What more proof of system’s collapse?

Islamabad diary
We should consider ourselves blessed for we are witnessing a miracle unfold. No power on earth could have broken the Zardari-led PPP’s record of incompetence. But Nawaz Sharif and his good governance team have managed the impossible. They have out-performed the PPP.
Corruption and mismanagement we are used to. They ruffle no feathers anymore and don’t even elicit comment, taken for granted as they are. The PPP government was undone by one thing alone: power cuts. They could not manage loadshedding and thus the party that Gen Zia could not destroy found itself lowered into its Punjabi grave. The Punjabi electorate swung towards the PML-N, convinced it was ensuring not only its wellbeing in this world but its salvation in the next. So the cry went up, ‘Mian de naare wajan ge…’
But consider this: even in the heyday of the Zardari era no one in his wildest dreams would have thought that those masters of incompetence would be so incompetent as to see the country run out of fuel. Nawaz Sharif and his dream team have achieved this feat. What haven’t we seen in our history? Wars, defeats, even the country’s breakup. But even in war we never ran out of fuel. To the Heavy Mandate belongs this distinction – something previously unheard of, previously scarce imagined.
The Mandate was first clobbered by the dharnas. Then it discovered terrorism after the Peshawar carnage, terrorism and religious extremism just not figuring across its radar screen before that grisly event. The army was leading the political leadership by the nose but the prime minister, making the best of his circumstances, climbed the terrorist bandwagon, vowing to lead the fight against terrorism.
The fuel crisis, however, was building up much before Peshawar, the state distribution company, PSO, defaulting on payments and thus not in a position to cater for fuel imports. Astonishing therefore that warning signs that could be read from the mountaintops the good governance team could not see from up close. Now once more in panic mode they are trying to figure out what has hit them and the country.
The irony is rich. The whole world is awash with cheap gasoline. In Pakistan the government and its managers have seen to it that gasoline is not to be had for love or money. As if this wasn’t enough, experts and pundits are warning us that furnace oil stocks with the power companies are running out. I hope they are wrong for if they are right we’ve had it. Baghdad saw such conditions at the time of the American invasion in 2003. We are re-enacting Baghdad without the benefit of an overt invasion.
Beyond moaning and breast-beating we should be getting the measure of things. Why are we in this soup? We don’t need quantum physics to help us out on this one. The answer is simple: incompetence…incompetence that was there all along and that any fool could have seen if the PPP’s superior brand of incompetence, the shenanigans of its two prime ministers, had not obscured the evidence. Punjab gravitated towards the Sharifs because it was either them or the black hole of the PPP.
Now reality and the truth are catching up with a vengeance. It’s not that something new is happening. Only that the old is being exposed…the PML-N being revealed for what it is. I speak from first-hand knowledge for I was part of this crew.
What is happening to this dream team now would have happened in Nawaz Sharif’s second stint as prime minister, 1997-99, if Pervez Musharraf had not blundered in with his self-serving coup. By turning the Sharifs out Musharraf gave an exhausted and discredited Mandate a golden chance to recover, the Sharifs turned overnight into champions of democracy. If Musharraf deserves punishment it is for this, not for any selective charge of treason. And the incompetence of the Zardari era gave the PML-N a Nishan-e-Haider of competence.
The PPP exposed itself in five years. The PML-N has exposed itself in less than two. The visit to the Army Public School was a warning. If Imran Khan is not careful he’ll expose himself in less time than that. This is progress of sorts, the Pakistani political environment outing quacks and humbugs in ever shorter time periods.
But how long can this go on? We have serious problems on our hands, terrorism alone a grave enough challenge. Drift can’t substitute for leadership. We have a political class which, until it was forced by events, simply refused to recognise the terrorist threat. And we have a government which can look after its private interests very well but which has neither the imagination nor the capacity to look after the national interest.
The army is fighting the terrorist threat. The army is telling the civilians what they should be doing. Gen Raheel is his own defence and foreign minister, interacting more meaningfully with foreign governments than the elected leadership. What more should the army do? Should we now have subedar majors running gas stations and the Quarter Master General sitting in the finance ministry?
What we are seeing is not just the failure of government but the failure of the very system under which the government is functioning. Musharraf may have been bad enough but the civilians coming in his wake – first Zardari and his two prime ministers, now the dynamic duo of the prime minister and his younger brother, not to forget the finance minister who is related to the family – have proved to be utter disasters.
The army is taking the key decisions but the army can’t fight on all fronts. It can’t spread itself too thin. It can’t ensure the supply of gasoline. It is hard put to do its own thinking. It can’t think for the civilians at the same time.
If this had been Egypt an El-Sisi would have made himself field marshal and got himself elected president. If this had been Pakistan of former times boots by now would have been marching on Constitution Avenue and brilliant lawyers would have been looking afresh at the doctrine of necessity. But times are different. By calculated design or fortuitous circumstance, the army is not so much pushing itself to the front as civilian authority is collapsing by itself.
After years of drift and instability France reinvented itself under de Gaulle. We must think hard whether a time for similar reinvention has not arrived in this country. The old system is just not delivering, each fresh arrival in the PM’s House a bigger failure than the previous incumbent. Maybe we need a strong presidency. Maybe we need an elected president. Maybe from our present turmoil, and this sense of impending doom, someone with a surer touch emerges.
Democracy has had its chance, or more accurately Zardari and Sharif democracy. Perhaps Pakistani democracy needs a facelift.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com