time the military takes power, it authorises a mutilation of the Constitution that ensures two things. First, that the president has overarching authority over all major executive decisions, and second, that there are no real instruments available to Parliament to contain or moderate the president's behaviour.
When it needs to run the country, the mutilation of the Pakistani Constitution (and thereby of Pakistani democracy) comes naturally to the military. Responsibility for a mutilated Constitution does not lie solely with the military, but is shared by those that have enabled the process of mutilation. The enablers of the Legal Framework Order of 2002 that lies at the heart of Pakistan's currently mutilated Constitution are the Q-League, and the religious parties. It was their assent that enabled Gen Musharraf to concentrate executive authority in the office of the president. By mutilating the Constitution to resemble a presidential system, Gen Musharraf was simply actualising both the institutional instincts of the military and the individual instincts of a military officer--for whom amorphous is nothing, and command structures are everything.
The PPP's newly discovered addiction to this mutilated Constitution is not unexpected. Given the personal trials (undeserved), and political tribulations (deserved), that the president has gone through, his affinity for a souped-up version of the presidency was entirely predictable. A mutilated Constitution that validates a hyper-powerful presidency has meshed perfectly with the deeply insecure model of governance adopted by the president. When presidential spokespersons express indignation at the Kerry Lugar Bill outrage as being a proxy for opposition to the president--they are simply living out the structural and contextual reality of the office of president in a Pakistan that is governed by a mutilated Constitution.
The Kerry Lugar Bill fiasco has been a brilliant illustration of the kinds of tensions that a hyper-powerful presidency places on a country's political system, in which the Parliament is supposed to exercise sovereign authority.
On Thursday last week, after Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi had put the finishing touches on an ode to Hillary Clinton and the US-Pakistan relationship that would put the PML-Q stable of courtesans to shame, Qureshi was asked to rush home. Apparently, the talking points memo Ambassador Husain Haqqani gave him were a tad too servile, even for this government. In any case, the president, prime minister and military elite, having taken Qureshi to task for his performance in Washington DC last week, have sent him back to DC. Essentially so that he can go back to Madam Secretary and press "undo," taking back all the nice things he said about the Kerry Lugar Bill, and about Madam Clinton's pantsuit. As bad as all this makes Qureshi, or Haqqani, look, it makes Pakistan look worse. What country will trust Pakistan when it can't even stick to its effusive praise for foreign leaders for barely 72 hours? And that too for a "partner" that Pakistan itself has chosen to define as its most vital economic and political friend?
Many have used the hullabaloo over the Kerry Lugar Bill to call for a quick end to Haqqani's career at the Pakistani Embassy--correctly pointing out Haqqani's organic revulsion to some of the basic foundational elements of Pakistani statehood. But Haqqani didn't all of a sudden become a critic of the Pakistani military and its modus operandi vis-à-vis India, strategic depth and the use of Islamic symbolism. Haqqani has marketed himself as a counter-Islamist, Pakistani Henry-Kissinger-in-the-making in Washington DC for the better part of seven years prior to his appointment.
The trouble with demonising Haqqani for the Kerry Lugar Bill fiasco is that it conceals the real cancer in Pakistan's institutional matrix. Haqqani, and the pathetic performances of Foreign Minister Qureshi he has stage managed, are symptoms of the problem. The real problem is institutional, not individual.
Searching for and finding an ambassador (or an interior or finance minister) that will protect the interests of the president is simply an organic outcome of operating under the shadow of Pakistan's mutilated Constitution. For the president, Haqqani's freelancing modus operandi is not a drawback, but rather a strength. His job, as a function of being a presidential appointee (from a country where the president is supposed to be symbolic) is to protect the very power that enabled his appointment in the first place.
The reason parliamentary democracies have a bureaucratic machine that helps fill out positions like ambassadors is because parliamentary democracies are messy places--where millions of different opinions converge. In foreign affairs, a professional corps of diplomats reduces the element of chance by producing an army of highly trained, poker-faced operators whose bloodstream is resplendent with "national interest." You can go wrong with a Maleeha Lodhi, or a Wajid Shamsul Hasan or a Husain Haqqani. But you can't go wrong with civil servants you've never heard of. Why? Because nobody's heard of them. That's the point. And once they are done doing their job, nobody will hear from them again.
We know that President Zaradri will not cut down the very powers that sustain him in office. Pakistan's mutilated Constitution is not going to be restored to its original state by the PPP with Zardari as president, ever. But as Pakistan meanders along a path for which it is brutally unprepared, President Zardari can do himself and Pakistan a big favour. If rumours of Haqqani's demise do come to fruition, President Zardari needs to go with the boring and predictable, and appoint an active Foreign Service diplomat to the post of ambassador to the US. It will not restore Pakistan's constitutional democracy, and it will not push back against the military's venturing into public life. But it will inoculate Pakistani democracy from easy frontal attacks made possible by inexperienced diplomats, over-confident policymakers, and a military elite only too eager to seek popularity in the public domain.
It may be a small step for Pakistani parliamentary democracy, but in the present context, small victories might seem like giant leaps in the PPP's looming future.
The writer advises governments, donors and NGOs on public policy. He can be reached through his website