for social justice, and  
activists working for dialogue and detente with India. When I was in  
the country in July, university students invited me to return in  
twenty years, when, they promised, democracy in Pakistan would be  
flourishing.

Notes

    1. Eqbal Ahmed, ‘Pakistan – Signposts to a Police State’, Journal  
of Contemporary Asia, vol. IV, no. 4, 1974, republished in E. Ahmed,  
Between Past and Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.
    2. Tariq Ali, ‘Musharraf Will Be Gone in Days’, Guardian, 14  
August 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/14/pakistan.usa?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront 
.
    3. An entertaining and well-informed version of Zia ul-Haq’s last  
days is presented in Mohammed Hanif’s 2008 novel A Case of Exploding  
Mangoes, Jonathan Cape, London.
    4. David Mansfield, ‘Drugs in Afghanistan’, 2007, www.davidmansfield.org 
.
    5. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military  
Economy, Pluto Press, London, 2007.